Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Debate between Jim Allister and Luke Evans

Committee of the whole House
Monday 20th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dr Evans]

The Minister is nodding along, but there must be something wrong if the public and Opposition Members cannot simply understand the arguments for what is being put in place. We cannot see the wood for the trees. It is a Government’s duty to show those arguments, and I look forward to the Minister doing that in his response and putting these arguments to bed once and for all. Otherwise, the British public will not forgive him.

[Jim Allister (North Antrim) (TUV)]

I will primarily focus on new clause 8, which is in my name and the names of colleagues. First and foremost, this Bill is about perfecting the decolonisation of the British Indian Ocean Territory—that is self-evident in clause 2—but it does that in a way that ignores a primary component of decolonisation. We subscribe to United Nations resolution 1514. That resolution talks about respecting not only the integrity of territory, but self-determination. The British Indian Ocean Territory has existed, de facto and de jure, for over 50 years, yet the Government’s approach in justifying this completion of decolonisation is to focus solely on territorial integrity by claiming that the Chagos islands are, in fact, part of Mauritius.

Resolution 1514 contains a number of components. Its first point is that

“The subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights”.

Its second point is that

“All peoples have the right to self-determination”.

The question for this House is surely this: are the Chagossians a people? I certainly think that they are. They are distinct from the Mauritians by their ethnic background, by their religion and by geography. Mauritius and the Chagos islands are over 1,300 miles apart, approximately as far as it is from this House to north Africa, so after 50 years of the existence of the BIOT, it really is a stretch to say that the sole defining issue is that of territorial integrity. To say that is to ignore the right to self-determination.

This nation has dealt with decolonisation before, and we did not approach it on the basis that it is only about territorial integrity. Take the example of India. We decolonised in India, but we allowed it to be subject to self-determination—that is why we have India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It is quite clear that this is not a situation in which territorial integrity trumps everything else. It does not trump self-determination. An experience of decolonisation such as India’s shows that territorial integrity is secondary to self-determination, yet the right of the people who claim the Chagos islands as their homeland to any measure of self-determination is the one thing that has been utterly ignored in this process. We have in our history the shameful episode of their forceful removal from the Chagos islands, and now under this treaty, we are going to compound that shame by legitimising that removal. Saying that this is only about territorial integrity is to legitimise their forceful removal from the Chagos islands—that is how we get around the question of self-determination. That is wrong. The people of the Chagos islands are a people. They are a people with a homeland; therefore, under international law, they are a people with a right to self-determination, so why do this treaty and this Bill trash that right? That is the fundamental haunting question when it comes to the humanity and international legal requirements of the situation that prevails.

The Government are obviously holding to the line, “It is only about territorial integrity,” but they are hoisted by their own petard, because they have recognised the Chagossians as a people by setting aside some millions of pounds for them. They cannot say it is only about territorial integrity, and there is no people to whom to give the right to self-determination, and then say, “For those people to whom we deny the right to self-determination, here is some conscience money.” They cannot do that, yet that is what the treaty does.

The BIOT recognised the separateness of the people of the Chagos islands, and even the much-vaunted advisory judgment of the International Court of Justice gives respect and acknowledgment—to an extent—to the question of self-determination. At one point, the judgment states:

“It follows that any detachment by the administering Power of part of a non-self-governing territory, unless based on the freely expressed and genuine will of the people of the territory concerned, is contrary to the right to self-determination.”

Even that advisory judgment recognised the exception of the freely expressed and genuine will of the people, but that is what we have not had on this issue. This Government have gone out of their way to deny the free and genuine expression of opinion by the people whose homeland is the Chagos islands. That shameful indictment compounds what we did to those people at the end of the 1960s. The Government now totally dehumanise their human rights by saying, “You have no rights whatever when it comes to self-determination.” That is fundamentally wrong.

If the splitting of that wider colony in 1965 was illegitimate because there was no self-determination, according to the advisory judgment of the Court, then equally the Chagos islands rejoining Mauritius without self-determination is illegitimate. The Government cannot have it both ways, but that is what this Bill is seeking to do. The Government say that because it was illegitimate to split the Chagos islands off from Mauritius in 1965 because there was no self-determination, the Bill is about territorial integrity only, but if the basis of rejoining the Chagos islands to Mauritius is without self-determination, then that equally is illegitimate. Those are some of the points that this Government have not faced, and if they have faced them, they have not answered them. This House is legitimately asking those questions tonight, and waiting for answers. If those answers do not come, it will illustrate how this is the tawdry, unacceptable and unenforceable Bill that it will ultimately be seen to be.

Ambassador to the United States

Debate between Jim Allister and Luke Evans

Tuesday 16th September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jim Allister (North Antrim) (TUV)]

I want to use the few minutes that I have to focus on how it could be that, just last Wednesday, the Prime Minister of this country came to tell this House that he had “confidence” in Lord Mandelson, the friend of the paedophile, in his role as a key ambassador for the Government. The Prime Minister said that not once but twice, when the Leader of the Opposition rightly asked him, declaring:

“I have confidence in him”,

and

“I have confidence in the ambassador”.—[Official Report, 10 September 2025; Vol. 772, c. 860.]

Those were his ringing endorsements of Lord Mandelson.

I want to examine the circumstances that then prevailed when he said that he had confidence in Lord Mandelson. What is confidence? Confidence is having trust, faith and belief in someone. That is what the Prime Minister was telling this House in respect of Lord Mandelson last Wednesday, yet by Monday it was a matter of public knowledge that the Bloomberg emails had been published.

The Prime Minister has since made some startling claims. He said that when he was answering Prime Minister’s questions he knew that questions were being asked, but he knew only about media inquiries about the emails and that questions were being put to Lord Mandelson. Our Prime Minister is a King’s Counsel. The natural instinct of a lawyer is to interrogate, and the training of a lawyer is to equip them to interrogate. However, this House is being told that when the Prime Minister stood at the Dispatch Box and said “I have confidence” in Lord Mandelson, even though he knew that questions were being asked, he did not interrogate them for himself or ask about what was being asked. When he told the House that he knew that there were media inquiries about emails, we are being asked to believe that he did not ask, “What emails? What did they say?”

[Dr Luke Evans]

The hon. and learned Gentleman is making a fantastic speech. The Prime Minister said that he had “confidence in the ambassador”. He did not say “pending investigation or a suspension”, “I’ll look into it” or “I’ll follow process”, but “I have confidence.” Why does the hon. and learned Gentleman think that the Prime Minister did not say that he would look into the situation seriously, and instead said from the Dispatch Box specifically that he had “confidence”?

[Jim Allister]

That is the most troubling thing about this. Equipped with the knowledge that he inevitably had—Monday night’s publication, and the knowledge that questions had been asked and that there were media inquiries about the emails—the credibility of the House is stretched to be asked to believe that the Prime Minister, a trained lawyer, never interrogated any of that and never asked, “What emails? What did they say? What questions have we asked?” We are asked to believe that he came to the House blind to all of that.

Not only in the appointment of Lord Mandelson do we see serious flaws in the judgment of the Prime Minister. If it is truly the situation, that he came to the House with a limited but uninterrogated knowledge of these matters, then that raises further questions about his judgment. I fear that this House has many answers yet to receive. It is a matter of regret to me, as it is to other hon. Members, that the Prime Minister is not here today to answer those demanding, alarming yet simple questions: they are questions that go not only to the heart of the Prime Minister’s confidence in Lord Mandelson, but to the question of whether this House, and this people, can have confidence in the Prime Minister.