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Britain has just received a painful reminder that nobody respects weakness

Donald Trump muses about transferring part of our territory to Ireland. The EU threatens us with illegal car and steel tariffs

By Daniel Hannan (*)

As the Chagos humiliation shows, the Foreign Office’s slavish adoration of international courts has got us nowhere. What has all our imagined soft power brought us? For all our performative internationalism, we find ourselves friendless.

Donald Trump muses about transferring part of our territory to Ireland. The EU threatens us with illegal car and steel tariffs. Our airports keep being closed for “technical reasons”. China talks menacingly of retaliation over our nationalization of steel. We have somehow managed to fall out simultaneously with Israel and Iran. Argentina sanctions oil companies around the Falkland Islands. Commonwealth grifters come after us – us, the country that abolished the slave trade – with demands of repatriation.

So much for the goodwill we were supposed to have amassed through leading on climate change, grovelling before international courts, spraying around aid money and indulging the shakedown artists.

Soft power, at least as Foreign Office types understand it, is codswallop. It is the comforting story we tell ourselves because we are too weak and indebted to exercise hard power. Actual soft power, in the sense of respect for our values and institutions, was only ever a corollary of military success. British cultural influence, as measured by other nations dressing like us, adopting our sports, establishing bicameral parliaments and so on, was a product of our nineteenth-century might. To pretend that we are still influential because Chinese children read Harry Potter is pure cope.

As a British 10-year-old in South America when Leopoldo Galtieri ordered the invasion of the Falkland Islands, I remember the upsurge in anti-British feeling after a small group of Royal Marines surrendered in Port Stanley. Local media took the line that a decrepit colonial power was finally getting its comeuppance. How the tone changed when Argentina was routed. All of a sudden, the British were admired and respected. Strangers would congratulate us in the streets. Nothing succeeds like success.

That respect has not entirely died away. A recent opinion poll showed that Chileans backed British rather than Argentine sovereignty over the Falklands by 68 to 17 per cent. While Chile is an unusually Anglophile country, I have noticed several other Latin Americans voicing the same opinion – especially since the recent World Cup, which turned pretty much the entire continent against Argentina.

Javier Milei, Argentina’s president, is the same age as me. He will also recall the mood changing when he was a child. He will remember how sympathy swung to the winners. He understands, in a way that our Foreign Office soft-power-wallahs seem unable to, that prestige is a commodity, as real as lithium or Malbec.

Listen to how he phrases his revanchism. “The United Kingdom faces multiple migratory, demographic and economic crises that will not be easily solved. It is clearly on the road to decline. Argentina, by contrast, has a prosperous future, and will prevail,” he said earlier this month.

For what it’s worth, I am not immediately worried by the prospect of another Argentine invasion. I visited the Falkland Islands three years ago, and was hugely impressed by the preparedness of our garrison. Milei, a libertarian at heart, is not going to blow away his country’s welcome economic revival by launching a war.

No, my point is a different one. Argentina, not Britain, has grasped the reality of modern geopolitics. To the extent that international courts mattered, they count for little now. What matters is military power which, in turn, rests on economic growth.

That might sound obvious, but it is plainly not obvious to our foreign policy establishment, which is even now trying to ensure that Andy Burnham does not interfere with its determined attempt to hand away thr Chagos Islands and pay for the pleasure of doing so.

Over the past week, we have seen repeated briefings claim it is too late to change the deal, that the key thing is to act before our legal position becomes weaker, and that, if necessary, we should keep Mauritius on side by giving it more handouts until a future US administration lifts its veto.

All these briefings come from our standing apparat, and all beg the question. If we start, as Sir Keir Starmer and Richard Hermer did, from a near-religious veneration of international law, then we must indeed obey the rulings of Russian and Chinese judges on a United Nations tribunal. It makes no difference that disputes between current and former Commonwealth members are excluded from the court’s jurisdiction. It doesn’t matter that Mauritius, which had no interest in the Chagos archipelago, accepted a cash payment in 1965 in return for renouncing any claim. It is of no consequence that the Chagossians themselves would rather live as British subjects than become Mauritians.

To see how unusual our approach is, try to imagine any other country taking it. Picture the Americans or the Chinese rushing to hand their territory to a country that had never owned it simply because a posse of Third Worldist judges had told them to.

While our civil servants continue to promote the deal of which they are so proud, Burnham can see how dreadful it looks. You don’t need to be a fulminating reactionary in a pith helmet to see what is wrong with betraying a poor, black, dispossessed population, and handing a pristine maritime conservation area to a country with a terrible record on biodiversity.

When the deal was first proposed, this column was a lonely voice of opposition. As the understanding of what it involved spread, so did the incredulity. This week, opposition has been voiced by Labour and Lib Dem MPs, by the Left-leaning News Agency podcast and by The Independent. All ask why we should pay to give territory we already own to a country that is increasingly close to China.

Burnham talks of Starmer’s deal as something he “inherited”: he, at least, gets the politics. At the same time, Ellie Reeves, his impressive Attorney General, has quietly altered the rules to water down the obligation on government ministries to follow non-binding rulings by international tribunals, making it much harder for Matrix Chambers types to pursue Mauritius’s claim through our domestic courts – the prospect held up by supporters of the deal as a reason to rush.

No doubt Burnham is being told by his advisers that there is no alternative – the same advisers who told David Cameron that it was not feasible to land a boat on the outer atolls, where a brave colony of returned Chagossian exiles has since been established.

In fact, there is a clear alternative. Ditch the deal and resettle the islands, allowing people of Chagossian descent to cultivate their old coconut plantations and tend their forefathers’ graves. Once the archipelago has a settled population, we can defend its right to self-determination as we do in Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands.

An opportunity is coming soon. Next month, the House of Lords will vote on the British Sovereignty Protection (Chagos Islands) Bill, proposed by the independent Lord Weir of Ballyholme. Lord Weir, a barrister and former Stormont minister, wants to make it illegal to transfer ownership of the islands without the permission of Parliament and the diaspora Chagossian population. On democratic grounds, his case is unarguable, and my guess is that his bill will sail through the Lords, Labour peers being as unenthusiastic as anyone else about betraying the Chagossians a second time.

Burnham should back the bill and announce that the Government will promote Chagossian resettlement of the outer islands – something that, while not cheap, is a fraction of what Starmer was proposing to pay Mauritius. As for Mauritius itself, its interest in the territory has only ever been pecuniary. Paying it to back our claim, rather than paying it to take our land, genuinely would be a worthwhile investment and an exercise of meaningful power.

Returning to power politics vis-à-vis Mauritius would strengthen our position globally, from the Falkland Islands to the slavery reparations moochers. It would also, for what it is worth, remove a vote-losing headache from Burnham’s inbox. Don’t hang back, Prime Minister. They’ll like us when we win.

(*) Daniel Hannan is President of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and sits in the House of Lords as an independent peer. The IEA is an educational charity and free market think tank. It describes its mission as improving the understanding of the fundamental institution of a free society and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problemas.