British Indian Ocean Territory

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House is opposed to the United Kingdom ceding sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory; believes that the United Kingdom should not give £34.7 billion to Mauritius when that money could be spent on the armed forces; further believes that the Diego Garcia British Military Base and Indian Ocean Territory Bill breaches the Exchange of notes constituting an agreement concerning the availability for defence purposes of the British Indian Ocean Territory, London, 30 December 1966 with the United States, as does the UK/Mauritius: Agreement concerning the Chagos Archipelago including Diego Garcia, and therefore that the Government should not proceed with the Bill; and also believes that Parliament must approve any changes to the 1966 Exchange of notes through the process set out under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010.

Labour’s £35 billion Chagos surrender deal is falling apart every single day. It is high time that the Prime Minister tore up this atrocious surrender treaty and put Britain’s interests, security, and hard-pressed taxpayers first. The Opposition have made that clear from day one, and have taken every opportunity to expose the deceit, falsehoods and foolishness of the approach taken by Labour. Whether it is on arguments of international law, defence and security, self-determination, the importance of the Chagossian people standing up for their rights, or the environment, it is the Conservatives who have been standing up for Britain’s national interests by unequivocally opposing this surrender treaty.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

Building on what my right hon. Friend is saying, is she not shocked that most Labour MPs cannot be bothered to turn up for this debate?

[Priti Patel]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I think it demonstrates their disdain and contempt for the British people, quite frankly. It is pretty obvious that as the Prime Minister and various other Ministers travel the globe, they go around waving the white flag of surrender. [Interruption.] Government Members can sit there chuntering, but the British public can see exactly what is going on with them: they are weak, feeble and giving away the public’s money.

Had the Prime Minister—[Interruption.] The Minister is chuntering about the start of the negotiations, but this deal is on him, the Labour Government, their lefty friends and their international law agreements. [Interruption.] Perhaps the Minister would like to listen; he might learn a few things today. Had the Prime Minister and his dear friend the Attorney General—[Interruption.] Perhaps the hon. Member would like to contribute to the debate, and will put her name down to speak. If not, I suggest that she sits and listens.

Had the Prime Minister, the Attorney General, and the real Foreign Secretary, Jonathan Powell—along with those who are or were Foreign Secretary in name only—got their way, the Mauritian flag would already be flying over the Chagos archipelago, and hundreds of millions of £35 billion of taxpayers’ money would already be lining the coffers of a foreign Government.

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[Dr Mullan]

My right hon. Friend highlights the lessons that the rest of the world will be drawing from this decision.

A submissive approach to third party calls on these issues displays an incredible naiveté about the world we live in and the direction we are travelling. Our previous positive disposition towards the role that these institutions could play was in a different era, when we expected a converging uniformity of basic values and democracy. That convergence is not happening; instead, our enemies are using our desire to stick to it as a weakness to exploit. They do not even recognise basic legal norms and institutions in their own countries; their own citizens do not benefit from legal protections and rights, and they do not believe in the rule of law full stop.

Do the Government really think that our enemies will put international legal obligations ahead of pursuing their own strategic interests? Of course not, yet we are expected to undertake a strategic surrender in the name of the rule of law in a way that advantages them, and on what basis—that they might look at what we have done and change their ways in the future, as they failed to do in Hong Kong? That is incredible naiveté.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

Does it not prove my hon. Friend’s point that despite being signatories to the World Trade Organisation, the Chinese continue to steal intellectual property?

[Dr Mullan]

It is not just the WTO; the Chinese are supposed to follow the jurisdiction of international maritime courts, for example. The Government point to that as a reason why we should comply with them, but the Chinese break those rulings all the time, as we discussed in relation to the South China sea. They could not care less; they are restrained only by their strict self-interest. They pretend and play up the idea that they might follow the rules—when it does not suit, they do not follow them—yet we are supposed to follow the rules, because the aim is to get the Chinese on side. That is never going to happen.

Let us look at the membership of the ICJ and the people who made the ruling. The vice-president was Xue Hanqin, who ruled that the UK should give the islands over to Mauritius. She is a former Chinese Communist party official who served as the director-general of the department of treaty and law in China’s foreign ministry—the same ministry that is overseeing the violation of the agreement in Hong Kong. It makes absolutely no sense to see it as a neutral arbiter. In 2022, she was one of two judges who voted against an ICJ ruling that Russia should suspend its invasion of Ukraine.

Would our country slavishly adhering to those rulings, against our own national interest, bring onside wavering countries that are making their own strategic calculations about who they want to support when it comes to challenges such as Ukraine and, if it happens, Taiwan? Of course it will not. The historical argument for that approach has been to suggest that we will bring other countries over to our way of doing things—the rules-based order—but I am afraid that that is not happening. Countries across the world are actually looking at which bloc and which sphere of influence would be best at defending their interests if they seek to align with it. This surrender deal will make it very clear that they should think twice about supporting the western democracies and instead point their finger towards the autocratic states that will benefit so enormously from the deal.

Surrendering the Chagos islands will simply strengthen those countries that want a more disorderly world. We should seek to use the rules-based order—we should not abandon that long-term goal, and we should continue to make it clear that that is our preference for how we run the world—but not with our eyes and ears closed to what is actually happening, and not at huge cost to our own interests. This is not diplomacy or pragmatism; it is weakness, and weakness has consequences. Britain is not just losing a territory; we are losing credibility. Our allies are watching as Labour surrenders key strategic ground without so much as a fight. Our adversaries are taking note and seeing a Government who lack the resolve to defend their own interests.

This deal is a sell-out and a catastrophic misjudgment, and it must not go ahead. I urge every Member of this House to stand firm for Britain’s interests, our national security and our place in the world. We must reject this reckless agreement and demand that our Government defend British sovereign territory, rather than bargaining it away behind closed doors.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

It is worth reflecting on the entire geopolitical situation that the world faces. Many treaties simply are not worth the paper that they are written on; if it suits our adversaries to ignore them, they will. Is not the old maxim, “To stop a war, be ready to fight a war”, more true today than it has ever been? If we decide that we are going to rely on pieces of paper, rather than the ability to say, “We will defend, at war if need be”, we weaken our position.

Let us consider the whole Indo-Pacific region. The NATO Parliamentary Assembly made a visit to Pacific command back in August. The admiral of the base made it crystal clear that in a very short space of time, the Americans would be outnumbered in the Pacific arena. Limiting what weapons can be used, when those weapons currently can be used, simply will not work. There has not been a satisfactory answer on whether nuclear weapons can be stored on Diego Garcia when it is under the authority of the Mauritians.

Despite the conversations about what Pete Hegseth said and what other treaties may have been negotiated along the way, we have the commander in chief, who outranks the US Secretary of State for Defence, saying, “I do not want to do this deal.” We have the deputy Prime Minister of Mauritius saying, “You will not be able to hold nuclear weapons there.” What makes Ministers so convinced that those leaders are wrong, and that they are right? That is the greatest and deepest concern.

We live in a world that is rapidly changing, not just in its disregard for the rules-based order, but in its energy demands. Those energy demands are shifting the geopolitical situation. Given where a lot of the materials that we need for renewables are, the focus is shifting more towards that hemisphere and away from the Gulf. The geopolitical positioning of the Chagos islands is therefore becoming more and more important.

It is absolutely right to say that our Government started negotiations, which went on and on, but that does not mean that there is a victory in ending them overnight by just giving way on the red lines that we would not cross. That is a very important point, because we should recognise the situation that we face, rather than crowing about some diplomatic “victory”.

Time and again, we see the Government kowtowing to Beijing, rather than standing up to it. We see that today. Where is the strategic plan? My right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) was exceptionally critical of the golden era of relations with China under David Cameron. The criticisms coming forward are not new; my right hon. Friend warned at the time of the security risks that China posed. The Prime Minister has signed off on the super-embassy, despite all the things we know about, and the things that we have seen in its blueprints, and for what reason? This seems to be almost—

[Sir Julian Lewis]

Pathological.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

Yes, pathological. There is this belief that the Chinese will always act in good faith, that we can trust them, and that they would not dare invade, because we signed a piece of paper. The world is changing, and there is no shame in pausing negotiations when changes come to light. The Minister should reflect on what is said today about how the situation has changed since his Government came to power, getting on for two years ago. The situation has changed incredibly.

[Tom Hayes]

rose—

[Sir Julian Lewis]

rose—

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

I give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

I have a helpful suggestion. I know that I cannot commit my party as a whole, but let me speak personally. If the Government change their position, I—and, I am sure, my right hon. Friend—will give a personal pledge never to accuse them of having done a U-turn on this matter. We will praise them to the skies, and we will not seek to take party political advantage of their belated acceptance of reality.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

That is a really important point. When the Government act in the national interest, changes in position should be welcomed.

We do not have the defence capability that we need, and it is worrying in the extreme to hear that the money for the Diego Garcia deal will come out of the defence budget. We hear people saying, “The defence budget went down under you; it was hollowed out,” and so on. It did go down, but the bit that is often missed is that that started during the cold war, and it continued through 13 years of Labour Government and across Europe. The Americans halved their defence budget over that time. However, the world is a different place now; Ukraine was invaded, and at that point, the world changed direction.

Let us consider for a moment two countries that have made incredibly significant U-turns, if you will: Germany, which has a new defence posture and will spend hundreds of billions on defence, and Japan. Both countries have very much drawn a line under the events of the second world war, and have recognised that the world has changed into a much more dangerous place and needs a much bigger posture.

[Tom Hayes]

The right hon. Gentleman has slightly taken forward the point that I was going to make. I take the point that we live in a more insecure time, and that this country has to respond to that. He has given the example of Germany; it is able to do what it is doing because its indebtedness has not risen as extraordinarily in recent years as ours. We are in deficit to the tune of £2.7 trillion, and we pay £105 million in debt interest repayments every year before we pay for anything else, so we are in a particularly difficult situation as a Government, and that is due to our inheritance.

However, the right hon. Gentleman’s thoughtful contribution is moving this debate into a more strategic conversation about the relationship of the UK to China. In my hand, I have an iPhone, designed in California and assembled in China. I assume that he has an iPhone, too—most people in this Chamber do. The point that I am making is that we have to figure out the relationship between our two countries. Economically decoupling so significantly could harm our quality of living, our trade balance and our investment opportunities, but we must also be mindful of the threat that China poses. What is the Conservative party’s posture on China?

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

The hon. Gentleman may have been tied up this morning trying to decide whether he backs Andy Burnham, but our leader has made our posture crystal clear today. When asked whether she would be going to Beijing now, she said that she would not, because there was no point in doing so until there was a proper plan about which strategic interests we would work on with colleagues in Beijing. I am afraid that I do not believe that there is much to celebrate in a trade deal with the Chinese worth £600 million; it barely seems worth the trip.

On debt, the hon. Gentleman has slightly forgotten something called a pandemic, which cost half a trillion pounds. He has forgotten Gordon Brown’s banking crisis, which also cost a half a trillion pounds, and he has forgotten that we have gone into a war in Europe that caused 11% inflation. We get a very interesting dichotomy from Government Members; they say, “Inflation was 11% under your Government, but it’s not our fault that inflation is going up; it’s because of the war in Ukraine.” They might want to marry those two sentences up.

[Dr Mullan]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that at every single point from 2010 onwards, all the Labour party has ever done is encourage us to spend more?

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

And it has put what it said into practice. It has raised £77 billion in taxes, but I cannot see great investments being made in defence. May I say that I do not like the idea of expressing the amount of GDP being spent on defence as a percentage? Somewhere along the line, NATO and its allies fell into the trap of thinking that we had to spend x% on defence; they say, “Well, we spent 5% of GDP on defence in the 1980s.” Yes, we did, because that was what it cost. That was not a target to get to. We should identify what we need, and then fund it, and see what that comes out as. If we do not properly defend ourselves, it may well not be possible to deliver the things that we say we want to fund.

That brings me back, before I go too far outside the lines, to the point of today’s debate. This is about a geopolitical situation, and about removing a key capability without a guarantee that we can have our nuclear deterrents. We have shown over decades that those nuclear deterrents help keep the peace. There are no SNP Members in the Chamber, but when they say, “We would never use Trident. We would never use a nuclear weapon,” they miss the point. It is not a nuclear weapon, but a nuclear deterrent. We have used it every single day since the day that the Resolution class was launched, and that has kept a semblance of peace and moved us away from war. I am deeply concerned that this debate seems to be more about what may be written on a piece of paper than what we actually have the capability to do today.

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[Dr Evans]

I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend, who has experience of running a Department. I find it all the more frustrating that Ministers cannot simply set out the difference between the two values when I as a Back Bencher can spot it and explain it. The question is which is the better tool and why.

Net present value has domestic use, and that is why the Office for National Statistics will not come out and say that there is a problem with it. It is a legitimate tool to use, but it is being used inappropriately when we are dealing with sovereignty. The assumptions that the Government are building their figure on are 3.5% for the first 30 years, but this is a 99-year lease. We do not even know what will happens with the other 70 years. If we compare with other countries, we see that the US uses a 7% social discount rate.

We are posing simple questions, doing our job on the Opposition Benches, trying to get answers from Ministers as to why we would use this net present value. When we take everything into account, if we use simply an inflation-adjusted amount, it is £10 billion. There are three figures out there that are all correct, but all stand to be used in a different way. The fact that a Minister repeatedly cannot answer those questions is of due concern to Opposition Members.

I will turn to the size of the environmental aspect. It has been pointed out multiple times that Mauritius does not have a navy or a force to protect the blue planet programme that is in place. Why am I concerned about that? We know that the 2015 UNCLOS tribunal was all about the fact that the UK wanted to put more protections in, but the Mauritians wanted fishing rights in the area—we already have history there—yet we would not have the Navy to enforce protections. It is a simple question for the Government to answer: how will they resolve that problem?

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that were this deal to go ahead, there will be a need for more Navy, which is expensive? At the end of the day, the increases to the defence budget that we are being told about will be used to pay for this ridiculous deal.

[Dr Evans]

Quite possibly. We already know that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has its blue planet programme to help to protect environmental areas that were, or are, under British control. Does this come under the FCDO budget as well? We still do not know the answers to these questions—very simple questions, which we have been asking for the past year.

On the matter of the Chagossians, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) raised a very simple principle. Again, I am confused by what the Government are saying. The Prime Minister himself has said that Greenlanders will decide for Greenland, yet Chagossians cannot decide for Chagos. I understand that there could be an argument one way or the other, but the Government apparently will not make it. They do not seem to see the illogical nature of what they are putting forward when they make a statement referring to sovereignty in one area, but make no statement that would apply to the case that we are discussing today.

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[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I will try to keep my words brief, because so much of this has already been laid out by my colleagues, although I see no reason why I cannot repeat it.

In essence, this whole thing falls on to a couple of stools, but there is an intervening issue. The hon. Member for Macclesfield (Tim Roca) and I have been to Ukraine together, and I have a very high regard for him. The Government ought to put him on their Front Bench as soon as possible, because he will make less of a mess of it than the others. [Interruption.] It was a compliment. Having been in government, I have to tell him that it was quite a compliment.

The hon. Gentleman talked, quite rightly, about ambiguity—sometimes determined ambiguity, and sometimes inadvertent ambiguity. What China is doing in the South China seas is against international law and has been condemned by the United Nations, absolutely and clearly. China has no right to that area, historic or otherwise, but the Chinese have ignored that, and are now putting defensive forts in the area. We have seen them threaten the Philippines, barge their boats out of the way and fire shots over them. The same goes for Vietnam. They are threatening Taiwan as well. All those countries lay a certain amount of claim to the area, but the Chinese have ignored that.

The one thing that the Chinese want to do is extend their position to the trade routes. If the Chinese Government could gain control of the east-west trade routes—which, strangely enough, flow right past the Chagos islands—that would be an absolute win for them. They would be able to choke the trade going from east to west whenever they wished to do so. People might say, “Well, they wouldn’t do that, would they?” Oh yes, they would. They are now talking about blockading Taiwan as part of that process.

I know that the hon. Gentleman is a realist, and on that basis I simply say that we need to look at the Chagos islands, and to look at this treaty, in the light of the threat to the free world from this unbelievably brutal but enormously growing power—a threat that is itself growing in plain sight. It is worth our reminding ourselves that the Chinese are building a navy that, as even United States experts accept, will outgrow US naval forces within two years. That is really important. Any one shipyard in China today builds more naval ships than the whole of the United States of America and probably Europe as well, and China has many naval shipyards.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

I spoke earlier about the naval problem, but China has also built an incredible number of intercontinental ballistic missile silos. It is hugely increasing its nuclear arsenal and refuses to come to the table for negotiations on non-proliferation treaties. Is this not the most ridiculous time to give up the certainty of being able to house nuclear weapons at a strategic site?

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I will come on to that, but my right hon. Friend is right. I just wanted to provide the background information on what the problem is. The problem is China. Remember that China supports Russia, so the very idea that a British citizen—Philippe Sands in this case, representing Mauritius—should actually negotiate with and talk to the Russians about how this would not make it difficult for them to hold on to Crimea strikes me as astounding. It is astonishing that a British citizen should even engage with them on this. That tells us that the nature of some of the people who are involved in this is questionable indeed.

The background, then, is “What is the threat?” It could be argued, I think, that the threat is now greater than it has been at any time since the second world war, and certainly since the end of the cold war. We are in a new environment, and that new environment requires us to understand the nature of our assets and how we would maximise those assets, not minimise them. My argument here is slightly different: we have taken the wrong decision over Chagos for the wrong reasons. If we had stepped back and then asked ourselves about this in 10, five or even two years’ time, when China is estimated to have a more powerful fleet in the Pacific than the United States can muster at any stage, would we really say that we ought to let the Chagos islands go and put them in the hands of Mauritius, which China lauds in almost every announcement that it makes and with which it has a very good relationship?