CONSERVATIVE Shadow Defence Minister Mark Francois has said that the government’s plan to handover the Chagos Islands to Mauritius is close to collapse.
He told GB News: “The whole thing is unraveling before our eyes. It’s been re-ignited by a social media post by a freelance journalist called Robert Midgley that went viral overnight, and what he does is he proves conclusively that there is no credible legal threat to our sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, as the government have been claiming for over a year. I’ll explain that in a second.
“So we don’t need to pay Mauritius £35 billion to rent back an island that belongs to us in the first place. We don’t need to pay anyone anything, because there is no legal threat.
“Now, ministers have kept changing their argument for what this threat was, that we have to pay 35 billion quid to avoid. First they said it was because of an advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice, a UN court. Well, point one, that’s an advisory ruling. It’s not binding.
“And point two, even if it were a mandatory ruling, when we signed up to the jurisdiction of the court, we had an opt-out very clearly that said we would not be bound by any judgments of the ICJ that related to either current or former Commonwealth countries. So that means, legally, they can’t touch us on this.”
He added: “So in other words, there is no credible legal threat to the Chagos Islands. We’re proposing to pay £35 billion to stave off a threat that doesn’t exist. Now I’ve raised this in Parliament. So other MPs, I, and IDS put it to Luke Pollard, the Defence Minister, when we had the second reading of the Diego Garcia bill that is now stalled in the Lords, he completely ducked the question. He didn’t deny it, he just didn’t answer it.
“We then had an opposition day debate on Chagos a few weeks ago, my boss, the Shadow Defense Secretary James Cartlidge, asked him exactly the same question…Pollard started ranting at him. He was yelling at him in the chamber so he wouldn’t have to answer the question.
“They can’t answer the question because if they answer the question, they have to admit there’s no threat and the whole thing disappears. It’s all coming out into the public domain. We’ve raised it in Parliament numerous times, but now you guys in the media are really picking up on this, so the government’s case is collapsing, and that may or may not have something to do with Jonathan Powell’s decision, I don’t know.”
Francois said the plan would soon collapse: “Their last line of defence, their last trench has been overrun, as it were. They are going to have to admit the truth to Parliament, and once they do admit it, instead of screaming and yelling in order not to answer direct questions, once they have to answer that direct question, this whole thing will then collapse.”
