The credit for defeating Sir Keir Starmer’s Chagos surrender bill goes to its political opponents who waged a relentless and diligent campaign. They got almost zero help from a group that should have been even more against the bill than anyone: environmentalists.

When Starmer government suggested handing over the islands to Mauritius – a nation that had campaigned against the designation of the archipelago as one of the world’s largest marine protected areas (MPAs), had partly ruined its own coral reefs, and was proposing to allow ‘traditional’ fishing in the archipelago, possibly including European fleets – I expected howls of protest from environmentalists. Instead, silence.

I can find no direct statement from the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) regarding the 2024-2025 UK-Mauritius agreement on the Chagos Islands. ‘Sorry, but nothing matched your search terms,’ laments Oceana UK (‘Protecting the World’s Oceans’) when I search for ‘Chagos’ on their website. Much the same from Birdlife International. As for the Green party, it prefers mosques to reefs.

Where are greens when you finally need them? Anticolonialism trumps the environment even for them and conservationists fear loss of funding if they appear to take a side on Chagos

Where are greens when you finally need them? Anticolonialism trumps the environment even for them and conservationists fear loss of funding if they appear to take a side on Chagos

I turned to the Blue Marine Foundation, which led the campaign for designation of the MPA. ‘While concerns have been........

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