The Chagos fiasco has exposed Labour’s legal cretinism

In October 2024, the then new Labour government announced that it was handing the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. It justified its decision on the grounds of an International Court of Justice ruling in 2019 advising the UK to do so. This, as UK attorney general Lord Hermer has it, showed that Labour is putting international law at ‘the heart’ of its foreign policy.

The deal that Keir Starmer has since struck over the handover of Chagos is an appalling one. Under its terms, Britain would give the territory to Mauritius and then pay £101million a year to lease back the joint US-UK military base on Diego Garcia, the largest of the islands. Diego Garcia’s remote location in the Indian Ocean has proven critical to US-UK foreign policy, aiding missions in the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific and Africa.

Moreover, Labour’s determination to follow international law, at the expense of Britain’s national interest, looks more foolish by the day. At a moment when world leaders and commentators are openly talking about the end of the so-called rules-based international order, Britain seems more willing than ever to blindly follow the rules – even when doing so makes no geopolitical sense at all.

Someone needs to tell prime minister Starmer that the world is not currently auditing who is complying with international law. And yet still he has agreed to surrender a major strategic asset in the name of that rules-based order, supposedly to avoid future ‘legal uncertainty’.

The UK government’s argument is that, as long as British ownership of the Chagos Islands is legally uncertain, the rights to continue using the military base on Diego Garcia are not secure in the long term. But you know what makes those rights less secure? Handing Chagos to Mauritius, a state aligned with China – and swapping actual sovereignty over the islands for an expensive tenancy agreement.

So how did we get into this mess? In the colonial era, the Chagos Islands were administered from Mauritius, despite being around 2,000km away. When Mauritius was granted independence in 1968, the UK retained control of the islands. Mauritius soon began campaigning for their ownership, with support from the United Nations. In 2017, the UN sought an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on whether the UK’s acquisition of Chagos had been lawful. In 2019, the ICJ concluded that it had not, on the basis that Mauritius’s pre-independence rulers were still dependent on the UK when an agreement was made in 1965 that Britain would keep Chagos.

That opinion was not binding. The ICJ has no power to force the UK to hand over the territory. But because Britain’s governing class sees itself as a global exemplar of rule-compliance, it opened negotiations to give Chagos to Mauritius – despite the military base on Diego Garcia being of enormous strategic importance to both the UK and the United States.

Now, in an ironic twist, the UK Conservative Party claims that international law actually prevents the surrender of the territory. Tory peers argue that passing the bill would place the UK in breach of a 1966 treaty with the US, which granted America extensive rights to use the islands for military purposes. Clause one of that agreement states that ‘the territory shall remain under United Kingdom sovereignty’. Returning Chagos, the Tories say, would therefore violate international law. As a result, Labour has postponed a House of Lords debate on the legislation designed to implement the Chagos deal.

The Tories’ argument is probably a weak one. Any judge interpreting the treaty would be forced to consider the context in which those words were included, and would almost certainly conclude that they were intended to reassure the UK that America’s military presence did not threaten Britain’s claim to Chagos, not to bind Britain to retain sovereignty over the islands indefinitely.

But that isn’t really the point. Neither the government nor the opposition should be making decisions of profound strategic importance on the basis of abstract legal reasoning. States have always interpreted and applied international law selectively in pursuit of their national interests. As even Canadian prime minister Mark Carney – himself the consummate globalist – admitted in his Davos speech this month, the international rules-based order has always been, at least in part, a convenient fiction.

To frame the Chagos question purely as a legal problem, as both Labour and the Tories are doing, is insane. It reflects the technocratic mindset that still governs Britain – one that treats geopolitics as an afterthought.

The strategic rivalry between the US and China is likely to define the next century. If Britain continues to subordinate its core interests to an international legal order that most serious global actors now regard as irrelevant, it is in danger of dooming itself to strategic irrelevance. What now happens to the Chagos Islands has become more important than ever.

Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author. His most recent book is Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, which is published by Zero Books. Order it here.