The incoming Trump is administration is openly hostile to the UK government’s push to give away a key strategic island in the Indian ocean, the Labour minister fending off criticism by repeatedly emphasising the Biden White House likes it, which apparently makes everything alright.
Brexit leader Nigel Farage MP was granted an urgent question in Britain’s House of Commons, the main legislating chamber, on Wednesday afternoon on the shock announcement last month that the UK government was giving away the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) to Mauritius. The question is of major interest to the United States and the wider Western intelligence and defence community given one of the U.S. military’s most strategic bases is on the largest of the BIOT islands, Diego Garcia.
Leveraging his closeness to the incoming Trump administration, something he can uniquely claim among perhaps every member of the 650-seat house, Farage made clear his understanding that the new Trump White House would not take kindly to the treaty to hand over the islands in return for assurances from Mauritus that the UK and U.S. could keep their base there and that other islands wouldn’t then be handed over to adversaries like China being signed.
Mr Farage told the chamber: “I warned the Foreign Secretary six weeks ago in this chamber that it was an enormous mistake to do this given that we had a U.S. Presidential election coming up on November 5th.
“If you say to me ‘it’s OK, the United States are fully in favour’ — really? I can tell you the incoming national security advisor has form on this… I can assure you, having been in America last week, knowing also the incoming Defence Secretary very well, there is outright hostility to this deal.”
Pushing through with the deal would put the UK into conflict with its most consequential ally, Farage warned, further stating: “Diego Garcia was described to me by a senior Trump advisor as ‘the most important island on the planet’ as far as America was concerned. So you’re going to find outright hostility… There is no basis for this agreement to continue as it is, and if you do you’ll be at conflict with a country without which we would be defenceless.”
Indeed, Trump National Security Advisor pick Mike Waltz has already described the UK giving away BIOT as an invitation to China to “take advantage” and akin to Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Illustrating Britain’s left wing government’s polar-opposite approach Sir Keir Starmer’s newly-appointed Nasional Security Advisor is anti-Trump writer Jonathan Powell, a former top Tony Blair man who masterminded the BIOT handover deal.
Dismissing concern over the deal last month, Powell had said nobody should worry about losing the Islands which he described as being “very tiny islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where no one actually goes. We’re probably losing more to tidal erosion in the east coast”.
Farage’s party colleague Richard Tice buttressed the remarks, challenging the government to answer whether they would “try and force it upon our most important, strategic partner” once Trump was President once again, but his remarks were essentially dismissed.
Minister of State for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Stephen Doughty, who had been sent to bat away these questions generally did not engage with criticisms levelled, telling Mr Farage that “I’m afraid I fundamentally disagree with what the honourable gentleman has had to say”. On the position communicated by Farage on the feeling towards the UK giving away the land underneath a strategic U.S. base among the Trump team, Doughty laid out his view that it was merely borne of ignorance, and once the British government had a chance to explain the facts to Trump, he would come around to their point of view.
Doughty said: “I am sure they are being briefed on the full detail of this deal, and I am confident that the details of this arrangement will allay any concerns. We would have not entered into any such arrangement in the first place.”
Yet there were a few points to which he repeatedly returned, among them the fact the previous Conservative government had explored questions over BIOT with Mauritius, and that the Biden White House and the full “national security apparatus of the United States” liked the deal, a point from which no amount of counter-points on the fact that government is on the verge of vanishing would budge him.
Further, Doughty made repeated insistence — asserted several times in unambiguous language — through the debate that the Labour government had signed off on the deal, and therefore it had to be a good deal by definition: they wouldn’t have signed it otherwise. This astonishingly self-assured position did not seem to do much to assuage concerns, however.
The Labour minister did not only field questions from Reform UK, however. Former Tory Home Secretary Priti Patel pointed to the fact that just weeks after the UK-Mauritus deal to hand over the strategic islands was announced, the Mauritian government fought and decisively lost a national election, meaning the people with whom the deal had been signed were no longer in power anyway. She said: “the elections in Mauritius and the United States pose further questions… Labour rushed into this deal just before the Mauritian elections, even though the ministers surely must have realised a changing government was a strong possibility. Why did they do this?”.
Tory veteran on foreign affairs and much else besides Sir Iain Duncan Smith characterised the situation of Labour clinging onto an agreement with a Mauritian government that no longer exists with the agreement with a White House that’s about to go the same way as “a deal with the wrong people, at the wrong time, and for the wrong reasons”.
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