Alex Brookes is Conservative Friends of Overseas Territories Director of External Affairs and Engagement. Callum Murphy is Conservative Friends of Overseas Territories Director of Campaigns.
The House of Commons will once again consider the Chagos Bill – after it suffered heavy defeats in the House of Lords. Those defeats were well-deserved. This legislation is not a gesture of reconciliation or justice. It is an act of strategic self-harm, moral confusion and bureaucratic legalism that compounds the original wrong done to the Chagossian people while actively damaging Britain’s national interest.
Donald Trump’s comments today on Chagos, tariffs and Greenland underline a shifting global reality. As major powers reassert sovereignty and strategic control, Labour is pursuing a policy that treats the voluntary surrender of territory as a moral good, an assumption increasingly out of step with the world as it is.
The original removal of the Chagossians from their homeland was a grave injustice. Conservatives have long acknowledged this, and many of us have spent years campaigning for recognition, compensation and the right of return where feasible. What makes Labour’s approach so objectionable is that it invokes the language of human rights while actively excluding the very people whose rights were violated.
Under Labour’s proposals, Britain would surrender sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory, commit vast sums of taxpayers’ money, and leave Diego Garcia – one of the world’s most strategically vital military bases – in permanent uncertainty. The Chagossians are neither consulted nor empowered; their history is being used as a rhetorical shield to justify a policy driven by elite legal consensus and international virtue-signalling.
It is hard to think of another example in modern British history where a government has chosen to give up sovereign territory and pay billions to do so. As the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Priti Patel, has argued, Labour have attached a huge price tag to a deal that actively undermines British interests – all in order to signal virtue to a narrow internationalist audience.
Diego Garcia is not an abstract colonial relic. It is a cornerstone of Western security architecture, central to UK-US defence cooperation, and a stabilising presence in an increasingly contested Indo-Pacific. At a time when authoritarian powers are expanding their influence and reshaping global norms, Labour’s instinct is to unilaterally disarm – not militarily, but politically and legally.
This is not realism. It is retreat dressed up as moral progress.
To understand why Labour is doing this, we need to look beyond the stated justifications and examine the worldview at work.
This is a government obsessed with human rights litigation, international tribunals and the approval of a global legal class that Britain once helped to create but which no longer reflects geopolitical reality. While the rest of the world has moved on – asserting sovereignty, securing borders and defending strategic assets – Labour remains stuck in the late-1990s mindset of post-national governance.
They dash from one international forum to another, surrendering authority and apologising for Britain’s existence, convinced that compliance will be rewarded with moral legitimacy. It will not.
The Chagos Bill is less about the islands themselves and more about signalling fidelity to the human rights apparat: the lawyers, NGOs and supranational institutions for whom Britain’s continued sovereignty is an inconvenience to be litigated away.
The great irony is that this approach does not heal the injustice done to the Chagossians – it compounds it. Their voices have been ignored, their right to self-determination sidelined, and their homeland offered to Mauritius without meaningful consultation.
Instead of restoring agency to the Chagossian people, Labour is transferring authority to a foreign government while locking in arrangements that make meaningful resettlement harder, not easier. Instead of prioritising the descendants of those forcibly removed, Labour prioritises the demands of international courts that have no responsibility for the islands’ future.
Chagossian campaigners have expressed that they feel “stabbed in the back” by the UK Government and that their voices have been consistently ignored. The amendment requiring consultative input from Chagossians on how the treaty is implemented does not resolve this injustice, but it does validate a core criticism: the Government has rushed an agreement that fundamentally sidelines the people most affected by it.
The result is a moral sleight of hand: Britain absolves itself symbolically while ensuring that the Chagossians remain marginal to decisions about their own homeland.
It has also become increasingly clear that the treaty’s environmental safeguards are minimal to non-existent. The proposed Mauritian MPA would be a significant downgrade from the UK’s notake reserve: much of it would allow fishing and resource extraction, undermining the very protections that make Chagos ecologically unique.
In effect, the treaty abolishes one of the most robust marine sanctuaries in the world with zero guarantees that a replacement regime will be equally protective – and no mechanism for the UK to withhold payments or take remedial action if Mauritius weakens conservation. Failing to secure enforceable environmental safeguards before ceding sovereignty is reckless at best and negligent at worst.
The Government’s narrative on the Bill has shifted repeatedly: first insisting it had “no choice” but to hand over the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) to Mauritius; then claiming it was vital to secure the future of the Diego Garcia base; and more recently framing the treaty as a demonstration of responsible decolonisation, all while refusing to justify the long-term consequences to Parliament or the British people.
This does not exist in isolation. It is part of a wider pattern: hostility to Overseas Territories, indifference to strategic geography, and a reflexive assumption that British sovereignty is something to be justified rather than defended.
Labour’s approach consistently elevates international process over practical stewardship. The same is true here. Rather than governing, Labour is outsourcing responsibility – and congratulating itself for doing so. If the UK signals that territorial control can be ceded to satisfy international tribunals and diplomatic pressure, it undermines the position of other Overseas Territories, from the British Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia and the people’s wishes in the Falklands to Gibraltar. Security should remain paramount. Sovereignty should not be negotiable. It is the foundation upon which the UK protects both its strategic interests and the rights of its citizens abroad.
Conservatives must be clear: recognising historic injustice does not require surrendering sovereignty, undermining security, or excluding affected communities. A serious approach would place the Chagossians at the centre of policy, not use them as a moral alibi.
That means proper consultation, meaningful compensation, support for return where possible, and long-term guarantees over Diego Garcia’s strategic role. It means standing up for Britain’s Overseas Territories, not treating them as liabilities to be traded away for applause in international courtrooms.
If Starmer thinks, rightly, that Greenlanders should decide their own future, then surely the same should apply to the Chagossians. Such blatant double standards do not sit easily with his current statements on the right of self-determination.
The Lords were right to push back. The Commons should now do the same.
If Labour insists on pursuing this Bill, it will go down as one of the most shameful episodes of strategic self-harm in recent British history: an act of surrender that satisfies lawyers, alienates allies, and leaves the Chagossians no closer to justice than before.
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