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.
Councillor Duncan Crow, Leader of Crawley Borough Council Conservative Group
22nd January 2025