the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The Chagos Island deal doesn’t easily lend itself to hilarity. Even if it is a hilarity that is made all the more hilarious on account of being unintentional 

In news which has understandably not garnered the full outrage it might otherwise have caused – on account of how the war in Iran is causing even more outrage – it was revealed that Mauritius is planning to sue Britain over delays in ratifying deal.  

Had Britain reneged on some crucial aspect of the deal? Negotiated in bad faith? Misled, deceived or otherwise failed to conduct itself properly? Or was it more to do with international law? A hitherto overlooked piece of legal precedent perhaps or a newly discovered treaty that even historians had been unaware of, each of which rendered the existing deal worthless? 

No, it is much simpler than that. The proverb ‘Counting ones chickens before they hatch’ might well have been coined to describe exactly this scenario. Essentially some of the money the Mauritian government had been hoping to get as part of the deal, and which they’d already allocated when calculating next years budget, was no longer the certainty it had been a couple of months ago.

The key point here is that the deal isn’t a deal. Nothing has been signed. It’s an agreement thats all. One thats involved expensive lawyers and many arduous meetings to be sure, with both governments taking part and with the British wary of creating an extensive legal precedent for other countries to follow, but an agreement nonetheless. Not a contract. 

What exactly it was called – a deal or an agreement – became the least of its problems when last month the UK government announced it was ‘pausing’ the whole process until the outcome of discussions with the US are concluded. For some reason which I’m not that interested in, any agreement cannot become a deal without the US’s blessing. That would be the US which has used the Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands to launch air strikes on Iran, and which has further underlined both its strategic importance and our diplomatic incompetence.

This creates a problem for the Mauritian government.  

The first payment of the total £35 billions the agreement proposes – £170 millions – isn’t happening any time soon.  “We will have to find Rs 10 billion (£170 millions).  We are exploring all possible avenues, but clearly the 2026-27 budget will not be an easy one,” said their Prime Minister, with wonderful understatement. 

According to the IMF – sadly the boring financial one and not the sexy top-secret spy movie franchise one with Tom Cruise  – Mauritius ‘faces challenges from high public debt, significant public investment needs, low productivity, and an ageing society.’  

Which is basically what we have here. We too have an ageing population. We are borrowing more just to pay for them. And everyone else on benefits. Our national debt is so big that simply paying the interest on it is the governments fourth largest spend.  

So yeah, unintentional hilarity will do just fine. 

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There’s one inherent problem with being moral. Consistency. The effort it requires. Constantly having to navigate all those moral dilemmas. The endless evaluation of competing needs. Of doing all this when so much information is readily accessible. And where the charge of hypocrite is bandied about on social media with carefree abandon. Where a backlash is only few clicks away. Much easier then to criticise others for what you perceive to be their moral failings.

In everyday life this isn’t a problem. It may be mildly embarrassing, to be called out as a hypocrite for some moral transgression or inconsistency and friends may think a bit less of you for a few days, but in the real world, long term consequences are rare. If you’re builder, a school-teacher or a dentist, really, what’s the worst thats going to happen? In everyday life, one has to be a hypocrite just in order to survive. We all believe that the law should be obeyed, yet people break the speed limit or steal stationary from work or take illegal drugs.

When one is a politician however, a different set of rules apply. Everyone thinks so. As do they, but only as it applies to other politicians, not to them. A classic example of this occurred last week in the House of Commons. The Foreign Secretary, Mini-Cooper was announcing plans to cut the foreign aid budget by about 40%, and to use the saving, estimated to be £6 billions over the next three years, on defence.

But the way in which some MP’s reacted to the news, one might almost be forgiven the thinking that Mini-Cooper was planning to visit Afghanistan or Sierra Leone to better relish the effects of the cuts. Mind you, given that she was announcing the news to a largely empty chamber – only 23 MPs actually spoke – their outrage was designed with re-selection, election leaflets and media profile in mind, more than any moral consistency.

The MP who first drew my attention to this tawdry episode was Moanica Harding, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson on  International Development, who was widely quoted in the media as having denounced the planned cuts as ‘a moral catastrophe.’ Pausing only to allow her righteousness to become fully indignant, she thundered, ‘Where are the Labour party’s values, where did it mislay its moral compass?’

Hand on! This wasn’t the same Moanica Harding who voted in favour of abolishing the two child benefit cap, was it?  Only someone so utterly in thrall to be seen to be doing the right thing, as opposed to actually doing it, could possibly hold two seemingly incompatible opinions. Voting to abolish the cap is the very epitome of creating a moral catastrophe, because in effect it gives parents on benefits a financial reason to have unlimited children.  On any metric one cares to use – other than accruing supposed moral virtue – abolishing the cap only exacerbates the problem it wishes to cure.

Firstly, because children who’ve grown in a family whose income is solely on benefits are themselves more likely to lead a life or have a families that are benefit dependent.  We already have a welfare bill that is growing more unsustainable by the month without placing even more demands on it. The moral catastrophe that she is so concerned about happening abroad, is more acute than the one her she has helped create here. But it won’t be anything she’ll need to worry about though. Not for her a life on benefits. She has her MP’s salary to live on. Once the public has had enough of her, she’ll possibly be ennobled and get some cushy gigs in the world of overseas aid quango’s, charities and NGO’s. Then she’ll have her pension. The bill for her morals will fall on the future generations.

Quite a few of the MPs who spoke out against the cuts raised the issues one might expect them to raise. How important it was for Britain to play its part. To combat the spread of disease. To increase access to education, to broaden the provision of healthcare and to champion equality. That was a major concern. The rights of women, girls and the LGBT+ community. The disabled. 

Pick of the bunch though, was this from Brain Less, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bleeding Hearts who asked ,’Does the Foreign Secretary agree that we would gain respect by doing the right thing and restoring the 0.7% now, which would be worth its weight in gold not just for the people of those troubled places but for ourselves in the months, years and decades ahead?’

He too voted to abolish the benefit cap. A bit rich of him to be suddenly talking about ‘doing the right thing’ now.  The ‘troubled places’ he is so vexed about may soon be places near his home. By 2065, the government estimates that nearly half of all the UK’s population will not paying tax – more than a quarter being over 65 and 15% under 18 – but will still expecting the state to provide for them.  This creates the second problem. 

More borrowing on account of less people paying tax. In what universe do these MPs live? Are they not aware than the government already spends nearly a tenth of its entire budget on paying interest on the national debt. Not the debt itself. The interest. £122 billions. When are MPs going to start putting local issues before global ones?

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One of the most interesting revelations to emerge from the whole foreign aid budget cut was the fact that one of its largest single expenditures doesn’t even go abroad. It stays right here. Some 20% of it was spent on housing and supporting asylum seekers in 2024. And because housing and supporting asylum seekers is a statutory duty – legally binding – it’s exempt from the cut.