‘Elbows up' for Starmer means telling Trump to pay rent on Diego Garcia or risk moving out
It's a funny old world. One day Britain agrees to pay for an Indian Ocean base for the US military at a cost of £90m a year for the next 99 years, and the next America slaps a random 10 per cent tariff on everything we sell, rising to 25 per cent for cars and steel.
The proposed leasing of Diego Garcia, part of the Chagos archipelago, quickly caught the attention of Dame Priti Patel, the shadow Foreign Secretary. 'It is like handing your house over to someone else, then paying to rent it out,' she wrote in The Telegraph. 'Put simply, this deal is madness.'
And so it is. Dame Priti may not have meant it this way but, in the new world of realpolitik and great power competition, smaller nations need to play their cards carefully. The danger in folding so quickly goes beyond the prospect of becoming a vassal, a lapdog or a gimp. For liberal democracies, the threat is existential. As the Canadians say, 'elbows up!'.
So how should Britain play its hand over its prospective 99 year lease on Diego Garcia? And might it be used to get Donald Trump to back down on the tariffs he has unjustly slapped on Britain PLC?
First, let's drop the magical thinking. As has been evident for at least six years now, the chances of retaining sovereignty over the Chagos Islands are all but non-existent.
As Derrick Wyatt, KC, a retired Oxford law Professor with a specialism in international law says, the problem is not that the judges of International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in 2019 that the UK had no title to the Islands. It's that almost every other country on the planet – including almost all our Nato allies – agree with them.
In his first term as President, Trump led a UK/US diplomatic offensive in the UN in support of the UK's title to the Chagos Islands but it failed. Only Israel, Hungary and Scott Morrison's Australia voted in support of the US/UK position.
'Countries abstaining on the vote, but conspicuously not supporting the UK and US line on the Chagos Islands, included Canada, New Zealand, virtually the whole of Nato, and Indo-Pacific allies Japan and the Republic of Korea,' notes Mr Wyatt.
Given these circumstances – and the fact that the Johnson, Truss and Sunak governments agreed negotiations to surrender our sovereignty of the Chagos – we should focus on what is within our grasp.
And that is a 99-year lease over Diego Garcia, the jewel in the crown of the archipelago and home to a vast and strategically important military base that the US desperately needs to hold on to.
The fact that China would love to have it, not to mention India, Pakistan and several wealthy middle eastern powers, only adds to its very considerable rentable value.
The UK has long considered the island an asset. In 1966 we leased it to the US for 50 years (later extending it to 2036) in return for a $14m discount on the purchase of Polaris missiles for our so-called 'independent' nuclear deterrent.
During this Cold War period it made sense not to charge the US through the nose for it. At the time, America was a reliable ally, jointly committed to the defence of Europe.
Extending Dame Priti's analogy, we leased the island to the Americans 'unfurnished', and over the decades they have very much made it their own. Its airbase and deep water ports were built by them and they have thousands of military personnel based there.
In the years following 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA is said to have run 'black sites' from Diego Garcia for waterboarding and whatnot.
And on February 21, 2008, the then UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband admitted that two US 'extraordinary rendition' flights refuelled in Diego Garcia in 2002 on their way to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
The UK only has a few dozen military administrators on the Island and they had not spotted our US tenant doing anything untoward. Mr Miliband told Parliament he was 'very sorry' that his government's earlier denials of wrongdoing were now having to be corrected.
Diego Garcia's value stems from its isolated position in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It is the perfect stopover for bombers, ships and troops headed to the Far East, Middle East and Australasia (or vice versa).
Even as I write, the US has six B-2 stealth bombers there, ready for possible deployment against the Houthis in Yemen or their paymasters in Iran.
Which brings us back to President Trump, his tariffs and the new world of realpolitik.
Why, if Britain is to secure a 99 year lease on Diego Garcia as we give up sovereignty over the Chagos, should we pay for it? We don't use the Island ourselves, so shouldn't we demand that the rent is covered in full by whoever does?
And if the tenant is to continue to be the US, shouldn't we demand that its President treat us fairly on trade, dropping his ridiculous tariffs on British goods altogether?
After all, £90m a year for 99 years is a lot of money, and right now we need every penny we can get.
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