Latest news with #Chagos
First Post
27-05-2025
- Business
- First Post
UK Signs Multibillion Dollar Chagos Deal With Mauritius Firstpost Africa
UK Signs Multibillion Dollar Chagos Deal With Mauritius | Firstpost Africa | N18G UK Signs Multibillion Dollar Chagos Deal With Mauritius | Firstpost Africa | N18G On Thursday ( May 22), Britain finalized an agreement to transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, following a London judge's decision to dismiss a last-minute injunction that had delayed the process. The government described the multibillion-dollar deal as essential for national security. Under the terms, Britain will maintain authority over the key U.S.-UK military base on Diego Garcia—the largest island in the Indian Ocean chain—through a 99-year lease. See More
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Britain is heading for utter ruin, and neither the parties nor the voters are prepared to stop it
What a dreadful week. For the first time, I find myself wondering whether there will be anything left to salvage. I don't mean for Sir Keir Starmer. No, I mean for Britain. Everything that elevated us above the run of nations is being lost: our competitiveness, our sovereignty, our credit-worthiness, our prestige. We are diminished morally, financially and, after the Chagos surrender, physically. At the start of the week, a different future looked possible. Labour had put the Chagos deal on hold, reluctant to hand billions of pounds to a foreign government while cutting benefits at home. There was talk of how, under the influence of his no-nonsense enforcers, Pat McFadden and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer was becoming more sensitive to voters. Just as the foreign aid budget had been cut to increase defence spending, so we were told to expect hard-edged policies on immigration, net zero and welfare. But, when the moment came, Labour returned to its comfort zone. Instead of cancelling the payments to Mauritius, it cancelled its sole attempt to trim the benefits bill, namely the removal of the winter fuel allowance from all but the poorest pensioners. At that moment, any hopes of a more fiscally responsible Labour Government dissolved. All those briefings to the effect that Labour would act where the Tories lacked public trust – cracking down on bogus sicknotes, ending the state's monolithic control of healthcare – were exposed as wishful thinking. When push came to shove, Labour would not challenge the prejudices of its core constituency. That core constituency is no longer the working class. Rather, it is what we might call the perking class, made up of those who depend directly or indirectly on state handouts: quangocrats, BBC employees, civil servants, human rights lawyers, white-collar shop stewards. A subset of the perking class is the shirking class: people who will vote against any party that makes it tougher to get signed off work. If Labour could not slow, even slightly, the ballooning of the state pensions bill, we can forget about Liz Kendall's benefits cuts. The pensioners who would have lost their winter fuel payments were largely Tories. The working-age people who watch YouTube videos on how to qualify for invalidity payments are Labour. Here was a vision of the next four years: a Labour Government prepared to spill the cash in every direction while doing nothing to generate more wealth. Mauritius was paid to take over territory that it had already been paid for renouncing. The EU was paid for graciously taking over our food standards – just in time for its trade war with the US, our chief export destination. Meanwhile, the welfare bill continued to grow. We are heading for national penury. Labour is not just expanding the state, giving pay rises to its public-sector friends while making their work-from-home arrangements permanent. It is simultaneously driving taxpayers to less punitive jurisdictions. Ministers seem not to understand why there might be a problem with pushing out a millionaire every 45 minutes. Leftist commentators positively cheered when it was reported that Britain had suffered the largest fall in the number of billionaires since records began. But who do they imagine is picking up the departing plutocrats' share of the tax bill? In any case, it is not just plutocrats. The real story, masked by our net immigration figures, is that we are also losing young entrepreneurs at every level. Never mind hedgies and property moguls. Beauticians, fitness instructors, IT consultants and estate agents are emigrating in pursuit of higher salaries, lower taxes and better weather. Many nurses in the UAE's top hospitals come from Scotland, as do a lot of the doctors. Who can blame them? Their colleagues in the UK are gearing up for yet another strike because what the Government manages to squeeze from the private sector is never enough. We train medical students expensively only to watch them cross the seas for better pay and conditions – in practice, if not in theory, ending their student loan repayments. Their places are taken by unskilled immigrants, most of whom become a net drain on the Exchequer. So the vicious cycle continues: higher tax rates, lower revenues, worse public services and a deterioration of the workforce. What might break the cycle? The first challenge is to forge a credible opposition. I don't intend to repeat all my arguments for a Tory/Reform entente. I have been periodically making that case in these pages since last year, but few in either party want to hear it. I will simply observe that, if I were to anonymise the reactions of the two parties to the EU and Chagos deals this week, you would not be able to tell which was which. Their divisions are rooted in past grudges, not present policy. Still, let's suppose that the two Right-of-centre parties managed to form a parliamentary majority. Do they have what it takes to nudge us out of our nosedive? To get back to the growth that we enjoyed before the massive expansion of the state under Gordon Brown, we need to cut government spending by a third. Nothing in either the Conservative or Reform programmes suggests that they are prepared for the radical solutions that the moment demands. Neither party backed Labour's mild reduction in pensioner benefits. Both theoretically favour smaller government; both oppose specific cuts. To be fair, they are accurately representing their voters. When the condition is as serious as ours, and the treatment so unpleasant, sufferers will often cast around for quack alternatives. Angela Rayner pretends we can solve our problems through even higher taxes – taxes of the most anti-competitive sort, falling mainly on savers. Reform and the Tories pretend that we can get the savings we need from foreign aid or efficiency drives or scrapping DEI programmes. The truth is that we need to abolish entire departments, halve the state payroll and remove the Government from swathes of public life. We need to dismantle the Blairite juridical state that prevents elected governments from implementing their promises. We need to repeal the laws on which that state rests – the Human Rights Act, the Equality Act, the Climate Change Act – and the quangos they spawned. We need to let ministers appoint their own senior officials, and to allow the Lord Chancellor to remove activist judges. We need to overhaul the immigration system, automatically removing illegal entrants and letting them appeal against that decision only afterwards and from overseas. We need to replace the NHS with Singapore-style individual healthcare accounts. Instead of penalising our private schools, we should be replicating their success in the state sector by introducing school vouchers. We should scrap the EU-era tariffs and regulations that, five years on, still clog up our books. We should replace the ECHR with a Bill of Rights that would restrict itself to guaranteeing our basic liberties: free speech, free association, free contract, free worship and equality before the law: no more protected characteristics. Simply to list these things is to see how far any party or, indeed, public opinion, is from them. Even before 2020, Britain was in an authoritarian mood. Since the dreadful lockdowns, the state has become, for many, a first rather than a last resort. An ugly phrase kept coming into my head this week: De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, or On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain. It was the name of a tract by a fifth- or sixth-century Welsh monk, Gildas, who chronicled the destruction of his country by the invading Anglo-Saxons. To Gildas, the barbarians were simply an instrument of divine justice. It was the sinful Britons who had brought the disaster on themselves. Is there time to turn aside? Are we ready to vote for candidates who offer hard truths rather than sweet delusions? Are we prepared to accept that public spending is limited by the laws of scarcity, not the meanness of politicians? Perhaps. Or perhaps, like the Britons of Gildas's time, we have already left it too late. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
We are heading for economic ruin, and no political party has what it takes to stop this
What a dreadful week. For the first time, I find myself wondering whether there will be anything left to salvage. I don't mean for Sir Keir Starmer. No, I mean for Britain. Everything that elevated us above the run of nations is being lost: our competitiveness, our sovereignty, our credit-worthiness, our prestige. We are diminished morally, financially and, after the Chagos surrender, physically. At the start of the week, a different future looked possible. Labour had put the Chagos deal on hold, reluctant to hand billions of pounds to a foreign government while cutting benefits at home. There was talk of how, under the influence of his no-nonsense enforcers, Pat McFadden and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer was becoming more sensitive to voters. Just as the foreign aid budget had been cut to increase defence spending, so we were told to expect hard-edged policies on immigration, net zero and welfare. But, when the moment came, Labour returned to its comfort zone. Instead of cancelling the payments to Mauritius, it cancelled its sole attempt to trim the benefits bill, namely the removal of the winter fuel allowance from all but the poorest pensioners. At that moment, any hopes of a more fiscally responsible Labour Government dissolved. All those briefings to the effect that Labour would act where the Tories lacked public trust – cracking down on bogus sicknotes, ending the state's monolithic control of healthcare – were exposed as wishful thinking. When push came to shove, Labour would not challenge the prejudices of its core constituency. That core constituency is no longer the working class. Rather, it is what we might call the perking class, made up of those who depend directly or indirectly on state handouts: quangocrats, BBC employees, civil servants, human rights lawyers, white-collar shop stewards. A subset of the perking class is the shirking class: people who will vote against any party that makes it tougher to get signed off work. If Labour could not slow, even slightly, the ballooning of the state pensions bill, we can forget about Liz Kendall's benefits cuts. The pensioners who would have lost their winter fuel payments were largely Tories. The working-age people who watch YouTube videos on how to qualify for invalidity payments are Labour. Here was a vision of the next four years: a Labour Government prepared to spill the cash in every direction while doing nothing to generate more wealth. Mauritius was paid to take over territory that it had already been paid for renouncing. The EU was paid for graciously taking over our food standards – just in time for its trade war with the US, our chief export destination. Meanwhile, the welfare bill continued to grow. We are heading for national penury. Labour is not just expanding the state, giving pay rises to its public-sector friends while making their work-from-home arrangements permanent. It is simultaneously driving taxpayers to less punitive jurisdictions. Ministers seem not to understand why there might be a problem with pushing out a millionaire every 45 minutes. Leftist commentators positively cheered when it was reported that Britain had suffered the largest fall in the number of billionaires since records began. But who do they imagine is picking up the departing plutocrats' share of the tax bill? In any case, it is not just plutocrats. The real story, masked by our net immigration figures, is that we are also losing young entrepreneurs at every level. Never mind hedgies and property moguls. Beauticians, fitness instructors, IT consultants and estate agents are emigrating in pursuit of higher salaries, lower taxes and better weather. Many nurses in the UAE's top hospitals come from Scotland, as do a lot of the doctors. Who can blame them? Their colleagues in the UK are gearing up for yet another strike because what the Government manages to squeeze from the private sector is never enough. We train medical students expensively only to watch them cross the seas for better pay and conditions – in practice, if not in theory, ending their student loan repayments. Their places are taken by unskilled immigrants, most of whom become a net drain on the Exchequer. So the vicious cycle continues: higher tax rates, lower revenues, worse public services and a deterioration of the workforce. What might break the cycle? The first challenge is to forge a credible opposition. I don't intend to repeat all my arguments for a Tory/Reform entente. I have been periodically making that case in these pages since last year, but few in either party want to hear it. I will simply observe that, if I were to anonymise the reactions of the two parties to the EU and Chagos deals this week, you would not be able to tell which was which. Their divisions are rooted in past grudges, not present policy. Still, let's suppose that the two Right-of-centre parties managed to form a parliamentary majority. Do they have what it takes to nudge us out of our nosedive? To get back to the growth that we enjoyed before the massive expansion of the state under Gordon Brown, we need to cut government spending by a third. Nothing in either the Conservative or Reform programmes suggests that they are prepared for the radical solutions that the moment demands. Neither party backed Labour's mild reduction in pensioner benefits. Both theoretically favour smaller government; both oppose specific cuts. To be fair, they are accurately representing their voters. When the condition is as serious as ours, and the treatment so unpleasant, sufferers will often cast around for quack alternatives. Angela Rayner pretends we can solve our problems through even higher taxes – taxes of the most anti-competitive sort, falling mainly on savers. Reform and the Tories pretend that we can get the savings we need from foreign aid or efficiency drives or scrapping DEI programmes. The truth is that we need to abolish entire departments, halve the state payroll and remove the Government from swathes of public life. We need to dismantle the Blairite juridical state that prevents elected governments from implementing their promises. We need to repeal the laws on which that state rests – the Human Rights Act, the Equality Act, the Climate Change Act – and the quangos they spawned. We need to let ministers appoint their own senior officials, and to allow the Lord Chancellor to remove activist judges. We need to overhaul the immigration system, automatically removing illegal entrants and letting them appeal against that decision only afterwards and from overseas. We need to replace the NHS with Singapore-style individual healthcare accounts. Instead of penalising our private schools, we should be replicating their success in the state sector by introducing school vouchers. We should scrap the EU-era tariffs and regulations that, five years on, still clog up our books. We should replace the ECHR with a Bill of Rights that would restrict itself to guaranteeing our basic liberties: free speech, free association, free contract, free worship and equality before the law: no more protected characteristics. Simply to list these things is to see how far any party or, indeed, public opinion, is from them. Even before 2020, Britain was in an authoritarian mood. Since the dreadful lockdowns, the state has become, for many, a first rather than a last resort. An ugly phrase kept coming into my head this week: De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, or On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain. It was the name of a tract by a fifth- or sixth-century Welsh monk, Gildas, who chronicled the destruction of his country by the invading Anglo-Saxons. To Gildas, the barbarians were simply an instrument of divine justice. It was the sinful Britons who had brought the disaster on themselves. Is there time to turn aside? Are we ready to vote for candidates who offer hard truths rather than sweet delusions? Are we prepared to accept that public spending is limited by the laws of scarcity, not the meanness of politicians? Perhaps. Or perhaps, like the Britons of Gildas's time, we have already left it too late.
The Hindu
23-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
U.K.'s Chagos Islands deal risks entrenching exile of some islanders: rights group
Human Rights Watch said on Friday the U.K. government's deal to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius could "entrench" the exile of Chagossians from the archipelago's biggest island. While the agreement "may result in some Chagossians returning to some islands... it also appears to entrench their exile from Diego Garcia, the largest island," said Clive Baldwin of the New York-based rights group. The group described the forcible displacement of the "entire Chagossian indigenous people, mostly to Mauritius, for a U.S. military base on the island of Diego Garcia" as an "ongoing colonial crime against humanity". British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday announced an agreement to give the remote Indian Ocean archipelago to Mauritius in exchange for control of a crucial U.S.-U.K. military base on Diego Garcia island. The deal, first touted in autumn last year, will see Britain pay its former colony £101 million ($136 million) annually for 99 years to lease the facility, Mr. Starmer said. As part of the agreement, Mauritius will be able to resettle Chagossian islanders, expelled from the archipelago by Britain in the 1960s, to all of its over 50 islands, apart from Diego Garcia. Under the deal, the British government will set up a £40-million ($54 million) trust fund for the 10,000-strong Chagossian diaspora. The agreement was announced with a slight delay after a last-minute injunction was granted to Chagos Islands-born British national Bertrice Pompe. In court documents Pompe laid out concerns that under the deal Mauritius would be responsible for resettling the islands. She said Chagossians had suffered decades of "discrimination" at the hands of Mauritius, "including in relation to distribution of financial support intended for Chagossians", according to the court documents. Pompe said she had been living in exile since being "forcibly removed from the Chagos Islands by the British authorities between 1967 and 1973". Of the around 2,000 Chagos inhabitants who were expelled by the UK, many ended up in destitution in Mauritius, she said. Britain retained control of the Chagos Islands after Mauritius gained independence in the 1960s — evicting thousands of Chagos islanders to allow the U.S. to build the strategic military base. The islanders have since then mounted several legal claims for compensation in British courts, while Mauritius brought its claims over the islands to international courts.
Western Telegraph
23-05-2025
- Business
- Western Telegraph
Minister defends ‘good value' Chagos deal as Badenoch says Trump ‘laughing'
Armed forces minister Luke Pollard defended the deal as 'good value' but the Tory leader said the US president has got a 'great deal at the expense of the UK'. In a treaty to 'complete the process of decolonisation of Mauritius', the Government has agreed to pay at least £120 million-a-year for 99 years for control of the vital Diego Garcia base, plus hand over £1.125 billion for economic development over a 25-year period. The Government has faced questions about their estimation of the full cost. Officials said the deal amounted to an average of £101 million a year in 2025/26 prices with an overall cost of £3.4 billion a year 'using a net present value methodology'. The Tories have said the true cost of the deal could rise to more than £30 billion if inflation is at the 2% target. Mr Pollard stood firm on the figures and said the cost was 'comparable' to bases other allies lease in the region. 'So it's £3.4 billion over 99 years – that represents good value,' he told Sky News. The French pay 85 million euros a year to rent a base in Djibouti that is 'literally next door to the Chinese naval base that's leased there', he said. Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch criticised the Chagos deal (Chris Radburn/PA) He argued that Diego Garcia is '15 times bigger than that French base' and the UK had secured an 'exclusion zone' around the base to protect UK and US operations. The Trump administration in Washington supported the deal, which guarantees the future of the base which is used extensively by the US armed forces. Asked why the US is not contributing to the cost of leasing back the base, he said the partner country pays much more in operational costs. 'What we are bringing to the deal is the real estate, the UK will be leasing the base and the Americans pay for the operating costs of the base – now that is many multiples more than the leasing cost,' he told Times Radio. Tory leader Mrs Badenoch said the US was benefiting at the UK's expense. 'Donald Trump is laughing at that Chagos deal,' the Conservative Party leader told BBC Breakfast. 'He's welcoming it because he's not going to have to pay very much, if anything at all. 'He's got a great deal at the expense of the UK. That's not right. It hasn't been done in our national interest. 'What I want to see is more nurses being paid well but we can't do that because we're taking a lot of terrible decisions under Keir Starmer that are weakening our country.' The total cash cost over the 99-year term of the deal will be at least £13 billion for the use of the base and the 25-year agreement to hand over money to support projects to promote the 'economic development and welfare of Mauritius'. The International Court of Justice, in an advisory opinion in 2019, said the Chagos Archipelago should be handed over. Ministers argued that the deal needed to be done because the UK would have faced legal challenges 'within weeks' which could have jeopardised the operation of the Indian Ocean base which is used by US and British forces. The UK will retain full operational control of Diego Garcia, including the electromagnetic spectrum satellite used for communications which counters hostile interference. A 24-nautical mile buffer zone will be put in place around the island where nothing can be built or placed without UK consent.
