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By vague request of interest in the topic, I am copying over a post I made elsewhere to this thread.
The Chagos Islands Deal, or, The Next Westminster Scandal Is Already Here, You Just Haven't Noticed It Yet
The British-owned Chagos Islands, in the Indian Ocean, host a major US military base, Diego Garcia. Our government is now planning to sell the islands to Mauritius, and to pay them for the privilege.
Brief on the background. The Chagos Islands were originally uninhabited until France brought slaves from Africa to work on plantations in the late 18th and early 19th century. The descendants of these workers became known as Chagossians. The islands, along with Mauritius, came under British control in 1814 through the Treaty of Paris, and were administered as a dependency of colonial Mauritius for administrative convenience rather than any historic connection. In 1965, three years before Mauritius gained independence from British colonial rule, the UK separated the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius to create the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Then, the UK removed around 2,000 Chagossians from the islands to make way for the Diego Garcia base. Mauritius maintains that the separation of the islands was illegal under international law, and has waged a legal battle to get them. In 2019, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that the UK's ownership of the Chagos Islands was unlawful. The UN General Assembly subsequently passed non-binding resolutions demanding the UK withdraw.
Alright, onto the actual scandal. Over the last few months, the British Government has been rushing to put together a deal that would hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. This rush was likely prompted by fears that the next US administration would oppose the handover, and seemingly because of this rush, the British government has kept giving in to new concessions that Mauritus is demanding to seal the handover. So now the UK will also pay $9bn over 99 years to lease the base. Oh, and it'll be inflation-linked. Oh, and front-loaded. Oh, and maybe it'll actually be $18bn instead. A substantial amount of money for a government that is raising taxes, cutting spending, and claiming there's a £22bn 'black hole' in the finances. In addition to the loss of a strategic military base, There are further concerns that the islands would likely end up hosting the Chinese military at the end of all this, too.
And in return for all this, in return for the territory and all that money, the UK gets... Nothing.
So to justify the seemingly impossible, the government has offered an increasingly bizarre list of reasons to hand over the territory, none of which hold up to scrutiny.
No, it is not. The Chagossians hate Mauritius and reject this deal because it doesn't give them self-determination and ownership of the Chagos Islands. In 2021, Mauritius criminalized "Misrepresenting the sovereignty of Mauritius over any part of its territory" i.e criminalized Chagossians stating they should own the islands themselves.
Nothing that would be binding. And besides, international law and what army? This is a US military base. If we care to hold it, it will be held, and there's no force that can take it from us.
No. It will cause other countries with dubious territorial claims on the UK, like Spain and Argentina, to smell blood in the water. Not to mention generally making the government look like gullible idiots.
Unfortunately, it is untrue that Keir Starmer monomaniacally follows international law. For example, his support for arresting Britons over speech crimes violates international law. "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." - UN General Assembly, Resolution 217A (III), Universal Declaration of Human Rights, A/RES/217(III) (December 10, 1948)
In 2022, they agreed to enter negotiations. And then in 2023 they realised how stupid handing the base over would be and pulled out of negotiations. This is also, of course, not an argument in favour of the deal.
I wish I was joking, but this is actually the argument they're currently using.
Okay, I did make that one up.
So what's actually going on here? There's not much that can be said with absolute certainty, but there is certainly some plausible alternative reasons that the government aren't so willing to state. For example, Keir Starmer was well aware of this case before becoming Prime Minister. In fact, Mauritius's chief legal advisor, Philippe Sands KC, is one of Keir Starmer's friends. Sands has seemingly (and maybe illegally) entered the islands in the past. Oh, and that last thing about changing the laws of physics to switch off the electromagnetic spectrum. That's also Philippe Sands. In other words, what's been presented as a national security claim from our own government is, in fact, smuggling a claim made by an adversary instead. There's another figure involved, too. Lord Hermer, who is seemingly involved in negotiations on the UK's side in some capacity, while also harbouring life-long anti-British sympathies. But his involvement seems less obvious here.
Anyway, now we have multiple opposition figures accusing Keir of, effectively, treasonous corruption.
Conservative MP Robert Jenrick:
Reform MP Nigel Farage:
Dominic Cummings:
I am gleefully awaiting the next reason the government presents for why we need to hand the islands over in full expectation that it is even more hilarious than the last.
While I agree that the Chagos deal is terrible for the UK, I don't think it is Starmer's folly, and I don't think it is worth trying to psychoanalyse Starmer to understand why it happened. The decision to do the deal stems from the British Deep State. The opening of negotiations was formally announced to Parliament by Tory foreign secretary James Cleverly in November 2022. If you read these columns on conservativehome.com where Deep Stater David Snoxell defends the likely deal to grassroots conservatives (again, while the Conservatives were still in office) you will get the gist. The change of government in the UK does not appear to have affected the progress of negotiations at all.
Tory caterwauling about the deal in opposition is entirely dishonest and opportunistic (I know, politicians. I don't even want to blame them) given that they could have blocked it when in government and didn't. But I think the reason why they didn't is that they didn't care and were letting the Deep State make decisions. So the first interesting question is "why did the British Deep State do such a terrible deal?" And the most obvious answer is that the Americans asked them to. (The British Deep State set a lot of store in maintaining the so-called Special Relationship with the US Deep State).
This David Allen Green post is the best summary of the argument. One piece of evidence he misses out is that Snoxell repeatedly cites to remarks by Blinken praising progress in the negotiations. DAG's key arguments are
The deal failed because the incoming Mauritian government realised that the British (and the lame duck Biden administration) were desperate to seal the deal before Trump came in, thought this gave them leverage to ask for more money, asked for too much, didn't get it, and ran out of time. The deal is now presumably dead unless the US Deep State manages to roll the Trump administration - certainly the Mauritian government says that they are not willing to do a deal that the US don't sign off on.
The second interesting question is "Why does the US Deep State support the deal?" Lawcellism is part of the answer, but the US is not a particularly lawcelled country, and nobody in a position of power is willing in the US is willing to let international law interfere with a vital interest like retaining Diego Garcia. But (unless the US is secretly paying for the lease) the deal isn't that terrible for the US. There are some obvious pragmatic reasons why the US might prefer a Guantanamo Bay-style arrangement where Diego Garcia is nominally Mauritian sovereign territory but US-controlled under a long lease to sharing the island with an ally:
And of course the third question, which is the one which is culture-war salient, is "Why is Starmer still noisily supporting the deal?" The anti-Starmer case has been made ably below. The pro-Starmer answer is that the deal is dead, Starmer knows this, but he wants (mostly for the benefit of elite opinion in relevant neutral countries who pretend to take international court rulings seriously, especially India) to ensure Trump gets the blame. So he is continuing to noisily support the dead deal until Trump unambiguously kills it.
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