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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   11186 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".

As I've bemoaned on multiple occasions, nobody is making the UK do this. The ICJ doesn't count, I've seen arthritic dogs ready to be ol' Yeller'd with a better bite:bark ratio. You can - if you are a sovereign state larger than Sealand - just ignore them. Mauritius? Why are they going to do, cancel Jet2 holidays and paddle over in their canoe?

Has anyone considered pitting one sacred cow against the other? Someone needs to tell Starmer that he could fund the NHS and pensions for another 3 weeks with the money.

Starmer is fully lawyer-brained. he is not mentally capable of ignoring a court.

The treaty establishing the jurisdiction of the court in question specifically excluded the U.K.s relationships with its former possessions. A lawyer-brained person would have no problem ignoring the court under such circumstances.

This issue is the focus of the sole dissent from the ICJ's opinion (authored by Judge Donoghue of the US).

Today the Court recites once again that there would be “compelling reasons” to decline to give an advisory opinion when such a reply “would have the effect of circumventing the principle that a State is not obliged to allow its disputes to be submitted to judicial settlement without its consent”. However, the decision to render today’s Advisory Opinion demonstrates that this incantation is hollow. It is difficult to imagine any dispute that is more quintessentially bilateral than a dispute over territorial sovereignty. The absence of United Kingdom consent to adjudication of that bilateral dispute has been steadfast and deliberate. Mauritius was thwarted by this absence of consent, so took another route, pursuing the present request and thereby fulfilling the affirmation of its Foreign Minister in 2004 that the State would use “all avenues open to us in order to exercise our full sovereign rights over the Chagos Archipelago”. The delivery of this Advisory Opinion is a circumvention of the absence of consent.

Donoghue is complaining about the Court's actions, but even had the opinion been unanimous, the point would stand; the court does not have jurisdiction and so its opinion (even if perfectly well-reasoned according to its own rules) is not binding. It's even right there in the name, "Advisory Opinion". Any actually "lawyer-brained" person know this and not feel bound by the opinion. Therefore lawyer-brainedness is not an explanation for Starmer's actions.

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