Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Debate between Lord Hannan of Kingsclere and Lord Beamish

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I will not detain the Committee for long, but I want to speak briefly to Amendments 20D, 20E and 20F from my noble friend Lord Kempsell and to Amendment 87 from my noble friend Lady Goldie. We have witnessed in recent decades an extraordinary alchemy in the South China Sea. Whole islands are called from the vasty deep, summoned like Brigadoon into existence, not by prayer but by the imperatives of Chinese geopolitics. Reefs are dredged into runways; lagoons are refashioned into naval installations; artificial islands are planted thickly with radar, missile systems and airstrips, and it is all done in the name of installing civilian infrastructure. None of those installations or airstrips is openly avowed as a military unit, so, when we hear that in this treaty there is an effective British veto for any kind of defence installation, I ask noble Lords to consider that no one is going to call it a defence installation. It is going to be done subtly, little by little, and it is going to be a much tougher proposition suddenly to object when we feel that a line has been crossed than at present when we have the unquestioned sovereignty over the entirety of the archipelago.

I did not want to misquote the US Secretary of State, so just after my exchange with the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, I looked up what he said on taking office. In November of last year, he said that the deal

“poses a serious threat to our national security”.

Obviously, he has changed his tune; people are entitled to change their minds. I just invite noble Lords to ask why he might have changed his mind. Is it that he saw a blinding figure on the road to Damascus and heard a voice saying, “Go into Damascus”—I think Marco Rubio has changed his religion at least twice, so I mean no disrespect to our most important ally. Or is it not more likely that he has been worked on by this Government’s officials?

[Lord Beamish (Lab)]

Could it not also be that when he came into office, he had not received the security briefings from his own intelligence services and possibly then he saw the importance of getting this deal and the permanency which it gives to both us and the United States?

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

It is a very good point. I think there is a divergence, exactly as in this country, between the permanent apparat and the rest of the country, which would explain why my noble friend Lord Kempsell and the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, are speaking to very different sets of people. As the German ambassador to London in 1914 said to his French counterpart, “You have your information, we have ours”. It seems that there is at least a debate in the United States about this, and you can see why. As my noble friend Lord Bellingham said, there is a real prospect down the line that a future Mauritian Government may take a very different attitude towards the presence in the outer atolls of powers that are unfriendly to us. We have no assurance that we will always be on friendly terms with that republic.

The world is imperfect, I understand that. The world is sublunary. We are dealing with lesser evils, as is usually the case in politics. But when the Minister has justified this treaty and the treatment of the Chagossians, she has always done so by saying, “Our priority was the security of the base”. I just ask noble Lords on all sides to consider how this makes us more secure in an imperfect world than we are at present. We have obvious sovereignty over the entire region at the moment. We have the great advantage of its isolation. There is no prospect of anybody taking a leased island and putting any kind of listening infrastructure or anything else nearby. How does moving from where we are now to what is proposed in this treaty make us more secure, even if we set aside all the wrongs being done to the Brits of Chagossian origin?

I thought the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, was on to something when he asked, “What if the Americans were to change sides?” But I am not sure that quite makes the point he intended. I just invite noble Lords to consider the wholly pecuniary terms in which Mauritius has considered this territory: not as part of its own demos, not as part of its own nation, but as an investment and a way of raising money—of paving its streets with gold, as my noble friend said earlier. Would it not be the ultimate humiliation if Mauritius were to trouser the sum of money that we are now paying it and then to turn around and sell the base to the United States? Where would that leave this Government? I would love to hear the Minister’s reply.