Should Falklanders or Gibraltarians be worried we gave up the Chagos Islands?

Though with considerably less bloodshed involved, the final stages of Britain’s retreat from colonialism are becoming almost as tricky as the creation of the empire itself. The sun has not quite set on what was once the greatest imperial power since the Romans, at its peak encompassing fully a quarter of the Earth’s people, but soon another few islets will no longer be coloured pink, as once they were in the school atlases.

The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), an archipelago best known by its largest components, the Chagos Islands (including Diego Garcia), will soon be no more – and, on the whole, it is entirely right that this should be so. Formal sovereignty of these lands will be transferred back to the independent state of Mauritius, and the very important US-UK (mainly US, to be honest) military installations will be retained under a 99-year lease arrangement.

It marks the end of a long-running and irksome legal dispute, and will thus place the islands on a far more sustainable basis in international law. One of the last “African” colonies will be liberated, peacefully, leaving only the Spanish enclaves on the north cost of Morocco as reminders of the imperial age.

Put at its simplest, the United Kingdom has no business exerting “sovereignty” on tiny specks of land in the middle of the Indian Ocean. “Losing” the BIOT is not like handing Yorkshire over to the Danes or Kent to the French, and neither does it carry the same significance as the dissolution of British rule in Ireland, Egypt, India or Palestine; there is no need for an emergency session of parliament. It is a long-overdue tidying up of an anomaly.

Under international law – or at least United Nations conventions – the islands should never have been carved out of the territory of Mauritius in 1965, while it was still a crown colony, in return for the full independence granted in 1968. The Chagossian people should never have been summarily evicted from their homes and sent away – to Mauritius, Seychelles, and, er, the less tropical environment of Crawley – to make way for the Americans, who didn’t want any locals hanging around such sensitive facilities.

The Mauritians were right to make their territorial claims, and the courts were clearly eventually going to declare Britain’s occupation of the place illegal. We could safely ignore that – but we would have less room for complaint if the Mauritians decided to entertain another foreign power on their own territory. The money the British are paying is rightful restitution. The base will carry on spying on the Iranians and the Russians, and providing safe harbour for American aircraft carriers, for another century.

The move, then, is very much in the British (and American) national interest, and the White House appears content with it. There are two obvious dangers – but not realistic ones. The first is that the Mauritians will provide China, too, with a naval base in the area, and experience in the South China Sea suggests that the Chinese are perfectly willing to build an artificial island if no suitable bays can be found (though the depth of the ocean may mean it’s out of the question).

Geopolitically, it’s a non-starter, because Mauritius is more closely allied to India, a regional rival to China, and is one of the few little countries in the whole Indo-Pacific region and Africa not to have signed up for the largesse available under the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative – in truth, a form of neocolonialism that is enforced, arguably, with giant debt traps.

The other danger is the “read-off” to other disputed outposts of the old empire – notably the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar, which are also the subject of international litigation and diplomatic agitation (from Argentina and Spain, respectively). Yet the threat to UK sovereignty, and to the democratically expressed wishes of their residents, comes from other sources.

In the case of the Falklands, it is that the territory is practically indefensible except at great cost – the 1982 task force could not be assembled now. The other threat, to both territories, is Brexit. As with every other British overseas possession that comes up for discussion in international talks, the UK can no longer rely on the tacit support of France, Germany and the other members of the EU.

Indeed, under the EU-UK Brexit treaty signed by that super-patriot Boris Johnson, Gibraltar, like Northern Ireland, is given a special status, whereby Spain has a veto over EU policy; and Brexit has still not been settled in practical terms on the Rock. The UK military bases in Cyprus, retained when that island was given its freedom in 1960, may also one day be the subject of difficult discussions.

As was clear soon after the end of the Second World War, the UK has long since lacked the economic (and thus the industrial and military) strength to maintain a global role – and it was wise to offload its “east of Suez” commitments in Singapore and the Middle East by the early 1970s, usually in some form or other to the Americans.

It was not Britain’s fault that independent India started cuddling up to the Russians, nor that Grenada found itself “freed” from a potentially pro-Russian Castro-style government when the US invaded the island in 1984. Hong Kong could never have been defended against the People’s Army, and the British could count themselves lucky that they managed to protect the freedoms of the people there for as long as they did after the transfer of sovereignty in 1997. Mao could have taken back control at any time, had he been bothered enough.

The winds of change that Macmillan spoke of were real, and, as an American statesman famously observed many decades ago, by the 1960s Britain had lost its empire and not yet found a role. The role that was then found was, of course, the European Union, but now that too has been lost, and a considerable amount of global diplomatic clout sacrificed with it.

Real “sovereignty” – the ability to protect and promote the national interest – is best pursued, by a middle-rank power such as Britain, through its international partnerships. The Falkland Islands and Gibraltar are more vulnerable than ever thanks to Brexit and the concomitant decline in the UK’s economic virility.

“Global Britain” sounds great – but the reality is that it’s a rather feeble, toothless lion.