Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020 and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.
I was trying to draft amendments to the Diego Garcia Bill, but it made me so angry that I kept having to step away from my laptop.
The Bill, which began its committee stage in the House of Lords yesterday, gives effect to the most disgraceful act by a British government since – well, since the removal of the Chagossians from their archipelago nearly sixty years ago.
Every aspect of the treaty stinks.
We are giving away British territory to a state that has never owned it, that happily pocketed a large sum for permanently renouncing any claim to it in 1965, and whose interest in it is solely pecuniary. We are betraying the only people who ever lived permanently on those islands. We are endangering one of the most important marine conservation zones on the planet. We are weakening the most strategically situated military base in the Indian Ocean.
And we are paying for the privilege of doing all these things.
I have been struck, throughout the passage of the legislation, by the perfunctory and unenthusiastic attitude of Labour peers. Lord Coaker, the defence minister, is one of those old-fashioned patriots who are still occasionally to be found in Labour. He does his best to recite the party line, but it is clear that his heart is not in it. Baroness Chapman, for the FCDO, is likewise dutiful in her defence of what she tellingly calls “the government’s view”. Behind them, the Labour benches are almost empty.
Rank-and-file Labour supporters don’t like this deal any more than the rest of us do.
They initially saw it as a belated restitution to the Chagossians who were removed from their homes half a century ago to make room for the British-American base. But once it became clear that Chagossians saw Mauritians as the aggressive colonists, and wanted to keep their status as British Overseas Citizens, the mood shifted.
With an independently verified poll of the diaspora population in Britain showing 99.22 preferring to keep their current citizenship, it is becoming impossible to defend this deal even in woke terms, and Labour parliamentarians are asking why we were raising taxes in this country to fund tax cuts in Mauritius.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the only people who back this deal are the infamous Leftie lawyers, the Doughty Street/Matrix Chambers clique called into creation by Tony Blair’s human rights legislation, who make up in moral fervour what they lack in popular support.
For Keir Starmer, Richard Hermer and Philippe Sands, the barrister who acted for Mauritius and who rejoiced in Britain being “humiliated completely”, this is a straightforward “decolonise” issue. Mauritius is an ex-colony, not a wicked imperial power. Its people are poorer than Brits and, crucially, browner. The chance to haul down a flag with a Union Jack in the top corner trumps any legal niceties.
Yet, even by these criteria, their argument fails.
For the truly injured party here – the more “oppressed” and “vulnerable” party, if we want to use woke language – are not the Mauritians, who see a chance to make a quick buck on territory 1300 miles away in which they had no interest before they began drawing closer to China, and whose outer atolls they are now very likely to sell to rival powers. No, the real victims are the Chagossians, plucked from their homes and dropped in strange lands. Some were sent to the Seychelles; some to Mauritius, which dumped the “Ilois” (as they were pejoratively known) in slums; and some here, eking out wretched lives on welfare in Crawley, having made it no further than Gatwick Airport where their flights touched down six decades ago.
Justice would mean allowing these wronged people to return to their ancestral homes, to harvest their ancient coconut plantations, to tend the graves of their longfathers. Maddeningly, there was a plan to do precisely that. First Tony Blair and then David Cameron looked into resettling the outer atolls, and KPMG found that putting in the requisite infrastructure would cost around £3 billion over a century – which, in the mood of austerity that followed the global financial crisis, was deemed too much.
Now, even on the government’s statistics, we will end up paying more than that sum simply in transfers to Mauritius (the actual figure is likely to be ten times as much). Had we pursued the resettlement scheme, the entire legal case would have collapsed because the Chagos Islands, like the Falklands or Gibraltar, would have been inhabited by a population attached to its British nationality.
There was no need for any of this.
That’s what makes me want to weep.
We expressly excluded disputes with current or former Commonwealth states from the jurisdiction of the international court of justice precisely to prevent cases of this kind. It is unthinkable that the US or France or India or any self-respecting state would be rushing to surrender like this. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any other British government than this one agreeing to these abject terms.
On which note, can we scotch the nonsense about the Tories having agreed to this deal? The previous government was prepared to talk about joint sovereignty over the outer atolls while leaving Diego Garcia in British hands. When it became clear that Mauritius, perhaps egged on by China, was holding out for full sovereignty, the talks ended.
The Mauritians cannot have believed their luck when David Lammy came in and agreed to their demands.
Britain carries as the last human rights-obsessed country, still dashing around surrendering to any international tribunal when the rest of the world has moved on. We are compounding the original wrong done to Chagossians in order to pursue the obsessions of the human rights apparat.
Labour, which promised growth, has instead delivered shrinkage – moral, financial and, not least, physical.
We are in every sense diminished as a country.
