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Spectator
3 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
The Chagos Islands deal just gets worse and worse
There has always been something mad about the government's deal over the Chagos Islands. The British Indian Ocean Territory was formed in 1965 from the seven atolls of the Chagos Archipelago and over 1,000 smaller individual islands. They had previously been administered as part of the Crown Colony of Mauritius, a British possession since 1810. Mauritius became independent in 1968 and had long claimed sovereignty over the BIOT, which the United Kingdom had consistently rejected and which has never been upheld by a judgement in any international court. Last year, however, the government reached an agreement with Mauritius to surrender sovereignty of the BIOT while retaining control through a 99-year lease of the military base at Diego Garcia, formally leased by the United States from the Ministry of Defence as Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia. After some subsequent renegotiations, a final agreement between the UK and Mauritius was published in May. As well as surrendering sovereignty, the government will pay on average £101 million a year for the lease of Diego Garcia, and it gave an overall estimated cost of £3.4 billion. So let us be quite clear about this aspect of the deal: the UK is giving away sovereignty it has exercised for more than two centuries to a country 1,250 miles from the BIOT, which has never held independent jurisdiction over the Chagos Islands and has no historical or cultural connection to them save through British and previously French administration. It is doing so because, in the Prime Minister's words: 'If Mauritius takes us to court again, the UK's longstanding legal view is that we would not have a realistic prospect of success.' And we are paying billions of pounds to induce Mauritius to accept this surrender. A price tag of £3.4 billion to prevent the upholding of a largely spurious claim in a politicised court on the bogus and nebulous grounds of 'decolonisation' is a high one, and the government has rightly been criticised for an abject and weirdly slavish sacrifice on the altar of international law. Sir Keir Starmer and his attorney general, Lord Hermer, regard the messy and often highly partial notion of international courts as sacrosanct; for them, this is simply the price that must be paid to be good global citizens. It now seems that the price may be higher than admitted; much, much higher. The Daily Telegraph has obtained documents under the Freedom of Information Act which purport to show that the Government Actuary's Department initially estimated the nominal cost of the agreement to be £34.7 billion. This was reduced to £10 billion by applying an assumed annual inflation rate of 2.3 per cent over the 99-year lease period (it is currently 3.6 per cent, so that is ambitious). The total was then lowered again by between 2.5 and 3.5 per cent per year by the application of a Treasury practice called the Social Time Preference Rate; this represents the fact that people value benefits received immediately more highly. It therefore converts future costs and benefits into their present-day value. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office argues that this is a 'standard' calculation for long-term government spending and there has been no attempt to deceive or mislead. Up to a point, Lord Copper. The Telegraph notes that this calculation was not applied, for example, to the Social and Affordable Homes Programme announced last year by deputy prime minister Angela Rayner. She could therefore promote a spending commitment of £39 billion, maximising rather than minimising the headline figure. The government needs to deal with this quickly. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it has been guilty of at least sharp practice, seeking radically to underplay the costs of a very bad deal. Remember that Starmer dismissed suggestions that the total bill might be between £9 and £18 billion as 'absolutely wide of the mark'. This kind of actuarial legerdemain, shuffling figures to say, in effect, that two plus two does not have to equal four, is shoddy and underhand. And the government has no reservoir of goodwill from which it can draw. In order for the treaty to come into force, parliament will have to agree the Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill introduced in July. The overall cost must be a vital part of that debate and parliament would be perfectly entitled to reject the bill. It is mad enough to be spending £3.4 billion giving away British sovereign territory. To pay 10 times that, and to work hard to minimise the published figures, is beyond madness. £34.7 billion is more than half the UK's annual defence budget. This is not Sir Keir Starmer reluctantly paying some modern-day Danegeld; instead he seems to have flung handfuls of cash at the Vikings before they ever set sail.
Spectator
4 days ago
- Politics
- Spectator
Portrait of the week: Palestine Action arrests, interest rate cuts and an Alaska meeting
Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said: 'The Israeli government's decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong… It will only bring more bloodshed.' Police arrested 532 people at a demonstration in Parliament Square at which people unveiled handwritten signs saying: 'I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action'; the group was proscribed by the government in July under the Terrorism Act of 2000. J.D. Vance, the Vice-President of America, stayed with David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, at Chevening House in Kent before going on holiday in the Cotswolds at a house rented for £8,000 a week. Work began on removing 180 tons of congealed wet wipes near Hammersmith bridge. Rushanara Ali resigned from her post as the minister for homelessness after it emerged that she had ended her tenants' fixed-term contract in order to sell the house, but then relisted it for rent at a higher price within six months, something she wanted to make illegal under the Renters' Rights Bill. The government proposed that foreign criminals in England and Wales who are given fixed-term jail sentences could be deported upon sentencing and barred from re-entering Britain. Protests continued outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, which houses male asylum seekers; other protestors protested against the protestors. The number of migrants arriving in England in small boats in the seven days to August 11 was 1,593, bringing the number since Labour was elected to 50,271. The Bank of England cut interest rates from 4.25 to 4 per cent, though four of the nine members of the committee wanted no change. Job vacancies fell by 5.8 per cent to 718,000 between May and July. By the government's own figures it will cost £34.7 billion over 99 years to give the Chagos Islands to Mauritius; the sum of £3.4 billion previously announced took account of future inflation and the 'Social Time Preference Rate'. Barbara Harvey, the historian, died aged 97. Biddy Baxter, for 23 years the editor of Blue Peter, died aged 92. After publishing an autobiography called Frankly, Nicola Sturgeon, the former first minister of Scotland, was asked about the rapist going by the name of Isla Bryson, who identified as a woman and was sent to a women's prison. Ms Sturgeon said: 'What I would say now is anybody who commits the most heinous male crime against women probably forfeits the right to be, you know, the gender of their choice.' A large gorse fire spread across Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh. The Environment Agency suggested deleting old emails to save water. Abroad President Donald Trump of America and President Vladimir Putin of Russia arranged to meet in Alaska to discuss the war in Ukraine. 'There will be some swapping of territories, to the betterment of both,' said Mr Trump. 'Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier,' said President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. 'The path to peace in Ukraine cannot be decided without Ukraine,' said a joint statement by Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Finland and the European Commission. Russia hurried to make territorial advances before the meeting. India's Supreme Court ordered Delhi to round up its stray dogs – estimated at a million – after the city reported 49 cases of rabies this year. Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, activated his plan to occupy the Gaza Strip, saying: 'We don't want to be there as a governing body. We want to hand it over to Arab forces.' Israel's chief of the general staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, warned that this would endanger the remaining 20 or so hostages held by Hamas. The plan would force a million Palestinians in Gaza City into evacuation zones in the south. Germany suspended the delivery to Israel of arms that could be used in Gaza. Australia will recognise the state of Palestine at next month's UN General Assembly. Five Al Jazeera journalists were killed by a targeted Israeli strike on their tent in Gaza City. A fire badly damaged a chapel in the Mosque-Cathedral in Cordoba, Spain. In France, a swarm of jellyfish shut down a nuclear power station. President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and Nikol Pashinyan, Prime Minister of Armenia, shook hands at a meeting with Mr Trump at the White House. More than 3,000 cases of chikungunya, a mosquito-borne virus, were reported in China's Guangdong province. Italy decided to build the world's longest suspension bridge, two miles across the straits of Messina to Sicily. Jim Lovell, the astronaut who guided the Apollo 13 moon mission back to Earth in 1970 after radioing 'Houston, we've had a problem', died aged 97. CSH
