UK puts Chagos Islands deal on hold to avoid ‘toxic backlash’

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2055914/uk-puts-chagos-islands-deal-on-hold-avoid-toxic-backlash

by pppppppppppppppppd

33 comments

  1. You mean giving away territory *and* paying for it is an unpopular policy? Colour me surprised…

  2. ‘Toxic backlash’ – it was a shit deal to begin with!

  3. In reality the new Mauritian Government asked for a way bigger financial contribution than had been agreed in the negotiations with the old Government. The UK Government declined the demand and it appears everyone is back to square one pending new negotiations, which I suspect may be some time in coming.

  4. Starmer now needs a returns hub after being knocked back yesterday.

  5. Good. It was potentially the most stupid foreign policy initiative we’ve put forward in years. Hopefully they quietly kill it off in a couple years.

  7. Expect the international police to come knocking any day now 

  8. People all just here pretending it was James Cleverly’s great idea to give it back and not a response to official legal judgements from the International Court of Justice and the UN that we’d been breaking the law since 1965 and had to sort ourselves out asap?

  9. That local council elections knocked some common sense into Labour in this issue didn’t it

  10. Why even make a deal anyway? What’s wrong with the status quo?

  11. >Part of the reasoning behind the delay is a reluctance to hand easy ammunition to Nigel Farage, who has frequently campaigned against the deal and called for the UK to sell the islands instead.

    This man is basically already PM with how many u turns he’s caused in the last couple of weeks,

  12. Some common sense at last. The idea we are paying a country to take back land they have a very weak claim to is laughable. The fact this very same country is debt trapped to China and are building up military installations throughout the area is worrying.

    Call the deal off, walk away and ensure the Chagossians get to decide what they want to be….independent, British protectorate or part of Mauritius.

  13. If the UK owns it but the US use it, why not just give it to the US and be done with it?

  14. *Please* get this stupid deal fully stopped. Maybe this is a promising first step.

  15. As I understand it, Mauritius’ claim to the islands is itself a kind of colonial claim. The British empire administered Mauritius, Chagos and the other islands in the region as a group. So an independent Mauritius claims a right to continue that practice.

    However the Chagos archipelago is 1400 km away from Mauritius. So there isn’t necessarily a logical basis for forcing Chagos to form part of Mauritius, other than the old logic of the British empire that places which are sufficiently far away from Britain can be grouped together however we like by drawing a line on a map.

  16. Starmer all over the place. His disastrous government going from one calamity to the next.

    I will be surprised if he’s still PM come the next GE.

  17. So giving Mauritius land costs us money, how much do they give us if we take their land instead?

    I’m developing a plan here

    We could re-name Mauritius to New Essex

  19. So now we see if the various claims by Labour ministers are correct don’t we? Those are:

    * We lose soft power with random 5 pence GDP African countries

    * We can’t use radio frequencies anymore or some absolute bollocks

    * The Chinese will use it as propaganda against us (they’d do this anyway, it’s propaganda. It doesn’t need to be true..)

    * The international police will come and arrest us for breaking the international law

  20. And now we found out how that US trade deal got done….

  21. Oh good the “experts” on this deal are back on here.

  22. We’re 3-5 years out from a conflict on a global scale and were trying to give away geopolitically significant bases? Not that Reform cares about national defence but it would have been a completely self inflicted gunshot for no reason whatsoever.

  23. There has already been a backlash of incredulity that such a self-harming treaty is even being contemplated. It’s not “toxic” to point out the utter fukwittery of those who are planning to do this.

    1. We pay Mauritius billions to take territory that is not theirs anyway. Mauritius is 1,300 miles from the Chagos Islands.
    2. Mauritius is in China’s influence and does not give a toss about the UK.
    3. We cede influence and useful territory, which may be even more important in the future.
    4. We allow a pristine 640,000 sq km (250,000 sq mi) marine protected zone to be cancelled, because it will be over-fished when the UK leave. You can see the Chinese fishing fleet on the horizon.

  24. The claims never made sense. If administering Chagos and Mauritius together somehow created a legitimate claim, then the UK would also have a legitimate claim over Ireland. It’s actually insanity to try and revive a quirk of the British Empire’s bureaucracy as a basis for justice here. Especially when half the Chagossians don’t agree with the terms.

  25. It’s a bit silly that we own the Islands, but at the same time I haven’t actually heard a good reason why we should be giving them to Mauritius. Honestly this whole thing is just people making a big deal about something that doesn’t matter at all. Even the supposedly extortionate rent we were going to be paying for America’s continued use of the bases there was a pittance in the national budget.

  26. I’m glad our government has seen sense on this. They should never have considered it in the first place, but better late than never

    Philippe Sands in the bin

  27. Why dont we threaten to sell it to china in exchange for no tarriffs? 

  28. It’s a bad deal.

    Mauritius’ claim to the islands is dubious.

    Handing them over doesn’t benefit the local population.

    Britain should just keep them and rent the base to the US

  29. Can’t we just scrap the deal entirely and just give the people of Chagos independence and give them security guarantees if we can have UK bases there?

  30. There is such an easy solution to it.

    Hold a referendum for all of the Chargosians on whether they want to become independent, part of Mauritius or part of Britain. One newspaper already did a poll contacting Chargosians and found that remaining British was the favorite option, if we do that referendum the UN right to self-determination applies and mauritius’s whole claim is gone.

    We can let them back to all the islands apart from the military base if they want to go back because there’s no need to keep them off the island particularly if they’ve decided that they are in fact British.

    As for why giving it to Mauritius is a bad idea in this deal, paying a few billion so that America can use a base is a rubbish deal. We do use it a bit as well and it is a very strategic base for the Indian Ocean. The waters around the islands are the largest protected seas in the world and Mauritius being debt trapped to China or almost certainly get rid of that to allow the Chinese super trawlers to destroy all the fish there. Mauritius actually imprisoned people if they say they are Chargosian instead of Mauritian which shows that will not benefit any of the people who were actually displaced, Ann Mauritius doesn’t really have a functional claim to the islands anyway, it’s claim comes from being part of the same administrative zone in the British Empire but if we are going off that then Bangladesh Pakistan Myanmar and Sri Lanka should all be part of India as they were all the British Raj.

    By any possible metric you are looking at this deal it is an awful deal, economically, strategically, humanitarian, and environmentally it is all awful.

  31. Wasn’t this a Tory deal to begin with?

    Seems very much like these dog whistle issues which right wing press must bring up every so often when some ‘good news’ appears for Labour.

    Guess only thing they’ve got currently.

  32. Getting told everyday that we don’t have money for shit and they are giving away 9 billion for some bumfuck island in the middle of no where.

  33. Good, the US won’t be around for much longer so they lack any leverage.

Comments are closed.