UK-Mauritius Agreement on the Chagos Archipelago

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Monday 30th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have listened to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Prentis, give an absolutely wonderful oration and to demonstrate how the one-in, one-out principle might usefully be applied on Wednesday.

A deal is not a deal until it is done. Regardless of what happened before July, we need to understand that Labour had a political choice: either put Britain’s national, financial and security interests first, or hold on to that naive but mistaken high-minded soft power illusion which the Government thought they had bought last summer by paying to give away the Chagos Islands.

How easy it must have seemed on those warm evenings last summer among the government opinion-formers, sipping prosecco and negronis in those north London townhouses—you know, the ones where they have knocked the breakfast room into the kitchen and put in American-style fridges and those step-free bifold doors out on to the terrace. After one too many, perhaps, they thought it was a rather good idea to pay to give up land and then ask for permission from our enemies to use it, having been kidded by their learned friends that international law required it, from a case in which the UK was not even a participant. They were craving approval from marine and maritime bodies that had no nexus over sovereignty and have no business pushing us around.

What we see here, and I thank the Library for pointing it out so clearly, is that the legal basis for giving up the Chagos Islands is not a judgment but an “advisory opinion”. The Government are playing by absurd rules that defy logic or common sense and are not even rules anyway.

I am not a property lawyer, but I know these simple truths: freehold is best; avoid restrictive covenants because the covenant holder can have you over a barrel; possession is only 9/10ths of the law; and when you transfer land to someone else, it is customary to be paid for it. In my career I have always ensured that lawyers are on hand but not on top. But not in this Government. Land and real estate are about selling a dream, but Labour’s lawyers have bought us a nightmare.

We have benefited for centuries from strategic land—on both sides of the Suez Canal; in Cyprus, as my noble friend Lord Bellingham reminded us; and the Chagos Islands—that support our soft trade and hard power. Giving up one side of the Suez would always be unwise in any circumstance, but who would have anticipated the wrong-headedness that has been exposed so quickly as we contemplate the Middle East tinderbox?

This deal generationally weakens us. It is an indefensible move from those in charge of our defences. Giving up land is bad enough; to not have been paid for it makes it worse. Worse still, this happened over the heads of the Chagossians; without their consent or consultation, their land has been taken and passed around as a chattel by a Prime Minister who claims to have their human rights as the golden thread that runs through his actions—what double standards.

In times like this, as my noble friend reminded us, paying billions to give away land so that another country can pay off its debts when we do not have enough money to give our pensioners the winter fuel allowance beggars belief.

Then there are the conditions and covenants. Sharing military secrets is bad enough, but the Library tells us that

“activities related to the military base will comply with international law”—

that old chestnut again. Can the Minister tell us when an “advisory opinion” became a statement of the international law, and who will determine the law when we do want to contemplate military actions at pace?

When the facts change, you need to alter your position. Boy, have the facts changed in the Middle East in the last few months. We must not ratify this deal. Let us be clear: the Government are acting as an enemy within and acting for those who are prepared to trade a mere “advisory opinion” into a legally binding treaty that will tie our hands on the flimsy pretext that we might avoid criticism from the usual suspects, including our enemies. It gives me no pleasure to say it, but if this deal gets done, history will show it was at this moment that Labour showed even more how out of touch it is.

In saloon bars up and down our nation, this is the moment when everybody will see that Labour’s values are not British values, because this deal weakens us—nationally, economically, financially and militarily—to please that nebulous cohort of judges and arbitrators in foreign lands who must think we have gone mad to swallow their advisory twaddle.

The noble Baroness, Lady Liddell, says that it is a good deal for the Mauritians, and she is right there. Labour has made a choice: to prefer the views of the prosecco wing of the party over those of the pie-and-a-proper-pint, common-sense socialists, who know a dud when they see one—and this is a dud.