Mick Hartley

Trump’s latest unhinged rambling features a swipe at Keir Starmer’s Chagos deal. For once the president is right. Fraser Myers at Spiked:

It is a deal so bad that only Keir Starmer could have negotiated it. With the assistance of the brightest and best of the UK Foreign Office, the Labour government agreed to an arrangement that would hand over territory containing an Anglo-American military base to an unfriendly country, condemn its former inhabitants to permanent exile, and pay tens of billions of pounds for the pleasure.

Not that Trump really cares about Chagos, mind:

Of course, Trump’s motivation for bashing Starmer’s deal now has little to do with the Chagos Islands themselves. The real prize for the US president is in a different hemisphere entirely, as he freely admits. In a bizarre non-sequitur, the US president’s Truth Social post goes on to say that the Chagos deal is ‘another in a very long line of reasons why Greenland has to be acquired’ by the US. This smackdown over Chagos, this attempt to humiliate Starmer and Britain on the global stage, is clearly part of Trump’s broader pressure campaign against the European powers, in his bid to seize Greenland for the US.

Nevertheless, it really should not have taken Trump’s intervention to put the brakes on the dreadful Chagos deal. Whichever way you spin it, this arrangement has never been in Britain’s national interest, nor the interests of the Chagossians who call the islands their home. It poses a risk to Western security interests, handing sovereignty over a territory, where almost 400 UK and US troops and 2,000 contractors are based, to a country that’s allied to China. The cost of leasing back Diego Garcia from Mauritius is also eye-watering. Although the Labour government tried to present the cost as just £3.4 billion, the true figure is believed to be 10 times as much, at around £34.7 billion.

And that’s without taking into consideration the issue of the huge marine protection area round the Chagos Islands now, which is in very real danger of being scrapped under Mauritian control [see here].

So what on Earth possessed Starmer to sign up to such a risible deal? What leverage was a tiny island like Mauritius able to gain over Britain?

Starmer’s eagerness to give away the territory stems in part from his government’s undue reverence for ‘international law’. In 2019, the International Court of Justice said that the Chagos Islands should be given to Mauritius. But this was not a legally binding ruling. The UK had no legal obligation to respond – or ‘no reason whatsoever’ to act, as Trump correctly puts it. Yet this is a Labour government that, as attorney general Lord Hermer has repeatedly insisted, puts international law at ‘the heart’ of its foreign policy. It wants to go over and above what the law actually says. Even, it seems, when this conflicts with the national interest, common sense or moral principles.

No other political leader, in other words, would have for a second considered following the International Court of Justice’s recommendation. But we have Starmer. He’s very very keen on following International law: domestic law on the other hand – like acting on the Supreme Court ruling on single-sex spaces – he’s not so bothered about.