Keir Starmer Gives In To Mighty Mauritius
Virtue Signaling is the UK's Final Imperial Policy
“To propose that Great Britain should voluntarily give up all authority over her colonies…would be to propose such a measure as never was, and never will be adopted, by any nation in the world. No nation ever voluntarily gave up the dominion of any province, how troublesome soever it might be to govern it, and how small soever the revenue which it afforded might be in proportion to the expense which it occasioned. Such sacrifices…are always mortifying to the pride of every nation.”
- Adam Smith [The Wealth of Nations, VI.VII.III]
On October 3rd Keir Starmer’s Labour Government issued a joint statement with the Indian Ocean nation of Mauritius announcing that after a series of international legal battles, the United Kingdom will be ceding sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory [BIOT,] otherwise known as the Chagos Islands, to Mauritius. It seems Britain’s ruling class is not satisfied with giving away their home country to former imperial subjects, they are also determined to give away what scattered rocks they have left to their former colonies. Not only that, for some reason the United Kingdom will be paying Mauritius to take them, in the form of various financial support and grants, as well as payments for a 99 year lease on the “joint” UK-US Military Base on Diego Garcia, the largest island in this territory in which 99.89% of the surface area is water. The United States military base at Diego Garcia, nominally under the control of the United Kingdom, has the cringe-inducing designation “the Footprint of Freedom” and provides access to East Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Though it is secretive and obscure, it is also notorious to those interested in government malfeasance due to the complete expulsion of the small native population of the territory, known as Chagossians, from the islands in order to build the base on an uninhabited landmass.
The cession of the Chagos to Mauritius is being lauded by some as a great win for international law. However, Mauritius has no claim to these islands besides that they happened to be administered from Mauritius before it gained its independence from the United Kingdom. They say the UK possession of Chagos violates UN rules on non-self governing areas, except that Chagos would then be in the same situation under Mauritius. While this deal means Chagossians may be able to resettle tiny, remote, deserted islands- besides Diego Garcia- it is clear this has little to do with justice for victims of imperialism, but instead serves to make an obviously false point about the United Kingdom’s consistent belief in the “rules-based world order.” Though it is fair to say that a former world power like the United Kingdom has little need for global military access, it is still incredible that this is how Britain’s once great African empire finally truly ends: not with a bang but with a whimpered virtue signal.
The history of the Chagos Islands is similar to many of the world’s small islands outside of the the area of Polynesian expansion in the Pacific. In short, they were uninhabited when discovered by the Portuguese, claimed by the French, filled with plantations, populated by slaves from Africa, passed to the United Kingdom after the Napoleonic Wars, further populated by “coolies” from Asia, and finally held as neglected minor possessions until a good use for them was found. The first Chagossians were brought to the island around 1780- the same time as the colonization of Australia- and began developing a unique Creole culture and language, especially following the introduction of Indians. Ultimately, three island groups were substantially settled, Diego Garcia and two atolls which are over 100 miles north but near each other, the Salomon Islands and Peros Banhos Atoll. Other islands are said to have been periodically inhabited, in the sense of going there to harvest coconuts with perhaps a few people tending the trees in between harvests.
In the 1960’s, at the height of the Cold War when the United Kingdom was still getting used to its position as America’s Assistant Manager, they did find a use for the Chagos Islands: the Diego Garcia base. The United Kingdom created a fiction that the inhabitants were contract laborers and not permanent residents and thus could be legally removed. Their awareness that they were intentionally lying is clear from now-declassified internal documents. The United States has more cover regarding the expulsion because they could write it down as believing the British, but it is obvious they were in cahoots to displace the islanders, and it was not subtle at the time either. My purpose here is not to tell this sordid story which has been told many times, but if you are interested there is a 2004 documentary by the legendary Australian journalist John Pilger titled Stealing a Nation which is available on Youtube and is my main source for this section.
The short version of the story is that after terrifying the islanders onto boats- including by poisoning their dogs- they were taken to prisons in the Seychelles and then moved to Mauritius. These people with low rates of trade skills and literacy who previously lived a farmer-gatherer lifestyle, as well as doing some work on coconut plantations, were left on newly-independent Mauritius without any real support. They were primarily put in decrepit, disused housing projects where some stayed for decades. Later, they were given some money to renounce their claim to the islands- a form many of them couldn’t read at all much less understand- and ultimately most were given British citizenship, as the children born outside of British territory were stateless.
Meanwhile, the US immediately got to work on the base. In no time they had a full service Naval and Air Force base capable of doing everything from monitoring deep space to reloading nuclear submarines to refueling “extraordinary rendition” flights. Though it is isolated, it is a dream posting for military service members, given that it is a literal tropical paradise. As one can easily see on Google Maps, it contains amenities such as a golf course, basketball courts, tennis courts, hiking trails, fishing piers, and businesses ran by military contractors. You can also visit the ghost town of the Chagossians; somewhat ironically, the main settlement was on the far side of the island from the current base, where very little has been built. It would have been possible to leave the islanders there to sell coconuts and handicrafts to service members while using their sons as laborers and their daughters as prostitutes- a much more traditional treatment of natives next to where you build a military base than total displacement. [It should be noted that this was their fate in Mauritius anyway.]
In October 2021 an unusual situation arose when Sri Lankan migrants were discovered near the island and became the subject of a protracted legal battle about what to do with them. Currently, they have been in a prison on the island for years1. Just last month a small number of journalists were allowed to visit the island to report on the migrant situation, something which was never previously allowed. Of the observations by journalists, perhaps most noteworthy for our purposes is that though it is a joint UK/US base, it is American in almost every way. Writing for BBC, Alice Cuddy notes that while on a surface level the US and UK are “jostling” for influence, it is obviously ran by and for Americans,
“Cars drive on the right, as they do in the US. We are driven around in a bright yellow bus reminiscent of an American school bus.
The US dollar is the accepted currency and the electricity sockets are American. The food offered to us for the five days includes “tater tots” - a popular American fried-potato side dish - and American biscuits, similar to British scones.
While the territory is administered from London, most personnel and resources there are under the control of the US.”
Bear in mind there isn’t really anything non-military to administer besides giving ships permission to pass through and declaring most of the BIOT a nature preserve.
The Diego Garcia base is of incredible importance to the US military’s ability to operate in a large section of the world. It could be fairly argued that given the number of people, and that they were displaced not killed, the “ends justify the means” when you consider the stakes of the Cold War. Certainly, I would agree, in general, that around 2,000 Chagossians being sent to a different Indian Ocean island is preferable to nuclear war, but it is not apparent that having a base in Diego Garcia had any impact on preventing nuclear war. The reason the Chagossians make such sympathetic victims is that unlike, for example, the citizen populations of Germany and Japan during WWII, who were in most ways part of the war machines and perhaps political supporters of those regimes, the Chagossians truly had nothing to do with the world events which overtook them. They were basically living peacefully on an island selling coconuts to passing ships when they became victims of history.
With a population of only 2,000, it would not have been at all difficult for a government the size of Britain’s to make sure that the Chagossians were set up properly after their expulsion. They could have been given a cash settlement and condos and some career training, even if their paradisaical home couldn’t be replicated. Governments do this sort of thing when dams are built all the time. The problem is that because of international laws relating to decolonization, they were set on selling the fiction that it was a “land without a people” and by extension couldn’t be ethnically cleansed, something which would be undermined by treating them as displaced people. This was always a problem that everyone hoped would go away, but it never did. It is hard to make people forget when they’ve been denied access to the graves of their fathers.
No one really denies that the Chagossians were mistreated- a UK High Court found their expulsion illegal in 2000- but the cause of consternation about this specific agreement is that Mauritius is not a party that was wronged. Sure, Mauritius had the British Indian Ocean Territory sheared from it as a condition of independence, but its only connection to those islands hundreds of miles away was sharing a colonial Governor who himself must have just collected some taxes on coconuts. The only sense in which Mauritius was victimized was having to take in a small population of impoverished and displaced people, something which Europe’s ruling class insists on doing in enormous quantities. By the “logic” with which they antagonize their own public, Labour should consider this small population of Chagossians a boon to Mauritian culture: diverse human capital who probably want to become neurosurgeons. From the start Mauritius showed little interest in helping the Chagossians- though they showed a fair amount of interest in getting the UK to pay them for it- while Chagossians have also not wanted to become Mauritians.
None of the above stopped Mauritius from persistently asserting its claims to the Chagos Islands. In prior times there was little they could do, but as the Anglo-American grip over the world faded they became more ambitious. In theory, throughout this Mauritius has maintained fishing and some other rights to the territory, but in 2010 the United Kingdom tried to put the issue to bed by making most of the territory a Marine Protection Area. Mauritius took the United Kingdom to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg and in 2015 this was ruled illegal in an international court. In 2019 the UN’s International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion calling the separation of Chagos from Mauritius “unlawful detachment” and a “wrongful act.” They said the United Kingdom was “obligated” to stop administering them as fast as possible, which was described as an “order” by much of the media, though obviously an advisory opinion cannot be an order.
The UN General Assembly agreed with the advisory order. That same year they voted 116-6 in favor of a non-binding resolution demanding the UK relinquish sovereignty. Only the UK, US, Israel, Hungary, Australia, and the Maldives sided with the UK, though 56 nations abstained, including several important European countries. I didn’t find what reasoning the Maldives presented, but they are the one country that could actually reasonable integrate Chagos into their nation, and perhaps want it themselves. The entire premise here is silly. I’m not an expert on international law but attempting to freeze borders where they were in 1945 has always been nonsense, and it can’t be “wrongful” for Britain to split its own territories which already had arbitrary British borders. Without doing a lot of research, presumably France got away with splitting up its two enormous African territories into their component parts because they held individual plebiscites.
It was repeatedly said that there is some risk of a binding resolution causing the UK and US to lose the base but that is absurd- only Russia or China could even potentially sink the US fleet at Diego Garcia. That, of course, would require a Pearl Harbor type attack and be a true beginning of World War III, rendering this entire legal process irrelevant. Regardless, this sequence of events caused the United Kingdom to perpetually negotiate with Mauritius about the situation. The Conservatives who took part in such negotiations are currently all passing the buck, with three former Foreign Secretaries, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and James Cleverly, insisting that they carried on negotiations with Mauritius with a clear understanding that they would never cede sovereignty under any circumstances. For their part, Labour claims the Tories handed them an untenable situation, with a Labour source telling The Independent,
“Labour inherited a legal car crash that could have left this vital military base in the hands of the court, damaging UK and US national security. James Cleverly and the Tories tried and failed in 11 rounds of negotiations, putting our national security interests at risk.”
This is on its face nonsense, because, once again, the International Court of Justice has no ability to take Diego Garcia. This is not like repossessing your car for non-payment. It’s funny that the “International Community” led by the UK and Britain have supported Israel’s brutality in Gaza and tried to stop the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, in one instance showing they don’t care about international law and in another showing they are unable to enforce it, but somehow they think other powers could make them give up this base. Further, it is now being said that Joe Biden pressured them into making this deal, presumably in between his 3 o'clock ice cream break and 5 o’clock bed time.
One way or another, Keir Starmer’s Labour Government pushed through a deal ceding sovereignty to Mauritius, while maintaining a 99 year lease on Diego Garcia, and giving Mauritius an unknown amount of “financial assistance” which goes beyond rent payments. Their main claim is that this secures the base, though they refuse to explain how they possibly could have lost it besides by choosing to forfeit it. The UK’s Foreign Minister made the following statement,
“Today’s agreement secures this vital military base for the future. It will strengthen our role in safeguarding global security, shut down any possibility of the Indian Ocean being used as a dangerous illegal migration route to the UK, as well as guaranteeing our long-term relationship with Mauritius.”
Whether or not you think returning Hong Kong to China was the right idea, it’s at least fair to say that China is an enormous country and economy with whom Britain needs to maintain good relations. Saying this about Mauritius makes me think of the episode of Seinfeld when Kramer is taking a children’s Karate class and Jerry says, “but you don’t need Karate, you could just ring his neck!” The UK may be a former world power, but it could probably bring Mauritius to its knees just be stopping Brits from honeymooning there. That they inexplicably paid Mauritius for this almost literally adds insult to injury in the minds of many of the British. No one believes the United Kingdom has a genuine interest in fairness and “international law” but for some reason the fear of being seen as international scofflaws for a minor and technical matter caused them to give Mauritius everything for nothing. In the immortal words of Donald Trump:
Speaking of Trump, if they would have held out to see if there would be a second Trump Administration, he probably would have been willing to try to get Congress to agree to buy the Chagos Islands straight cash, saving Britain this entire headache and a good amount of money.
Despite all of this, reactions to the deal were mixed. A White House statement from Joe Biden praised the deal, saying, “It is a clear demonstration that through diplomacy and partnership, countries can overcome longstanding historical challenges to reach peaceful and mutually beneficial outcomes.” This is a strange statement for a man whose Administration has been defined by anything but productive diplomacy in difficult circumstances…though I suppose perhaps for that reason the world needed a demonstration such as he describes: Joe Biden certainly wasn’t going to provide one.
The reaction from Conservatives has been overwhelmingly negative. There has been a great deal of concern about China, which is on good terms with Mauritius, but this hysteria is so silly that it hardly merits going into. Suffice to say, beyond the fact that there is no evidence China wants a base in the Chagos [as ever, Anglo views of China’s desires are complete projection,] there is no indication Mauritius would approve such a thing, none of the other islands are appropriate to even dock a large ship at, and once again the US has total military dominance of this specific location. Further, though the UK and US may be stacking up the L’s recently, I have little doubt that if the President of some tiny insignificant nation like Mauritius made a deal with China that damaging to Anglo-American interests we would immediately learn they need some “freedom” and before the ink dried the President would be Color Revolutioned, Ledeen Doctrined, or simply thrown out a window.
Other opinions have been mixed. Reform Leader Nigel Farage put out an official statement demanding a Parliamentary vote and being honest about his support for Western dominance [Labour would surely win that vote and it isn’t legally required, so this would do nothing but gets MPs on record.] The Conversation published a ridiculous essay by one Peter Harris claiming this is a rare “win-win-win-win” situation in international relations and is good for the UK, US, Mauritius, and the Chagossians. He buys the claim that these islands- which never belonged to Mauritius- always belonged to Mauritius and further that there was some meaningful risk of the base being removed through international law or of Britain becoming a pariah over these reefs, some of which stick out of the water. They don’t seem to be worried about their pariah status over supporting Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, but somehow Chagos is what is going to sink them:
Peter Harris also seems to believe, based on absolutely nothing, that Mauritius is able and willing to settle Chagossians on the outlying islands and that they would be able to survive there. Counter Currents published a much better essay titled “Raw Deals: The Continued Shafting of the Chagossians” by Dr. Binoy Kampmark which called Harris’s assessment “unpardonably inaccurate.” Kampmark recognizes the shallow cynicism of this, which amounts to little more than a “land acknowledgement” statement, writing,
“It was a spectacular example of a non-event, alloyed by pure symbolism and cynicism. Here was a British government offering – how generous of them – to return sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, whose residents had been brutally displaced between 1965 to 1973, to Mauritius.”
Meanwhile, speaking of cynicism, my new friend Kunley Drukpa could only mock his country’s ruling class giving away their once-great empire’s few remaining rocks:
It must be mentioned that the Labour Party was immediately put on the defensive about Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands, their two main remaining territories that are subject to longstanding disputes, insisting that those territories are not at risk and are “non-negotiable,” just like the British Indian Ocean Territory was five years ago. For my part, I would like to start pressing the United States’ claim to the Falklands now, before these idiots pay the Argies to take them. According to Edmund Burke, it was our whalers who established human presence on the Falklands in the first place, which is much stronger than Argentina’s claim of never having had anything to do with those islands. He wrote, “Falkland Island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting place in the progress of their victorious industry” [Speech on Conciliation with America.] It certainly seems that maintaining them is too remote and romantic for what constitutes Britain’s national ambition now.
What, then, of the Chagossians? Well, no one really cares, something at least some of them have noticed as they were yet again absent from negotiations about their erstwhile home:
This all reminds me of an episode where Barack Obama classified some Federal land as sacred to American Indians and thus not available for economic use but then didn’t actually give it back to the Indians [Trump reversed the decision a few years later and as ever the media acted like this took us back to 1950.]
Even if the Chagossians could return to the northern islands, it is not clear how they could survive on those specks of land. It needs to be noted that though I’m sure they grew to love fishing and canoeing around the lagoon, the Chagossians are not seafaring people: they were dropped off to work coconut plantations and were always at the mercy of people with ships. Really, only Maldivian property developers or Polynesians know how to make any good use of these spits of land, and similar atolls in the Maldives are able to function because they are all close to each other. Mauritius is a nation primarily of one island, which is small compared to most places but has over 30x the landmass of Chagos Islands, which add up to 23 square miles including Diego Garcia, containing around half the dry land of Chagos. There is no reason to believe Mauritius has the skills or resources to make these islands a viable place to live, though perhaps they can make something of the fishing and mineral rights that Britain has not seen it fit to exploit: if this pristine marine environment is filled with commercial fishing ships and oil platforms it will all have been worth it.
Further, Chagossians have been displaced for 60 years, and thus anyone with meaningful island survival skills is in no position to move back and reclaim their old villages from the coconut trees, build new homes, restart their farms, and raise new livestock. If they are returned to the islands either it will cost someone a massive amount of money to settle them or they will basically be marooned and many will die. This diaspora is said to be around 10,000 people now, far more than the islands ever supported. Really, the only obvious economic use of these islands is to lease them out to to film seasons of the show Survivor, which could be surprisingly lucrative being as there are versions of that show made by countries all over the world and this would probably be the first time a new location has opened in 20 years [at the same time, an island completely overgrown by coconuts probably doesn’t make that compelling of survival television.] This whole premise of resettling the Chagossians is seemingly a non-starter, and it doesn’t appear Mauritius intends to give them any sort of tribal ownership where they can collectively profit off of the islands without living on them. In short, concern about the Chagossians is entirely performative.
While the displacement of the Chagossians is considered one of the most shameful episodes of Britain’s late imperial history, the cession of Chagos is perhaps the most shameful episode of Britain’s post-imperial history for entirely different reasons. The displacement was sinful, the cession is just pathetic. I often think of Montesquieu’s description of how in the late empire the Romans began paying people from whom they used to collect tribute to not attack them, but this takes it to the next level because Mauritius is absolutely no sort of threat and “International Law” wasn’t putting meaningful pressure on the United Kingdom. I’m most of all struck by how meaningless this is. It is the archetypal “virtue signal.” I would be happy to see the Chagossians get their home back and I don’t care about the US ability to project power in the Indian Ocean, but this situation is ridiculous. It doesn’t help the victims or actually reduce imperialism, it is just public groveling to create the obvious fiction of being on “the right side of history.”
In 2024, Keir Starmer’s Britain not only couldn’t resist the pressure of the tiny, vacation island nation of Mauritius kindly asking them to forfeit the Chagos Islands, they paid Mauritius for the pleasure of being allowed to surrender. I rarely use my favorite catch phrase in my writing, but history truly is a farce this time.
Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles are free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. I am a regular contributor at The Libertarian Institute. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.
I should note for readers, I got the advice from a journalist whom I respect that I was using way too many links and it is distracting. I had taken a very "more is better" approach to this, even though I know no one clicks on them [I can see that in the back end.] I decided to try and keep them to mostly either things being quoted, documents, figures, or things more difficult to find etc, and not include links for things which are easily verifiable by googling a few of the sentences main words.
I suppose let me know what you think, as a long time Raimondo reader it was easy for me to easily get addicted to linking constantly, which wastes quite a lot of my time anyhow.
also I'm finally trying to shorten my paragraphs, which everyone says to do, though I kind of hate some of them not being "complete" paragraphs like they teach you to do in school.
I guess on both points if you found the change noticeable let me know what you think lol
Starmer's virtue signaling while supporting the ongoing genocide in Palestine is pathetic. It reminds me of woke culture, the focus on a small enough issue to look righteous. Thank you for the unexpected insights into the history of Diego Garcia.