BITE SIZE: Trump vetoing the Chagos Islands farce could save Starmer from disaster

The "deal" Britain has negotiated to pay Mauritius billions while surrendering the archipelago tells the whole world that it is governed by weaklings and fools

Photo by Lance Anderson on Unsplash

THE “deal” whereby the UK pays to surrender the Chagos Islands to Mauritius must be the worst bit of global real estate business since France sold the Louisiana Territory to the US for $15m.

Yet at least France got some money for selling more than 800,000 square miles of fertile ground – around a quarter of the land mass of the modern US – way back in 1803.

Britain is actually proposing to pay Mauritius a staggering £9bn for it taking possession of the Chagos archipelago, which it has long claimed as its own. And, amazingly, the remaining haggling over the deal is the result of the government of Mauritius saying this isn’t enough and we should pay it even more.

Now the Chancellor Rachel Reeves and other ministers are reportedly guaranteeing that we will “frontload” our payments, apparently in a bid to get the deal done before Donald Trump assumes office in Washington and potentially torpedoes the whole thing.

Part of the deal is for Britain to take out a 99-year lease on the island of Diego Garcia – the site of a strategically vital joint US-UK air base (in reality the US accounts for by far the lion’s share of flights to and from the facility, but it is on our sovereign territory and so is designated as a shared bit of military infrastructure). The proposed terms of the lease are believed to stipulate an annual UK payment to Mauritius of around £90m.

The agreement to surrender the islands to Mauritius at all is absurd, given that Mauritius is more than 1,000 miles away and they only ever came within its purview as a function of both territories being in the British Empire at the same time.

Yet the International Court of Justice published an advisory decision in 2019 basically stating that the Chagos Islands belong to Mauritius. The UN General Assembly soon afterwards passed a resolution affirming that the archipelago “forms an integral part of the territory of Mauritius”.

Both these decisions constituted the “Global South” flexing new-found muscles against a former imperial power. Were Britain a resolute country with a governing class which believed in it then matters could have rested there: a bit of anti-British yadda-yadda every few years in talking shop international forums from African and Asian grifter regimes met with supreme indifference by the UK amid the reality that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

But, of course, our governing class and senior civil service is not like that. They contend that Britain must never find itself in contravention of this nebulous notion of “international law”. Absurdly, they believe that always tamely obeying horse-traded, anti-British resolutions in such counsels can win greater respect for our country as we seek to right the wrongs of the colonial era.

The last Tory government could not be relied upon to resist this mindset, though David Cameron appears to have vetoed further talks on surrendering the Chagos Islands when he replaced James Cleverly as foreign secretary. Yet with Labour matters are much, much worse: it is pretty much an article of faith for every minister that assuaging this increasingly emboldened Global South sensibility is not only the just thing to do but also the wise thing. Apparently, just giving in to demands will result in Britain’s “soft power” being enhanced.

In fact, gaining a reputation for surrendering to bullies and blaggards is liable to