The framing of the Chagos deal as a 'farce' cuts through a lot of the diplomatic rhetoric around this issue. What's particularly striking is how this situation reveals the gap between sovereignty in theory versus practice - Britain maintaining formal sovereignty while the U.S. exercises actual control creates this peculiar arrangement where we're now paying rent on territory we supposedly own.
The economic absurdity is hard to ignore: trading away an asset and then paying billions for continued access to it. But I wonder if the deeper issue is about institutional memory and strategic coherence. The fact that this process spanned both Conservative and Labour governments suggests this isn't just about party politics or individual officials, but perhaps a broader erosion of institutional capacity to assess Britain's strategic interests clearly.
The parallel you draw with the Welsh reservoir case is illuminating - it highlights how compensation frameworks can be arbitrarily applied based on who's making demands and who's responding to them. Though one might argue that's less about the merits of specific claims and more about the political dynamics of grievance entrepreneurship in different eras.
Good piece. I suspect the more "tactical" use of the rights deal is to illuminate the hypocrisy of so-called "human rights lawyers" Starmer and Hermer. That said it's still counter-productive to frame the rights of some random brown population half the world away as important in the first place without explicitly advocating for White Britons in the first instance (which these people don't do).
A deal could easily have been done. A symbolic transfer of sovereignty and in return Mauritius gets fishing rights in the outer islands. That was clearly the deal the Conservatives were aiming for. 99 years is more than enough time before the islands sink, get nuked, or replaced by a permanent moon base. In the meantime why pay for islands we already own?
But instead Keir Starmer gets elected and he seems to be a genuinely unintelligent man with very little grasp of foreign policy or economics. The Mauritians managed to use a non-binding ruling as political leverage somehow. Now they’re getting a massive payday at the expense of the British taxpayer. Quite simply Starmer has absolutely bogged it.
Great article. I’m an American and vaguely familiar with the Chagos Islands situation and, until now, I was under the impression that the removal of the “Chagossians” was unjust or a mistake. That’s definitely how Wikipedia makes it sound anyway. Thank you for this informative and thought-provoking piece.
My tutor at Stowe in the 1950s, reading the first adolescent sentences of this piece, would have torn up my essay and told me to go away and rewrite it in readable English.
Finally somebody has written the truth about the Chagos Islands. The Seychellois company was owned by a Paul Moulinie, who after selling the plantation to the British government moved to Australia. Moulinie contracted labourers from the Seychelles and Mauritius to work on the plantations. My late father knew and worked for Paul moulinie in 1968 on Diego Garcia as well as Peros Banhos and Salomon, all part of the Chagos archipelago. Later in the late 1990's my parents enquired about the numbers of "Chagossians " with a friend who was the manager of the plantations , he with his wife confirmed on two separate occasions that there were no more than 1000 labourers working on the islands and that only a handful were born on the island from previous labourers. Contracts were usually one to two years. Afterwards many labourers returned to the Seychelles or Mauritius. Some did renew their contract and returned with their wives. The islands were dependant on supplies shipped from the Seychelles on a ship named the "NordVaer" approximately monthly to bimonthly. The article is correct, the "Chagossians" were a mix of contract workers from Seychelles and Mauritius.
I’m too scared to take issue with the substance of the article, so I will confine myself to complaining about the grammar, which bears the imprint of our hegemonic master.
“The French … likely employed slave labour in those plantations.”
Yes, I know the American habit of using “likely“ as an adverb has been taken up by the British media over the last few years, including by the “British” Broadcasting Corporation, but it is not how normal British people speak. Normal British people say “probably“. They don’t say “I’ll likely be back by Seven“, they say “I’ll probably be back by Seven“. The war against “probably“ has been waged by our America-brained elite. Could a patriotic publication such as Pimlico Journal not lead the fightback?
But far worse is this horror:
“If Britain did not expel them in order to allow the Americans to build an airbase, then the counterfactual is as follows: Britain would not have purchased the Chagos and detached it from Mauritius.“
The first half of this sentence suggests that we have not yet decided whether to expel them or not and we are considering what might happen if we do decide to do so. But, of course, we have expelled them. The author is considering what would have happened IF WE HAD NOT expelled them or HAD WE NOT EXPELLED THEM.
The sentence as written makes my head hurt. But apparently this is how they speak in America now (Donald Trump never uses the Third Conditional) and depressingly, but inevitably, it is now crossing the Atlantic.
I would happily give up BIOT, Gibraltar, the Falklands and that Mutiny on the Bounty place if only we could be allowed to keep our language.
«We are (like it or not) currently dependent on the United States for security. Unless and until we invest sufficiently in our military to maintain a foreign policy independent of the United States»
Investing in the military (for that purpose) would be entirely pointless: the UK would collapse without overseas imports of food and oil and those are entirely controlled by the USA Navy that has its knee on the throat of Europe; not many european elites would like to be "sanctioned" by the USA. The outcomes of WW1, WW2, Suez also make clear that even as an imperial power as it was in the past the UK could not defend its interest without the USA.
It is the era of continental powers that alone have the resources to sustain large long lasting industrial wars. The UK and other european states can only negotiate their degree of vassalage and cannot even choose which continental power to have as suzerain: Russia is too weak, China is too far away, Brazil is too immature, India is too poor, so it must be the USA. Fortunately the USA are a fairly tolerable suzerain, at least for resource-poor countries like the european ones.
JM Keynes: «The financial history of the six months from the end of the summer of 1916 up to the entry of the United States into the war in April, 1917, remains to be written. Very few persons, outside the half-dozen officials of the British Treasury who lived in daily contact with the immense anxieties and impossible financial requirements of those days, can fully realize what stead-fastness and courage were needed, and how entirely hopeless the task would soon have become without the assistance of the United States Treasury.»
Andrew Marr: «Nonetheless, John Maynard Keynes, the chief economic advisor to the new Labour Government, warned ministers in August 1945 that Britain's world role was a burden which '... there is no reasonable expectation of our being able to carry [...] ' As he pointed out, the entire British war effort, including all her overseas military commitments, had only been made possible by American subsidies under the Lend-Lease programme.»
«“Churchill was reduced to a subordinate position in the Grand Alliance as early the Teheran Conference in 1943, when he "realised for the first time what a very small country this is". By Yalta in February 1945, he was "weaker than ever before" [...] for Great Britain as a bantam in a heavyweight league, for the Anglo-American alliance as an expedient relationship premised on subordination...”»
PS: Tony Benn, 1965: «Defence, colour television, Concorde, rocket development - these are all issues raising economic considerations that reveal this country's basic inability to stay in the big league. We just can’t afford it. The real choice is — do we go in with Europe or do we become an American satellite? Without a conscious decision being taken the latter course is being followed everywhere.»
This is an interesting and well researched article, but its central thesis that the Chagossian people were quite simply erased as "demos" by their evacuation/eviction and compensation in the 1970's is quite frankly disgusting, as was their eviction, of course. The author seems fond of imagining a "counterfactual" as a rhetorical device. Well think on this counterfactual: had the British state respected the principles of self-determination as it rightly did in decolonizing most other colonies in the 1960's, e.g. the Gilbert and Elice islands, or St Kitts and Nevis, then the Chagossians would still be habiting the islands, still tending the graves of their ancestors. That they aren't and are instead reduced to sitting in the public gallery of the House of Lords, should, both morally and legally, lead to the British state consulting with them and affording them their right to self-determination, even at this late hour.
«the Chagossian people were quite simply erased as "demos" by their evacuation/eviction»
What kind of "demos" is a group of contract employees from Mauritius and Seychelles working on a farm owned by someone else? For one thing none of their ancestors lived on those islands before those islands were discovered by european ships and their presence on those islands was only at the discretion of the copra oil farm that hired them.
If there is any justice any compensation and restitution should have been given to the people living on those islands before the europeans discovered them (that is: nobody).
I don't think that's at all true. Many did work as contract labourers on the copra plantations, but many other Chagossians didn't, surviving by fishing, etc., or just surviving. The original Chagossian people probably arrived on the islands by dhow from East Africa; many are clearly of African rather than Indian origin (by the way,m most Mauritians are of Indian origin having been "invited" as indentured labourers by the British to work on the then French-owned sugar plantations). In the 1960's the Chagossians were disparagingly referred to as "Man Fridays" by the British when they were evicted, whilst they themselves and the more polite British referred to them as "Ilois", distinct from Mauritian or Seychellois.
It doesn't claim that they were erased as a demos by eviction; it claims that they never existed as one - a claim that it backs up with historical evidence. There is no question of 'self-determination' in a place that requires external support for the most basic elements of human survival.
Is the author aware that his Cdr J Aubrey is in fact fictional character from Patrick O’brien and the actual commander was Vice Admiral Bertie ?
No he real
The framing of the Chagos deal as a 'farce' cuts through a lot of the diplomatic rhetoric around this issue. What's particularly striking is how this situation reveals the gap between sovereignty in theory versus practice - Britain maintaining formal sovereignty while the U.S. exercises actual control creates this peculiar arrangement where we're now paying rent on territory we supposedly own.
The economic absurdity is hard to ignore: trading away an asset and then paying billions for continued access to it. But I wonder if the deeper issue is about institutional memory and strategic coherence. The fact that this process spanned both Conservative and Labour governments suggests this isn't just about party politics or individual officials, but perhaps a broader erosion of institutional capacity to assess Britain's strategic interests clearly.
The parallel you draw with the Welsh reservoir case is illuminating - it highlights how compensation frameworks can be arbitrarily applied based on who's making demands and who's responding to them. Though one might argue that's less about the merits of specific claims and more about the political dynamics of grievance entrepreneurship in different eras.
Good piece. I suspect the more "tactical" use of the rights deal is to illuminate the hypocrisy of so-called "human rights lawyers" Starmer and Hermer. That said it's still counter-productive to frame the rights of some random brown population half the world away as important in the first place without explicitly advocating for White Britons in the first instance (which these people don't do).
A deal could easily have been done. A symbolic transfer of sovereignty and in return Mauritius gets fishing rights in the outer islands. That was clearly the deal the Conservatives were aiming for. 99 years is more than enough time before the islands sink, get nuked, or replaced by a permanent moon base. In the meantime why pay for islands we already own?
But instead Keir Starmer gets elected and he seems to be a genuinely unintelligent man with very little grasp of foreign policy or economics. The Mauritians managed to use a non-binding ruling as political leverage somehow. Now they’re getting a massive payday at the expense of the British taxpayer. Quite simply Starmer has absolutely bogged it.
They all emigrated to Minnesota claiming to be from Somalia and living Walz’s Learing centre
Great article. I’m an American and vaguely familiar with the Chagos Islands situation and, until now, I was under the impression that the removal of the “Chagossians” was unjust or a mistake. That’s definitely how Wikipedia makes it sound anyway. Thank you for this informative and thought-provoking piece.
My tutor at Stowe in the 1950s, reading the first adolescent sentences of this piece, would have torn up my essay and told me to go away and rewrite it in readable English.
Finally somebody has written the truth about the Chagos Islands. The Seychellois company was owned by a Paul Moulinie, who after selling the plantation to the British government moved to Australia. Moulinie contracted labourers from the Seychelles and Mauritius to work on the plantations. My late father knew and worked for Paul moulinie in 1968 on Diego Garcia as well as Peros Banhos and Salomon, all part of the Chagos archipelago. Later in the late 1990's my parents enquired about the numbers of "Chagossians " with a friend who was the manager of the plantations , he with his wife confirmed on two separate occasions that there were no more than 1000 labourers working on the islands and that only a handful were born on the island from previous labourers. Contracts were usually one to two years. Afterwards many labourers returned to the Seychelles or Mauritius. Some did renew their contract and returned with their wives. The islands were dependant on supplies shipped from the Seychelles on a ship named the "NordVaer" approximately monthly to bimonthly. The article is correct, the "Chagossians" were a mix of contract workers from Seychelles and Mauritius.
I’m too scared to take issue with the substance of the article, so I will confine myself to complaining about the grammar, which bears the imprint of our hegemonic master.
“The French … likely employed slave labour in those plantations.”
Yes, I know the American habit of using “likely“ as an adverb has been taken up by the British media over the last few years, including by the “British” Broadcasting Corporation, but it is not how normal British people speak. Normal British people say “probably“. They don’t say “I’ll likely be back by Seven“, they say “I’ll probably be back by Seven“. The war against “probably“ has been waged by our America-brained elite. Could a patriotic publication such as Pimlico Journal not lead the fightback?
But far worse is this horror:
“If Britain did not expel them in order to allow the Americans to build an airbase, then the counterfactual is as follows: Britain would not have purchased the Chagos and detached it from Mauritius.“
The first half of this sentence suggests that we have not yet decided whether to expel them or not and we are considering what might happen if we do decide to do so. But, of course, we have expelled them. The author is considering what would have happened IF WE HAD NOT expelled them or HAD WE NOT EXPELLED THEM.
The sentence as written makes my head hurt. But apparently this is how they speak in America now (Donald Trump never uses the Third Conditional) and depressingly, but inevitably, it is now crossing the Atlantic.
I would happily give up BIOT, Gibraltar, the Falklands and that Mutiny on the Bounty place if only we could be allowed to keep our language.
«We are (like it or not) currently dependent on the United States for security. Unless and until we invest sufficiently in our military to maintain a foreign policy independent of the United States»
Investing in the military (for that purpose) would be entirely pointless: the UK would collapse without overseas imports of food and oil and those are entirely controlled by the USA Navy that has its knee on the throat of Europe; not many european elites would like to be "sanctioned" by the USA. The outcomes of WW1, WW2, Suez also make clear that even as an imperial power as it was in the past the UK could not defend its interest without the USA.
It is the era of continental powers that alone have the resources to sustain large long lasting industrial wars. The UK and other european states can only negotiate their degree of vassalage and cannot even choose which continental power to have as suzerain: Russia is too weak, China is too far away, Brazil is too immature, India is too poor, so it must be the USA. Fortunately the USA are a fairly tolerable suzerain, at least for resource-poor countries like the european ones.
«The outcomes of WW1, WW2, Suez»
JM Keynes: «The financial history of the six months from the end of the summer of 1916 up to the entry of the United States into the war in April, 1917, remains to be written. Very few persons, outside the half-dozen officials of the British Treasury who lived in daily contact with the immense anxieties and impossible financial requirements of those days, can fully realize what stead-fastness and courage were needed, and how entirely hopeless the task would soon have become without the assistance of the United States Treasury.»
Andrew Marr: «Nonetheless, John Maynard Keynes, the chief economic advisor to the new Labour Government, warned ministers in August 1945 that Britain's world role was a burden which '... there is no reasonable expectation of our being able to carry [...] ' As he pointed out, the entire British war effort, including all her overseas military commitments, had only been made possible by American subsidies under the Lend-Lease programme.»
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3667997/How-victory-spelt-the-end-of-empire.html
«“Churchill was reduced to a subordinate position in the Grand Alliance as early the Teheran Conference in 1943, when he "realised for the first time what a very small country this is". By Yalta in February 1945, he was "weaker than ever before" [...] for Great Britain as a bantam in a heavyweight league, for the Anglo-American alliance as an expedient relationship premised on subordination...”»
PS: Tony Benn, 1965: «Defence, colour television, Concorde, rocket development - these are all issues raising economic considerations that reveal this country's basic inability to stay in the big league. We just can’t afford it. The real choice is — do we go in with Europe or do we become an American satellite? Without a conscious decision being taken the latter course is being followed everywhere.»
This is an interesting and well researched article, but its central thesis that the Chagossian people were quite simply erased as "demos" by their evacuation/eviction and compensation in the 1970's is quite frankly disgusting, as was their eviction, of course. The author seems fond of imagining a "counterfactual" as a rhetorical device. Well think on this counterfactual: had the British state respected the principles of self-determination as it rightly did in decolonizing most other colonies in the 1960's, e.g. the Gilbert and Elice islands, or St Kitts and Nevis, then the Chagossians would still be habiting the islands, still tending the graves of their ancestors. That they aren't and are instead reduced to sitting in the public gallery of the House of Lords, should, both morally and legally, lead to the British state consulting with them and affording them their right to self-determination, even at this late hour.
«the Chagossian people were quite simply erased as "demos" by their evacuation/eviction»
What kind of "demos" is a group of contract employees from Mauritius and Seychelles working on a farm owned by someone else? For one thing none of their ancestors lived on those islands before those islands were discovered by european ships and their presence on those islands was only at the discretion of the copra oil farm that hired them.
If there is any justice any compensation and restitution should have been given to the people living on those islands before the europeans discovered them (that is: nobody).
I don't think that's at all true. Many did work as contract labourers on the copra plantations, but many other Chagossians didn't, surviving by fishing, etc., or just surviving. The original Chagossian people probably arrived on the islands by dhow from East Africa; many are clearly of African rather than Indian origin (by the way,m most Mauritians are of Indian origin having been "invited" as indentured labourers by the British to work on the then French-owned sugar plantations). In the 1960's the Chagossians were disparagingly referred to as "Man Fridays" by the British when they were evicted, whilst they themselves and the more polite British referred to them as "Ilois", distinct from Mauritian or Seychellois.
It doesn't claim that they were erased as a demos by eviction; it claims that they never existed as one - a claim that it backs up with historical evidence. There is no question of 'self-determination' in a place that requires external support for the most basic elements of human survival.
What historical evidence? I don't see any in the article. Please see my reply to Blissex above ...
Sparkling stuff.