Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a friend of the British Overseas Territories. Can I say how delighted I am to hear the excellent speech from the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, because I, too, shall focus on MPAs at the end of my remarks?

We have to ask ourselves how we are now in the position of giving away a vital British Overseas Territory to a nation that has no legitimate claim to it—and paying it a fortune in the process. It simply comes down to the traditional role of our Foreign Office: always selling out British interests as we kowtow to hostile foreign states such as China while abandoning our friends and allies. Of course, the Foreign Office has a long history of this.

Last week, the Telegraph contained an obituary for Vice Admiral Sir Jonathan Tod, who flew more than 2,000 hours in 25 types of aircraft and commanded the aircraft carrier “Illustrious”. His talent was soon recognised and, in 1980, he was promoted early to captain and sent to the Cabinet Office. There, he headed the assessments team in analysing intelligence from central and South America.

In July 1981, Tod told the Joint Intelligence Committee that, if the Argentines were to conclude that there was no peaceful solution to the Malvinas question, they would be capable of mounting an invasion swiftly and with little warning. The Foreign Office absolutely rubbished that as scaremongering and the intelligence watch on the Argentines was scaled down, giving Argentina the signal that we did not care about the Falkland Islands. However, Tod stuck to his guns. In the October, he warned that the threats emanating from Argentina were not disinformation. Six months later, Argentina invaded; the rest is history.

Then we have Gibraltar. Again, the FCO tried to sell it out to Spain, with secret negotiations on shared sovereignty in 2001 and 2002. There was no reason for sharing sovereignty with Spain apart from the FCO wanting to kowtow to a foreign EU Government. Once the plan was in the open, of course, the Gibraltar Government organised a poll. Some 98.97% voted against the UK Government’s plan and wanted to stay with the UK—another FCO plan scuppered.

Now I come on to the Chagos Islands. These islands have been British since the end of the Napoleonic wars, long before Mauritius existed as an independent country. Nobody had ever lived in Mauritius until the Dutch brought in slaves, and then the French took over. No Mauritians ever landed on the Chagos Islands, some 2,000 kilometres away, to inhabit or claim them. Thus, Mauritius has never owned or controlled the islands; the Mauritian sovereignty claim is totally bogus and nothing more than a rewriting of history. France and the UK administered the Chagos Islands and Mauritius from Mauritius, but they were never owned by Mauritius.

Its false claim was strengthened by the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, the judicial arm of the thoroughly discredited United Nations in its usual anti-colonialism stance. I do not mean to offend noble Lords, but I say discredited because there has never been any UN condemnation of the genocide being perpetuated by Russia in Ukraine, nor in China with the Uyghurs, nor in Myanmar. When we come to the current genocide in new Sudan, which was debated about an hour ago in this Chamber, while US officials have explicitly declared that the RSF and associated militias have committed genocide, the UN as an organisation has generally used terms such as “risk of genocide” or “genocide could be occurring”. It is typical UN cop-out speech. The UN cannot denounce genocide, but it can denounce UK ownership of the Chagos Islands as colonialism. The ICJ’s so-called ruling was merely an advisory opinion from a political court, which in 2017 was involved in a grubby episode to remove the Security Council nominee judge who was British, the renowned Sir Christopher Greenwood, stack the court with more Asia-Pacific judges and reduce western influence.

If it is the Government’s case that we have to obey the ICJ in this case, will we have to obey it when it gives an advisory opinion on giving the Falklands to Argentina or on giving Gibraltar to Spain? The previous Government, of course, were negotiating and negotiating, but they had no intention to sell out. It is one thing starting negotiations but another to conclude them in a bare three months as Mr Lammy did.

We first need to look at why Labour did it. I think we need to look at the past behaviour of the Prime Minister. Before entering politics, Sir Keir Starmer was invited to a high-profile legal conference in 2013 hosted by the Mauritius Bar Association at the InterContinental hotel on the intriguingly named Balaclava beach. It was a gathering of international lawyers. While there, Sir Keir delivered a keynote speech. More notably, he used the visit as an opportunity to engage in discussions on the Chagos issue with Mauritian legal and political figures. He met the then Prime Minister, Navin Ramgoolam, who is now leading Mauritius’s negotiations over the islands and is back as Prime Minister. Ramgoolam later recalled their 2013 meeting as a moment of shared values and mutual understanding. Another prominent Mauritian lawyer and friend of Sir Keir Starmer, Satyajit Boolell, has stated that he “cleared things up” for him regarding the Chagos issue.

Thus, we have our new Prime Minister already keen to sell out to Mauritius, and then came along the new Foreign Secretary, David Lammy MP, not known to be the sharpest knife in the drawer and ripe for the FCO to con him into a sell-out. I can imagine what the FCO said to him at their first meeting: “Welcome, Minister. You have a unique opportunity to settle a long-running issue, which the last Government failed to do. We have an International Court of Justice ruling, and we must hand back the Chagos Islands to their rightful owner, Mauritius. You can get the credit where the last Government failed. They started negotiations, but they were unable to conclude them. Naturally, we will have to pay them a small amount to keep our lease on the military base at Diego Garcia, and that will keep the Americans happy. It is a win-win for you, Minister. We avoid condemnation from the UN, the Americans are content, and you will get the credit for a diplomatic success”. I challenge anyone to say that that description of what happened is not reasonably accurate in all probability.

The previous Government had started negotiations in November 2022 and were nowhere near an agreement after 11 rounds of negotiations by the general election in 2024. That is 18 months of negotiations, including six months led by my very able noble friend Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton. I have to hand it to Mr Lammy: he was a mere three months into the job and a new Foreign Secretary with no experience whatever, and yet he concluded the deal in a mere three months. No wonder the deal is so diabolically bad for the UK and the Chagossians.

We have surrendered a UK strategic asset to China, which is already talking to Mauritius about doing deals there. Which country will fund development in the Chagos Islands? It will be China, of course—possibly India too, but certainly China. If Mauritius wishes to exploit the archipelago economically, it will need to establish infrastructure on the islands, and the most likely investor for that is China. China will most likely build a huge military base on one of the other 70 islands, some of which have very shallow water around them. We have seen how China has illegally built massive military bases on sandbanks in the South China Sea. It would be a piece of cake to do likewise on one of the Chagos Islands.

I leave it to others to try to get to the bottom of the cost: £5 billion, £9 billion, £18 billion or £35 billion. Even £1 million is an outrageous sum to give to a foreign power with no rights whatever to the islands, along with our giving away our own territory.

I conclude on the environmental crime that we will soon see there when the marine protected area is destroyed, as it surely will be. Mauritius ranks very low globally in overall ecosystem vitality and biodiversity protection metrics, with fish stocks showing a decline. The Chagos Islands boast some of the world’s most pristine coral reefs and marine biodiversity, making their preservation critical not only for ecological reasons but for future scientific research on climate change adaptation and marine conservation.

In 2010, the UK Government established an MPA of approximately 640,000 square kilometres around the islands. This no-take zone is one of the world’s largest marine reserves and protects the Chagos Archipelago’s coral reefs, deep-sea habitats and wildlife. However, China’s distant ocean fishing fleet is ravaging and destroying our oceans, invading the Galápagos MPA. It is a constant battle to keep it out of our gigantic Pitcairn Islands MPA, the second largest in the world at 841,000 square kilometres. So when China does a deal with the Mauritius Government, now mired in corruption scandals, the MPA will be the first target for Chinese exploitation and destruction as China fishes it dry and destroys the coral reefs with bottom trawling. Four of the top 10 MPAs in the world are UK overseas territories, and we will have destroyed one of them.

I ask the Government: is there nothing you will not sell out in this grubby deal—the Chagossian people, our defence and security, the costs to our economy, the perception that we may sell out other overseas territories and now even our pristine marine environment? I pray that this appallingly bad Bill can be amended or stopped before it does more damage to our country.