{"id":184100,"date":"2024-11-28T08:41:07","date_gmt":"2024-11-28T08:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/28\/david-lammy-plays-down-criticism-of-chagos-islands-deal\/"},"modified":"2024-11-28T08:41:08","modified_gmt":"2024-11-28T08:41:08","slug":"david-lammy-plays-down-criticism-of-chagos-islands-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/28\/david-lammy-plays-down-criticism-of-chagos-islands-deal\/","title":{"rendered":"David Lammy plays down criticism of Chagos Islands deal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy has played down criticism from the new Mauritian prime minister and the incoming Trump administration of a deal to cede control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.<\/p>\n

Under the agreement, which has still to be signed, the UK would relinquish sovereignty over the archipelago but maintain a 99-year lease over Diego Garcia, home to a major UK-US military airbase.<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Navinchandra Ramgoolam, elected two weeks ago<\/a>, has voiced severe doubts over the agreement.<\/p>\n

Reform UK leader and Trump ally Nigel Farage told BBC Newsnight it would damage Sir Keir Starmer’s relations with the US president-elect.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The deal is still subject to the finalisation of a treaty.<\/p>\n

Lammy told the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee it was a “good deal” and that it addressed US concerns about the future of the military base on Diego Garcia.<\/p>\n

“I’m very, very confident that this is a deal that the Mauritians will see, in a cross-party sense, as a good deal for them,” Lammy said.<\/p>\n

Ramgoolam expressed doubts about the agreement after meeting Jonathan Powell, the UK’s national security adviser, on Monday.<\/p>\n

Marco Rubio, Trump\u2019s pick for secretary of state, said in October that the deal posed a “serious threat” to US national security by giving the islands to a country allied with China.<\/p>\n

Lammy said: “This is incredibly sad. I know and I’m sad that there’s been so much politicking about this.”<\/p>\n

He said the agreement was a “very good deal” for “our national security” because it secured the legal basis of the Diego Garcia military base.<\/p>\n

“I’m really reassured about that, and I think an incoming [US] administration will be reassured about that, and I’m confident that the Mauritians are still sure about that, despite politicking that we all know goes on,” Lammy added.<\/p>\n

Speaking to BBC Newsnight<\/a>, Farage said the incoming Trump government was “horrified” by the prospect of the deal the UK government had struck “because they know China has extraordinary naval ambitions”. <\/p>\n

If the treaty were signed, he added, it would “be a terrible mistake, it would damage very badly our relationship not just with Donald Trump but with America as a whole and make getting any deal on tariffs that much harder”.<\/p>\n

Newsnight political editor Nicholas Watt said he had spoken to a government minister at the heart of the deal who rejected claims that there were doubts over the agreement.<\/p>\n

“This deal is fine, we are complying with international law,” the minister told him.<\/p>\n

Discussing the agreement in the context of current global tensions, Times columnist Matthew Syed told Newsnight: \u201cI think we\u2019re moving closer, potentially, to a major war between the big powers.<\/p>\n

“We have proxy wars happening in Europe and in the Middle East and there could be a blockade by China on Taiwan. Military leaders say this is a strategically absolutely crucial part of the world and China’s leading an ever more cohesive axis including Iran, Russia and North Korea.”<\/p>\n

Europe, he argued, had been “free-riding” on US defence spending. “We have to be realistic that in that context, with our denuded defence capacity, it is absolutely crucial that we stand with America.”<\/p>\n

Details of the treaty’s legal text are being worked out and it is expected to go before Parliament for scrutiny next year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy has played down criticism from the new Mauritian prime minister and the incoming Trump administration of a deal to cede control of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Under the agreement, which has still to be signed, the UK would relinquish sovereignty over the archipelago but maintain a 99-year lease over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/ichef.bbci.co.uk\/news\/1024\/branded_news\/a39d\/live\/6574bfc0-ad25-11ef-8ab9-9192db313061.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[603],"tags":[81354,4762,564,2294,9408,26189,9238],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184100"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184100"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":184102,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184100\/revisions\/184102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}