Sovereignty matters. Except when it doesn’t. And it doesn’t when another people’s sovereignty gets in the way of your nation’s needs. Then sovereignty (for any other country or people, at least) becomes so much dust blowing in the storm. It is something to which the peoples of the Chagos Islands and Gaza can attest.

Last year, Britain finalised an agreement to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, a shabby deal at the end of a sordid history of British rule. Much of the criticism of the deal is equally shabby.

Britain wrested the Chagos archipelago from French rule in 1814 and administered it from Mauritius, 1,300 miles away, another colony snatched from France. When Mauritius gained independence in 1968, Britain retained the Chagos Islands for itself, having already reconstituted them as a new colony – the “British Indian Ocean Territory”. “The primary objective,” according to a confidential government memo, was to ensure that “they could be used for the construction of defence facilities” – notably an American naval base on the island of Diego Garcia – and to “be able to clear it of its current population” without facing “political agitation”. Britain had, in the words of a Foreign Office lawyer, to “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos are not a permanent or semi-permanent population”, because otherwise their “democratic rights will have to be safeguarded”. By 1973, acceding to American demands, Britain had forced out all the Chagossians, who were banished to a wretched life of exile in Mauritius and Seychelles, with a sizeable number ending up in Britain.

Under a process begun by the Conservatives in 2022 and completed by Labour, Britain will now transfer sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius, except for Diego Garcia, home to the US military........

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