‘MARK my words. It’ll be Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands next.”
This was the predictably doolally reaction from some self-styled British patriots to the news that the UK Government has finally agreed to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius last week.
People who couldn’t find these islands on a map have quickly acquired strong views on the topic. There have been immediate demands for “guarantees that no other British overseas territories would be signed away under Labour”, suggestions Sir Keir Starmer can’t be trusted not to “hand back” Northern Ireland to the Republic, and yet another outbreak of misplaced imperial nostalgia about defending Britain’s “place in the world”.
Last week, “Britain’s place in the world” meant keeping hold of all outlying islands which global demands for decolonisation in the 1960s didn’t manage to wrest from the British Empire. Brexit Britain seems particularly susceptible to the onset of this kind of acute psychic episode.
Former United States Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously observed in the 1960s that “Great Britain has lost an empire but has not yet found a role”. Not much seems to have changed. For some of the more easily triggered figures on the British right – they’re apparently still experiencing the process of losing the empire and are still smarting from the sense of political diminution it brings.
Allegations
One of the Conservative Party’s ugliest instincts is how freely they feel able to attack the patriotism of their opponents. And lo and behold, this was precisely the allegation immediately levelled at the Labour government by James Cleverly when the story broke, suggesting Starmer had reneged on his promise to be “patriotic”.
“Weak, weak, weak!” Cleverly thundered. That suggestion began to wilt in the sun minutes later, after alert people pointed out that the Tory leadership contender had himself kicked off the negotiations with Mauritius when he was Foreign Secretary in the last government.
But the rhetorical fire has proven catching. For Robert Jenrick, the decision was a “dangerous capitulation”. Suella Braverman dubbed it “a dark day for our country’s sovereignty” and characterised the David Lammy as “China’s useful idiot”. Boris........