Time to scrap Labour's shoddy Chagos Islands deal with Mauritius

 

A trait I’ve noticed in the Labour Government since they’ve been in office is not admitting mistakes when they’ve been made. The longer this continues while making an ever-increasing number of mistakes, the more unsustainable this attitude will be, and ultimately the greater the political consequences.

A prime example of this shoddy attitude is how the Labour Government have behaved over the Chagos Islands. They have been acting with incredible naivety when it comes to global security, with their determination to hand over sovereignty to Mauritius, while simultaneously ignoring the concerns of the Chagossian people.

It has been no secret that the Labour Government were trying to get the deal signed and that they wanted to ‘wash their hands’ of the Chagos Islands before the change in US Administration this week. Thankfully it appears they failed in that, but we should never be in a position where we need the Administration of a US President who has a track record of acting on personal whims and grievances, to stop a British Government from making a monumentally bad international decision.

Keir Starmer seems unable to get out of his lefty lawyer mindset, that he had during his career before politics. Not only that, but his clique of fellow lefty lawyers also appears to be having undue influence. It is apparently one of his chums who has been acting on behalf of the Mauritius Government during the negotiations, very much against the interests of our own country. It’s also emerged that the Government’s Attorney General represented a group of asylum seekers who landed on Diego Garcia, against the British Conservative Government in 2023. He lost that case but guess what, now that Starmer is PM, those asylum seekers have been flown thousands of miles to come here to the UK as a ‘special case’.

We will see what happens, but what really needs to happen is the UK Government to tell Mauritius there is no deal, and then seek to address the historical wrongs that a previous Labour Government did, when they forcibly removed Chagossian people from their homeland in the 1960s.  

The Chagos Islands deal must be stopped

 

I was staggered when a few weeks ago, the Labour Government suddenly announced it was going to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands (also known as the British Indian Ocean Territory) to Mauritius - a small island nation that is 1,300 miles away from the Chagos Islands. That distance is the same as from London to Malta.

If enacted, this terrible decision will be permanent and the ability of the UK to make future decisions about the islands will be lost forever. We know there is a historical injustice in what happened to the Chagos islanders in the 1960s, when they were forcibly removed by the then Labour Government. What must not happen now, is a new and second injustice, where the Chagossian people can never have any say about the future of the islands. Disgracefully, that is exactly what will happen under this shoddy deal.

With Crawley being home to largest number of Chagossian people in the UK, it is right that we make a stand here and implore the UK Government to have a change of heart. In seeking to positively influence the government, I have tabled a motion for the Full Council meeting of Crawley Borough Council, that takes place on Wednesday 11 December at Crawley Town Hall. This meeting will be broadcast live on YouTube. 

This motion is intentionally worded in a non-political way, so that all of Crawley’s Councillors can unite behind it. I have the support of all my Conservative colleagues, and I will be genuinely reaching out to Crawley’s Labour Councillors, whose support will be needed for the Council to adopt this motion. 

Our motion reads: “As the UK local authority with the largest number of residents of Chagossian descent, Crawley Borough Council states its strong opposition to the recent UK government announcement to hand sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius.”

“In doing so, Crawley Borough Council calls upon the UK government to reverse its decision, and to ensure that local representatives of the Chagossian community are fully involved in all discussions relating to the future of the Chagos Islands.”

Our Countryside and our Farmers matter!

 

While living in an urban town most of my life, I have previously lived in a rural area and recognise the huge importance of the countryside to our national life. Both urban and rural living have pluses and minuses, but both are needed to sustain the other in today’s world. 

The governing Labour Party are an urban-based party and have little understanding of the countryside. In the same way that none of the Labour Government’s Cabinet have no real experience of working in business, the vast majority if not all of them (I would expect) don’t represent any predominately rural constituencies. 

This matters because this lack of understanding of the countryside is leading to bad policy decisions. Our countryside is under attack from Labour politicians who don’t understand it. The government are planning a huge concreating over of much of our countryside to accommodate record population growth, rather than address the issues contributing to it. Make no mistake, the west of Ifield proposals are nailed-on to happen under Labour.  

Then there’s farming. Our food security is important and the Covid pandemic and its aftermath, showed we can’t always take having all types of food readily available for granted. We already import between 42% and 50% of all the food we consume, which doesn’t feel very environmentally friendly. This makes us very vulnerable to future unforeseen global events.

Our farmers not only feed us, they play a huge role in managing and looking after the countryside, and a significant national economic role, being the backbone of the rural economy. We need to produce more food domestically, not less. The Labour Government’s attack on farmers is wrong. A farmer’s life is not easy and has many challenges, but the ability to pass on the family farm to the next generation is what makes a lifetime of hard work rewarding. Labour’s budget changes to inheritance tax will force farmers to sell off land to pay new huge tax bills. This could be the ending of the British family farm as we know it. It’s wrong and I stand in solidarity with our farmers.