Labour Treason on the Ocean

Labour’s treasonous conduct over the British Indian Ocean Territory is as expected as it is repulsive. It follows decades of misconduct whereby the United Nations has betrayed its founding principles. That too should have been predictable.

People who play with maps and confected outrage over colonial guilt should have no part in considering situations requiring reality and national interest. Instead, they have been recruited as Mauritian, and Chinese, agents of influence and embedded themselves in positions of influence, simply by being the people who show an interest. One became a close adviser to our new Prime Minister. The most notorious such agent got appointed as adviser to a parliamentary group on the subject, and was only expelled shortly before the election (I understand). Their revenge has come swiftly.

The islands of the British Indian Ocean Territory (once a wider colony but now reduced to the Chagos Archipelago) are a protected paradise, with a naval base guarding the Ocean. Here the Royal Navy and United States Navy have a deep, protected anchorage in the heart of an ocean strategically vital to the future of the balance of world power. Otherwise the islands are practically uninhabitable.

There was never a Chagossian nation: that is an invention of later days. The islands were uninhabited and considered uninhabitable until put to work up in the 19th century as a copra plantation – copra, the dried flesh of coconuts – was once an important trading commodity. Workers were brought in from other lands to work the plantations, with their families, which provided a small population for a time. Some were born on these sparse atolls; born to labour. Then in the 1960s the bottom fell out of the copra market, the plantations became unprofitable and were closed. Most of the workers were temporary contract workers who returned to their homes in Africa, the Seychelles or Mauritius, leaving 1,800 to be relocated elsewhere. It is of these few that a nation has been invented.

Without the plantations and without the naval base, neither Diego Garcia nor any other part of the Chagos Islands is capable economically supporting human life in the 21st century.

When the last remaining workers were moved off the islands in the 1960s, a large sum of money was paid to the Governments of Mauritius and the Seychelles to resettle them. It was stolen. The ‘Ilois’ were abandoned to squalor. Their descendants by all accounts remain as discards on Mauritius: on an island with a population abounding in a variety of race and religions, one must ask why one sector of the population, albeit small, is kept from equal participation. The situation of the Ilois is used as an emotional plea from the very government which keeps them in that state, and as a reward that government is to be handed a British territory and billions of pounds. It is inconceivable.

I accuse the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as complicit in treason. It is they who have pressed for handing over the territory. They have no interest in their duties to manage British territory; they express embarrassment at the existence of the overseas territories, and they understand only relations with foreign states, over British interests. They bow to whatever gives an easy life, and are often shown happy to accept claims of ‘international obligations’ which are pure political inventions. I would sack the lot of them for gross misconduct, and betraying the great trust reposed in them.

I accuse new Foreign Secretary: his whole declared purpose is to oppose ‘colonialism’ without understanding it; whose every speech has been a jumble of ignorant commonplaces blaming the existence of Empire not for universal values and prosperity but for the wicked behaviour which it ended.

I accuse the Prime Minister, who entrusted to such a man, a man, who opposes colonies, the care of our colonies, and who chose as a close adviser an agent of a hostile power.

How must our fellow Britons in Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands be feeling now? I know what the politicians in Madrid and Buenos Aires are thinking.

Back to the Indian Ocean; the atolls of the Chagos group were, before the Empire, fishing grounds for the Maldives, whose seamen knew them well. The tussles between British and French fleets in the Indian Ocean would not leave any anchorage unclaimed, and so the French attempted meagre possession, and eventually the Union Jack was raised, and has stayed raised until this betrayal. The atolls were nevertheless uninhabited and so could have no governor of their own – for convenience they were attached to the nearest island colony – the Seychelles. Later the Governor of Mauritius was given responsibility – though there is no connection to that island. On the latter’s independence, the islands were separated, by agreement and treaty. A claim of sovereignty by Mauritius is utterly without foundation.

How could a close little island, Mauritius, scarcely able to govern itself, think to govern islands separated from them by 1,200 miles of ocean? The Chinese, who rule there now, know how. It is ludicrous. It is avaricious. It is dishonourable, in breach of treaty obligations. The Maldives would have a better claim, or the Seychelles, or India, but sensibly they raise none.

I accuse the United Nations, for betraying all principles and leading the idea of international order to be a mockery. They invent rules out of thin air and out of malice.

This should have been foreseen. When the United Nations Organisation was founded in the final days of the War, it was a club of ancient, respected nations, and Russia, and we knew how to work together with common understandings. It was a noble idea. As the European empires were discarded though, it changed. The United Nations became a club of ex-colonies led by politicians radicalised to hatred of their former masters. The idea that treaties would be kept, and all be respected in diversity, were untenable when the new states wanted to use the same mechanisms for power and revenge.

The agreement giving Mauritius independence specified that any future disputes between Britain and Mauritius must not go to the United Nations as both were and remain Commonwealth nations. The United Nations though pays barely lip-service to upholding treaties or established international norms. A committee even invented a rule retrospectively that states may not separate parts off their colonies before independence – a novel idea with no basis in the law of nations. What does that says for the existence of Pakistan, for example? Several isles have been separated and for good reason – the Cayman Islands from Jamaica and Anguilla from St Kitts-Nevis, or Mayotte from the Comoros, because the inhabitants demanded it, having little in common with the isles to which they had hitherto been administratively attached. In those cases there was only a few miles of sea – not 500 miles of tossing ocean.

The matter has proceeded to avarice, lies, anti-colonial ideology, and what Scruton called ‘oikophobia’; a disgust for one’s own home and nation. The result of this deceit and folly is that those recently entrusted with the nation’s interests, have gladly betrayed them; handing a vital British territory to Chinese client state.