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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11685 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?

What stands out to me on Wikipedia is the insistence that the islands have an indigenous population that the British lied about and deported. The Chagos Archipelago article includes the introduction "the UK falsely claimed that the Chagos had no permanent population", and the page on the islanders themselves has as its second sentence "Under international law, they are the indigenous people of the Chagos archipelago".

Read on, however, and it becomes clear that this 'indigenous population' is a melange of people from many different regions brought to the islands by Europeans as workers in the 19th century, and that when the British deported them in the 60s and 70s, they moved around a thousand people, who were mostly workers on failing, unprofitable plantations that would have been closed in the near term anyway. This is probably not what most people have in mind when they think of colonial genocides of indigenous peoples. The Chagossians are a relatively recent polyglot of diverse origins, not people with an ancient connection to the islands, and seem likely to have had found more opportunities away from the islands anyway. I'm not asserting that the deportation was therefore morally unproblematic - I'm just saying that it doesn't seem like a very central case of the violations it's being presented as. Wikipedia doesn't technically lie - "the UK falsely claimed" and "under international law they are X" seem like claims that are at least arguably true - but it presents those claims in ways that strike me as calculated to produce a misleading impression.

Indigenous just means ‘the last non-white people in a region’.

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