After Chagos, Starmer can only be a law zealot or a traitor
Not in the cool Claudia Winkleman way either
To be a fair dealer in politics, you must at least try to understand where the other side is coming from. With the facts uncertain, people can reasonably disagree on what exactly is happening, how things might change, and what the costs and benefits are. That’s before you get to arguments about priorities and trade-offs, where the real politics begin.
This is a good recipe for how to analyse politics. But it’s one that I’ve been unable to apply to the British government’s attempt to relinquish the Chagos Islands, our Indian Ocean territory, complete with US military base. The plan to hand it over to Mauritius was first conceived by the brilliant mind of Liz Truss, and since pursued at pace by the Labour government from when it took office last July.
While the government was unable to sneak the deal through before the inauguration of Donald Trump, who might yet block it, Mauritius’ prime minister Navin Ramgoolam has told his country’s MPs that Keir Starmer wants to press on. According to the Times, this would involve an inflation-linked doubling of the £9bn first offered to Mauritius for a 99-year lease of the Diego Garcia military base, with Mauritius also being able to veto a 40-year lease extension.
British government sources say the terms were always something like this, but that’s beside the point. Whatever its vintage, the deal is catastrophic. It’s the kind of diplomacy that makes Britain’s entry into the Iraq War look like a deft display of statesmanship. On its face, it looks like Britain is paying somebody else for the privilege of controlling sovereign territory, at a time of squeezed budgets and growing geopolitical tension.
Defenders claim that Britain is obliged to give up the Chagos Islands, the International Court of Justice having ruled against British sovereignty in a non-binding, advisory opinion in 2019. This is disputable. But even if the court had us bang to rights, it’s a strange move in 2024 to go all in on international law, comparable to funnelling your net wealth into horses just as Ford launches the Model T.
I’m not especially against lawyers – like most people I regard the trade as reprehensible. But there’s definitely a procedural streak to the Starmer premiership, much as there was a journalistic one in Boris Johnson’s. You can’t shake the impression that Starmer would regard nuclear winter as an acceptable conclusion to the Russia-Ukraine war, provided all the paperwork had been filed correctly. It’s almost sacral, to invoke the historian Tom Holland: the kind of belief that can only come from years poring over esoteric texts with a tenuous relationship to reality.
Indeed, if you look at Starmer’s response to the conflict between Israel and Palestine you see exactly this reverence for the law. “That is a point that we have repeatedly pressed on Israel and other countries have pressed on Israel,” he told a think tank event in 2023. “It has to act in accordance with the law.” No doubt the denizens of Gaza find such sentiments soothing as they pick through the rubble to find their relatives’ body parts.
Say what you want about Tony Blair, but he at least got that international law was just politics in disguise. Most international courts lack strong enforcement mechanisms, especially when the perp has the American military standing behind them. And a judge without a bailiff is just some bloke (or bloke-ess) in a wig, muttering impotently like a druid at Stonehenge.
Suffice to say, we could have ignored the opinion of the International Court of Justice, and nothing much would have happened, much like you can ignore those angry letters from the TV licensing people, who have no authority to break into your house and catch you illegally watching The Great British Bake-Off. This is why hard power, which involves somebody holding a gun, is better than soft power, which involves making puppy dog eyes and hoping you don’t get your head kicked in.
But naivety is actually the more flattering explanation of Starmer’s Chagos deal. The grubbier one is that he is a devout anti-imperialist who believes in British original sin that must be atoned for, even if it’s done in an underhand way that doesn’t spell out the penance in public.
This of course taps into a recurrent Daily Mail fantasy that Labour is stuffed with fifth columnists out to betray Britain. A mantra of the columnist Peter Hitchens is that Tony Blair’s government was run by cryto-Marxists. Starmer’s old boss Jeremy Corbyn was repeatedly slated as sympathising with Britain’s enemies (which to be fair is true), and these days the rightwing media accuse Labour politicians of wokery. The song remains the same; only the lyrics change.
And yet, not all of this is hysteria. Consider what the foreign secretary David Lammy has said on the subject of reparations: “As Caribbean people enslaved, colonised and invited to Britain as citizens, we remember our history. We don’t just want an apology, we want reparations and compensation.”
His more recent line is that reparations are about “partnership” – a corporate euphemism for the tawdry business of money exchanging hands. Perhaps he’s had a change of heart, but then he also claims that former “woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” Trump is now “a man who had incredible grace, generosity”. I think backbencher Lammy may have been more honest than his new incarnation.
These comments in mind, accusations of outright treachery on Chagos at least explain an otherwise inexplicable act of national self-harm. From its flimsy beginnings to the egregious terms now under discussion, not to mention several opportunities for our government just to walk away, this has all been mad. At this point Starmer’s best defence is that a foreign agent, needing to conceal their identity, would at least have agreed to better terms.