Trumps Latest Insults are a Disgrace.

[Omegstrat6]

We are giving it away to Mauritius, they have no historical claim on the islands. As I understand it, the islanders themselves do not want control to pass to Mauritius anyway. As far as the British government (a misnomer if ever there was one) is concerned, their prime responsibility is the defence of the Nation and retaining control of those islands is very much in the interests of this country; that is far more important than the opinions of the hand wringing lawyers such as Starmer and his craven crew.

Just quickly looked into the history of the islands Ketts as unsure myself.

The Portuguese "discovered" them in the 1500s but as they had little resources they felt they could use, largely ignored them. France was the first colonial power to take control of them in 1751 which they did alongside neighbouring Mauritius and they granted permits for companies to extract coconut oil on the islands. With the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Chagos islands then passed to Britain alongside Mauritius from where they were governed. The British established more coconut plantations across the islands, continuing to use imported slave labour. These slaves were not freed until 1840 and the descendants of these Afro-Indian-Malay slaves and later workers became the Chagossian islanders.

From 1903, Chagos was administered by Britain from the Seychelles as part of the Empire while Mauritius pushed for independence which was eventually granted in 1968. Part of the deal over independence however was that the UK would pay them £3 million in compensation for allowing Britain to retain the Chagos islands which they needed for the strategically important airbase there. The agreement also stated that the UK would return the islands to Mauritius if they were no longer needed for defence purposes.

Under pressure from the US, between 1967 and 1973, Britain helped them forcibly remove all the islanders from Chagos to Mauritius and the Seychelles to enable the building of the joint US/ UK military base of Diego Garcia. After independence, Mauritius refused to take further islanders forcibly expelled by Britain from the Chagos unless paid to do so, which the UK eventually agreed to do.

In 2016, the UK government still rejected the rights of expelled Chagossians to return to their islands after a 45 year dispute and so they took their case to the International Court of Justice which ruled in 2019 that the UK did not have sovereignty over the Chagos islands and that they should be handed over " as rapidly as possible" to Mauritius. The UN General Assembly subsequently backed that decision.

In 2024, negotiations between the UK and Mauritius saw the islands pass to Mauritius with the exception of Diego Garcia. Many Chagossians were happy with the deal but there were also those (who had moved to the UK or Seychelles rather than Mauritius) that were angered over not being consulted and wary that passing control back to Mauritius would not best represent their own interests either.

Whatever the history, it seems to me that the bottom line is that we retain control of the strategically important military base on Diego Garcia. That's surely the important thing in regards to our defence even if it costs us?