STEVE DOUGHTY
IT MUST have seemed so simple to Sir Keir. Decolonise the Chagos Islands! Demonstrate the importance of international law and fly the new Labour Government’s human rights flag in the most unmistakable way.
Sir Keir’s old legal crony Phillippe Sands had tied up the deal, so no technical difficulties. The increasingly senile Joe Biden didn’t seem to have any objections, provided Britain slipped the new Mauritian owners a few bob to leave the US airbase at Diego Garcia alone.
We have however learned over the last 18 months that on occasion Sir Keir’s judgment may be a little hasty and that, sadly, he is frequently misinformed by his aides and cronies, whoever they might be this week.
The Chagos misjudgment ranks with the worst of them: a tiny set of uninhabited tropical islands has now become a gigantic mess and is getting worse every day.
Where to start with the miscalculations? The International Court of Justice opinion telling Britain to hand the islands over was advisory only and unenforceable anyway. The lead judge in the case was Somali and there was, apparently, deep influence from China, coincidentally a big funder of Mauritius.
Professor Sands turned out to be a pal of Mauritius. Apart from the case being a nice little earner, he seems to have gone to the extent of planting a Mauritian flag on the Chagos and drawing up a planned Mauritius law that would have made it illegal for native Chagossians to deny its claims to the islands. He has also been granted Mauritian citizenship.
The few bob turned out to be £30billion over the course of a few years. President Trump may change his mind a bit but ‘an act of great stupidity’ sounds like an fairly unambiguous opinion, whatever the State Department may be saying on any given day.
Er, breaking news. Trump’s changed his mind again. Now he says on Truth Social that Britain shouldn’t give the Chagos islands away.
The President said that ‘this land should not be taken away from the UK’ and if it did it would be ‘a blight on our Great Ally’.
Our Foreign Office wasn’t going to put up with that. It declared that Sir Keir’s deal is ‘crucial to the security of the UK and our key allies, and to keeping the British people safe.
‘The agreement we have reached is the only way to guarantee the long-term future of this vital military base.’
Yes, just like the only way the Foreign Office was able to guarantee the freedom of Hong Kong was a cosy deal for a Chinese takeover. To check how well that went, ask Jimmy Lai.
Now we have the seriously clever stroke of a bunch of Chagossians and a former Tory MP, now a Reformer, re-occupying the islands. The Chagossians, of course, were rounded up and deported to Mauritius in the late 1960s by a Labour government less devoted to human rights than this one, and many of them now live around Crawley.
On Wednesday a British patrol boat put-putted up to their beach and told them to get lost, threatening them with jail if they refused.
It does not take a great political brain to work out that forcibly deporting the Chagossians from their own islands is an unappealing policy. Voters might make an unfavourable comparison with more than 41,000 small boat arrivals of asylum seekers from who-knows-where trafficked into Britain by criminal gangs in 2025. All of whom have been given a rather warmer welcome.
Of course Sir Keir could just try to force the Chagos deal through and let the Mauritians deport the Chagossians. However, that might not look tidy on TV.
So if the Chagossians stick, Sir Keir might be stuck.
At this point I will humbly offer my own solution. Let the Chagossians stay. Tell the Mauritians that, unfortunately, circumstances and human rights concerns prevent the handover just yet.
Then develop tourism, the industry that would make the Chagossians rich. The islands are said to have pristine beaches, lagoons and reefs. A BBC tourism piece this week from the crew of a yacht allowed a Chagos stopover said: ‘Days fell into a rhythm shaped by the environment. We snorkelled reefs thick with life, spotting dozens of sharks, rays and turtles, and vast schools of wrasse, damselfish and parrotfish. We hiked shaded trails through old plantations, and caught jacks and snappers with ease, logging each one as required.’
Sounds like a tourist paradise for those for whom the Maldives have become old. You could build a new airstrip or let public flights into Diego Garcia. The Galapagos environment has survived tourism, and how could the US object to tourists around Diego Garcia when they were content to leave the whole archipelago free for the use of Chinese spies?
They could even build a 300-foot golden statue of Sir Keir, somewhere out of the flightpath. Frankly, it’s more plausible than a statue of Donald Trump in a new Gaza tourist strip.
This article (Chagos, yet another millstone around Starmer’s neck) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Steve Doughty
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