Empire in reverse: How Britain pays to lose its own territory

In a country where pensioners were, until last week, being told to brace for cuts to their winter fuel payments, the government has somehow found billions to hand over a British overseas territory to a state with 47 Chinese development projects on its books. The optics are grim. The substance, worse.

The Chagos Islands, under British sovereignty since 1814, are about to be signed over to Mauritius. In return, Britain will retain a 99-year lease on Diego Garcia, the most strategically important military base in the Indian Ocean. And we are to pay, by some reports, over £10 billion to make it happen.

The deal has been smuggled into the news cycle with minimal scrutiny. Ministers insist it fulfils our international obligations, citing a 2019 International Court of Justice advisory opinion. But the opinion is just that: advisory, non-binding, and issued by a court whose jurisdiction we never recognised in this matter. The real driving force behind the deal appears to be ideological, not legal.

Mauritius's claim to Chagos is a post-independence invention. In 1965, as Britain prepared to grant Mauritius independence, the islands were separated with Mauritian consent. They were sold, cleanly and legally, for £3 million which is about £50 million today. Mauritius, at the time, made no claim to the territory. The claim only emerged in 1982, long after independence, and was dismissed by the very statesman who had led the country to freedom. "Very few people knew" about Chagos, he said. It was, he admitted, a place Mauritians had "never visited."

So why surrender it now? Because we are governed by men who think law trumps politics, and by extension, national interest. Sir Keir Starmer, Lord Hermer, and Philippe Sands form the legalist vanguard behind the handover—three men with deep roots in the international legal establishment and, in Sands's case, a history of theatrical gestures against British sovereignty. (It was he who illegally planted a Mauritian flag on Chagos in 2022.)

What they lack in strategic sense they make up for in self-righteousness. Diego Garcia is a lynchpin of UK-US defence coordination, a critical outpost in a region increasingly defined by Chinese naval reach. To trade direct sovereignty for a 99-year lease, from a country already deep in Beijing's debt, is folly of a high order.

Starmer says this makes us safer. The logic is incomprehensible. How does leasing a base from a third country make us more secure than owning it outright? We have seen how quickly international agreements can be rendered void in the South China Sea, in the Philippines, and closer to home, in Hong Kong. What Mauritius agrees to today can be undone tomorrow.

And then there is the cost. The government has not been candid with the British public, but in Port Louis, parliamentarians have spoken openly of sums exceeding £10 billion. This from a government that has toyed with cutting heating support for the elderly and whose armed forces are stretched to the bone.

We are not decolonising. We are disarming ourselves, legally and strategically, at great public expense. This is not justice. It is judicial cosplay masquerading as diplomacy. And the bill, as ever, is being sent to the taxpayer.

The British public deserves better than this theatre of surrender. Parliament must demand clarity. And the Chagos deal, in its current form, must not go through.