I last wrote about the Chagos Islands in this column on 5th October last year( Chagos ). Since when, the UK negotiating stance, plagued by our own ‘lefty’ lawyers, appears to have weakened dramatically.
To recap, the archipelago is a legacy of the Empire, as the British Indian Ocean Territories.
In the early nineteen seventies the native population were resettled to Crawley in England and to Mauritius off the coast of East Africa, so that the main Island, Diego Garcia, could be leased to USA for a vital strategic air base.
Notwithstanding previous agreements and payments, Mauritius has claimed sovereignty and was backed by a UN non-binding judgement.
To see if a new agreement could be established, our last government opened negotiations. We ‘walked away’ however, when it became clear that the demands by Mauritius were excessive.
In July our newly elected government reopened negotiations and has now reached agreement.
Parliament was told the bones of the agreement are that UK will cede sovereignty to Mauritius and then lease back the Islands for 100 years, with an option to extend for a further 40 years.
What was withheld from Parliament was the price attached to the lease. Although, informed opinion suggested that it was £9 billion.
There was some urgency to complete the deal before the supportive Biden presidency ended. This was prevented by an election in Mauritius, which resulted in a new government there, which thought that the deal negotiated by its predecessor was a sell-out. Negotiations were reopened and a revised deal concluded.
The Prime Minister of Mauritius told his Parliament that the price of the lease would be an index- linked £18 billion and that Mauritius would have a veto on any lease extension.
Our Foreign Office Minister told the Commons on Wednesday that the terms of the deal hadn’t changed. So, were they always that bad?
It is outrageous that we are contemplating paying billions to rent something that we already own, at a time when we are so strapped for cash that we have stripped pensioners of winter fuel payments the Treasury is even consulting on taxing death-in-service payments to the Armed Forces.
The Government’s defence is that our tenure of the Islands require certainty and that there is a danger that this would be thrown into doubt if a case was brought against us at the International Court of Justice. This is pure sophistry, the United Kingdom is not subject to the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ when it concerns disputes involving members or former members of the Commonwealth.
This dreadful deal is now on the desk of President Trump. We are at his mercy, hoping that he will save us from ourselves and the rotten deal that the Government has negotiated.
Now, to cap it all, we discover that the Government is about to open negotiations with Caribbean nations on the issue of reparations for the Slavery. They are asking for trillions, notwithstanding that we were the first to abolish slavery and then expended enormous sums using our naval power to stamp out the trade internationally.
So much of the effort against us on the question of the Chagos and of slavery reparations is driven by our own left-wing lawyers who hate Britain and are ashamed of our history.