Well, well, well, after a depressing and burgeoning list of gaffes and scandals, the Labour government, for all its rhetoric regarding following a moral foreign policy, has added a large helping of neo-imperialism to the festering mix. Who would have guessed?
As well as an encouragement of Argentina’s hopes of gaining sovereignty of the Falkland Islands, the government’s unilateral decision to hand the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius is also a denial of the principle of self-determination, as it has been agreed without any reference to the wishes of the Chagossians, the once indigenous people of those islands. Cecil Rhodes, eat your heart out!
I say ‘once’ because it was another Labour government, that of Harold Wilson, that extracted the Chagos Islands from Mauritian control in 1968 and then expelled the Chagossians from their archipelago in order to lease Diego Garcia, the largest of the islands, to the United States as an air force base. To encourage the Chagossians to exile themselves, either to the UK or Mauritius, Wilson’s regime restricted their supplies of food and medicine and closed down the coconut plantations which were their principal source of income. Though we often hear the left beating their chests over Britain’s imperial crimes, I do not think we have heard anything from them about Wilson’s cynical stunt. Over to you Corbyn.
Starmer has used royal prerogative powers to agree with his Mauritian counterpart, Pravind Jugnauth, to the islands’ handover. But the treaty needed for this can only be ratified through an Act of Parliament, and MPs will have the chance to debate this later this month. If MPs have any integrity, they ought to listen to Bernadette Dugasse, the head of the campaign group Chagossian Voices. She is shocked by the decision and demands that the Chagossian diaspora have their say in the negotiations. They ought to listen too to people such as Pascalina Nellan, whose grandmother was Chagossian and who has called for her people to be included in the negotiations.
Yet Starmer appears doorpost deaf to the Chagossians’ pleas. He has defended his decision by arguing that the deal would address wrongs of the past, such as Britain’s expropriation of the islands in 1814 to assert naval dominance in the Indian Ocean. He does not see that in his attempt at being the anti-imperialist, he has acted in an imperialistic manner. Whatever the rights or wrongs of Britain’s seizure of the Chagos Islands, to determine their future with another nation over the heads of those who once lived there strikes one as decidedly imperialistic also. It is reminiscent of the sort of late 19th century bargaining between colonial powers over territories in Africa in which decisions about thousands of people were decided in foreign ministries faraway in London, Paris and Berlin.
But should we be surprised? Starmer is Tony Blair’s successor (and there was a strong neo-colonial strain to Blair’s foreign policy seen in his bloody penchant for regime change.
Fears over the future of the Diego Garcia military base appear to have motivated the Biden administration to pressurise the UK into a deal with the Mauritians. The Americans we are told were concerned that unless the UK reached an agreement with Mauritius, the Mauritians would seek a binding agreement from the UN for control of the islands and then possibly close the US-UK military base. As Mauritius has close economic ties with China, the nightmare scenario for Washington would have been China using the base to project their naval power into the Indian Ocean more effectively than they are already doing. That in turn would have heightened tensions with India. The Anglo-Mauritian agreement means that the US and the UK are able to lease the base for another ninety-nine years.
The Chagos Islands matter raises some testing questions such as the morality and necessity of their secession by Britain, whether the Falkland Islands are next and whether Britain has any claim to being still a serious diplomatic and military power. Perhaps the most disturbing question is to what extent Britain is a vassal state to the US. If Brexit removed Brussel’s interference in British affairs, should not Washington’s meddling be next?
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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“[Starmer] has defended his decision by arguing that the deal would address wrongs of the past, such as Britain’s expropriation of the islands in 1814 to assert naval dominance in the Indian Ocean. ” So we are left to presume he is less concerned about China moving in and asserting such dominance instead?! How is that defending the UK’s and western world’s interests, as he should be doing?
The PM generally wields too much peacetime prerogative power in our unwritten constitution, and the UK is too beholden to the USA in many ways.