Katie Lam: When it comes to spending on defence, the Chagos deal is all spending and no defending

Katie Lam is the MP for the Weald of Kent and a former advisor in Downing Street and the Home Office.

It is obvious to everyone that the “deal” the Prime Minister has done to give away the Chagos Islands is a miserable failure.

Many have rightly pointed out the appalling security risks from surrendering a key military strategic asset in the Indian Ocean to a close ally of China.

Or how mad it is to do this in response to an entirely advisory opinion issued by politicised judges in the International Court of Justice (the ICJ).

Or how outrageous it is that British Parliamentarians remain in the dark about the details and must hear them second-hand from Mauritian politicians.

Or that it beggars belief that as pensioners cannot heat their homes and family farms are taxed into oblivion, somehow the Government has decided to find billions of pounds it claims we don’t have to give to a corrupt regime to pay for something we already own.

President Trump has now indicated he is “inclined” to agree the new arrangement, presumably because he wishes for good relations with Britain, and has sensed how much the Prime Minister wants this. But this is our land. And we’re the ones set to foot the bill.

The US is right to demand the whole of Europe increase defence spending. But this deal is all spending, no defending. The money for the Mauritians looks likely to come from the uplift in the defence spending the Prime Minister has announced. At 0.2% this uplift was already insufficient; now it seems that billions of it will be spent paying an ally of China to use a base we already own.

This is ludicrous.

The obvious question one has to ask, then, is why? Why would any Prime Minister do something so self-destructive? It is blatantly not for the reason the Government gives. Anneliese Dodds – back when she was Minister of State for Development, since resigned – recently attempted to claim in the House of Commons there was, “clear risk to critical functions of [the] base on Diego Garcia because of legal jeopardy”. But she refused to tell us more. Despite repeated questions, we were left none the wiser as to what this risk is, where it comes from, or how likely it is.

In other words, it isn’t real.

People are right to say that this is partly about Keir Starmer’s commitment to the rule of lawyers, rather than the rule of (actual) law.  But there’s something else going on here, something more fundamental and sinister about how the Government feels about this country.

The Mauritians argued – and the International Court of Justice accepted – that giving away the Chagos Islands would be an act of “decolonisation”. This Government’s Attorney General has described “almost every element” of the British Empire as “deeply racist”. And just last Wednesday, we saw that one of the ICJ judges is also calling for £19 trillion to be paid by Britain in slavery reparations. That is every penny the UK government will spend for almost the next 15 years. It’s about seven years’ worth of GDP.

These sorts of arguments are as ahistorical as they are nonsensical. But it is this dangerous worldview, under which Britain is rendered forever shamed and humiliated by its supposedly terrible past, which motivates so many on the Government benches, and is so mercilessly and effectively exploited by our enemies.

Of course, our basic morality dictates that where Britain has done something wrong, we must acknowledge that.

But in the case of the ownership of the Chagos Islands, there was no original British sin – Mauritius does not have, and never has had, sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. Practically no Mauritian people have ever lived there. This should come as no surprise, since the two places are more than a thousand miles apart. The Chagos Islands have been under British sovereignty since 1814, before which they were occupied by the French, and before that they were entirely uninhabited. This is no “decolonisation”. It is, as Kemi Badenoch rightly says, a surrender.

The history of the British Empire is complex. It contains cruelties, yes, but also contributions to human health, wealth and flourishing around the world. We should be honest about both.

The conquest and loss of land through violent means has happened all over the globe from the beginning of civilisation until relatively recently. The British were hardly unique (although the size and breadth of the empire arguably was). It is ridiculous to brand all of this as ‘bad’ and seek to undo it.

It is also totally unworkable. Where would it end? The whole world is reallocated to the people who arrived there first, a sort of global Finders Keepers? Who would enforce that? Does that mean the Chagos Islands should, in fact, be given to the French? Or maybe in Lord Hermer’s next lecture we’ll learn nations should belong to those they have most wronged – so Germany should be given to the Jews, or Belgium to the Congolese, perhaps? This is clearly impossible.

The horrors of slavery and slave-trading are regrettably as old as organised human society and shamefully, Britain was no exception in participating. But we were exceptional in being among the first people in the history of the world to abolish both. And we went on, rightly and proudly, to do penance for slavery by spending resources – ships, money, political capital, and the lives of Royal Navy sailors – in fighting slavery across the globe for 150 years.

Our debts were awful, but they are paid.

Human history is an intricate tapestry whose individual threads cannot be unpicked. To attempt to right the wrongs – real or imagined – of the distant past through taxation of current citizens is divisive madness, and we will fight it.