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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11452 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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I'm not sure whether this counts as culture-war material, but it definitely is political, and I found it extremely interesting.

Daily Telegraph (found via Breitbart):

Revealed: Chagos deal to cost 10 times what Starmer claimed

Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos Islands deal will cost 10 times more than he claimed, official figures reveal.

The Government’s own estimate of the cost of giving away the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius is almost £35bn, according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act – far higher than the £3.4bn figure Sir Keir has previously used in public.

Labour ministers now face claims that they misled Parliament and the press with an “accountancy trick” to hide the size of the bill from taxpayers.

An official document produced by the Government Actuary’s Department shows the cost of the deal was first estimated at 10 times Sir Keir’s figure, at £34.7bn, in nominal terms.

The UK will pay £165m a year to rent Diego Garcia for the first three years.

The rent payments will then be set at £120m a year, increasing in line with inflation from year 14.

The document shows that civil servants were first instructed to lower the cost of the deal on paper to £10bn, to account for an estimated annual inflation rate of 2.3 per cent over 99 years.

Then it was reduced again by between 2.5 and 3.5 per cent per year using the Treasury’s Social Time Preference Rate, a principle that money spent immediately has more value than funds earmarked for future spending.

The final figure was calculated to be 90 per cent lower than the cash value of the payments the UK will make to Mauritius over the next century, in what critics say was a deliberate attempt to mislead the public.

Writing for The Telegraph, Dame Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, said: “Instead of owning up to the costs, Labour have used an accountancy trick to claim the amount was only a mere £3.4bn.”

Foreign Office sources insisted ministers had used a “standard” calculation for long-term government spending, and denied accusations that it was part of a “cover-up”.

However, other projects announced by Labour have not used the same method, which has allowed ministers to advertise higher spending on popular policies. Angela Rayner has since launched a 10-year affordable homes plan that included inflation-level increases in government spending as part of the cost of the policy – a method not used with the Chagos deal.

I'm getting flashbacks to my Engineering Accounting class in college. Calculations in this vein definitely are used on a regular basis for cost–benefit calculations in engineering. And a long-term discount rate of 5–6 percent certainly sounds reasonable to me. But, if discount rates are being used selectively rather than uniformly, that indeed would count as an "accountancy trick".

I'm reading the Wikipedia on the Chagos Islands right now, and I'm a little confused as to why Mauritius wants the islands.

Does anyone here have any insight on that, or links on the history of these events where I could learn about it?

Ok, the weirdest part of the Wikipedia on the British Indian Ocean Territory is that its motto references Lemuria, an extremely outdated scientific theory that has connections to Theosophy.

But my understanding is that the most relevant element of the territorial dispute for people outside of Mauritius is that the territory nominally controls the .io country-code TLD. Geopolitical instability over British soverignty led to the mass exodus from .io domains.

The deal signed between the UK and Mauritius means that Mauritius will take control of the TLD; there was some doubt that it would continue to exist as a valid domain. We're definitely in a bizarre world where internet domain names are the subject of geopolitical disputes. But .su will bury us all.

Apparently the US also has military infrastructure on the islands, and Trump was a fan of the deal?

an extremely outdated scientific theory that has connections to Theosophy.

‘Scientific’.

Was lemuria ever a science hypothesis? I was under the impression that even back in the day it was ancient aliens tier.

Apparently the US also has military infrastructure on the islands, and Trump was a fan of the deal?

I highly doubt Mauritius is dumb enough to tell the US to take their base away.

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