Broadly speaking, there are two responses to Keir Starmer’s surrender of the Chagos Islands. The first is indignation. This is sovereign British territory and yet the Prime Minister has handed it over to a foreign country. The constitutional scholar Yuan Yi Zhu asserts that this decision ‘cannot be defended on any authoritative legal grounds’, and nor does it make much political sense. In exchange for being gifted territory that has never been under its sovereignty, the Republic of Mauritius has agreed to lease the Diego Garcia military base to the UK for the modest sum of £101 million a year for the next 99 years. The UK government has arranged for Britain to lose land and gain a landlord. Starmer wouldn’t be the first prime minister to sell out his country, but he might very well be the first to pay a foreign power to take part of his country off his hands.
Which brings us to the other response: why do you care? This is a common tactic from progressives when they adopt a position out of negative partisanship and are unwilling or unable to defend it intellectually. Why
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