If you think Prime Minister Starmer’s Chagos Islands deal with Mauritius is a bad deal, you are Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot and Nigel Farage-adjacent. That’s Starmer’s message, at any rate, in his latest effort to sell the settlement. Asked about it in the House of Commons, the premier couldn’t help himself:
We have secured the base for the long term and that has been welcomed by our allies — by the US, by Nato, by Australia, New Zealand, India. It’s been opposed by our adversaries — Russia, China and Iran. And in the second column we add Reform, following Putin, and the Tories following Reform.
This is the same leader who at other times affects to oppose demagoguery, asking everyone to lower the temperature over potentially polarizing national questions. Yet now that his Chagos deal is subject to increased scrutiny, he trades a different set of manners, just as he did with the Leader of the Opposition over Ukraine.
It’s not the first time Starmer has exempted himself from the civility he demands from the rest of us. When he led the opposition, his party produced a Twitter ad claiming Prime Minister Rishi Sunak doesn’t think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison.
Well, this is politics, I can hear some of you (and myself) thinking. Politics is an unfair contest that engages visceral emotions that will work as heuristics to be exploited. It is not croquet on the vicarage lawn. Playing nice leads to failure, failure means irrelevance, and irrelevance hands the baton to worse actors and greater evils. If it’s not Starmer peddling slurs, it is Boris Johnson accusing Brexit opponents of surrender or sabotage.
Told that objecting to the Chagos deal makes them sound like Reform, they may just embrace Reform
Very well. Starmer has elected to play rhetorical hardball, c’est la guerre. Only, this particular move, of tainting dissidents on foreign policy questions as dupes or agents of hostile foreign powers, and claiming that only his column supports principled internationalism, is unlikely to be effective in this instance.
Firstly, if you were (or are) a supporter of this deal, aren’t you disturbed by this shrillness? That its champion resorts so quickly to guilt-by-association smears does not project confidence. The attempt at deflection away from the issue’s merits suggests a level of fragility, that there is something very wrong under the bonnet.
When fellow citizens — and not just professional politicians — suggest there might be better things to do with eighteen billion pounds than spend them to rent back property while giving the actual islanders nothing, and possibly making it easier to lose basing access, and when your main response is a treason charge, you ought to be embarrassed. Though if you are resorting to that method at the first whiff of grapeshot, you may lack the capacity for embarrassment to begin with.
Moreover, it isn’t only Britain’s international adversaries who oppose the deal. It is representatives of the Chagos Islanders themselves. It is Labour MP Peter Lamb, whose constituency contains the largest community of Chagossians in the UK. It is a panel of human rights experts appointed by the United Nations, an international organisation whose moral and legal authority Starmer supports. The deal has also drawn the opposition of the former First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord West, who also served as a security minister under the last Labour Government. Are these dissidents also in the same column as our enemies and in league with Blackshirts at home? That’s where Starmer’s insinuation leads.
By the way, if Starmer wants to traffic in “which view is associated with whom” as a political device, that the regimes of Donald Trump and Narendra Modi support a thing may not be the argument-settling point that Starmer thinks it is. Trump is deporting people without due process to a gulag in El Salvador while casting covetous eyes from Canada to Greenland. Modi is arranging for extrajudicial assassinations of Sikh separatists abroad. That’s the kind of observation Starmer’s rhetoric invites. As does the claim that his government pursues “progressive realism.”
It is also news that Starmer regards Beijing as an “adversary”: recently, he has courted its investment in Britain’s economy, acceded to its new “super-embassy” in London, and met with his Chinese counterpart to call for a “strong relationship.” There might be a subtlety of statecraft at work here that we can’t see. Or it might be that the government can’t get its story straight.
To return to the main issue: we have been here before. That is, we have seen people set up the cry that opinions on specific issues must be sinister because they happen to coincide with the utterances of rogue regimes. That fallacy damaged our collective ability to judge the question of invading Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with cool heads. Far longer ago, it didn’t help the country deal with the abolition of slavery, given the association of abolitionism with revolutionary French adversaries.
Starmer’s jibe reinforces this bad tendency that corrupts foreign policy debate in Britain and beyond, the treatment of important questions not as prudential matters for judgement where reasonable citizens can disagree, but as loyalty tests. That very tendency can also backfire badly. Sensing defeat, some EU Remainers tried to taint those who favoured leaving the European Union by pointing out their bad company, playing the same “Putin supports it” card. How did that argument fare?
Starmer and his counsellors might inhabit a world where branding a legitimate conservative argument with “Reform” or “Russia” is enough to make dissidents cower. If so, they have been watching too many episodes of the West Wing, where sharp liberals can outflank illiberal opponents with rhetorical cleverness.
Alas, that’s not how the world is. To people outside that orbit, the attempt to intimidate via rebranding may not impress them. Told that objecting to the Chagos deal makes them sound like Reform, they may not change their minds. Rather, they may embrace Reform. Calling anything to the right of your current demands “far right” may not only fail to reduce dissent. It may become self-fulfilling.
Those who deploy “association” smears may be right in their conviction that politics inherently isn’t nice. Exactly so. But if all restraints are removed, it then gets dysfunctional for everyone, and quickly. They should pause to consider the kind of return fire they might receive. After all, Starmer like many concerned people favours Israel ceding some territory to Palestinians, and statehood, in order to achieve peace. That doesn’t make him objectively pro-Hamas. But it’s the kind of low, casual suggestion that he is unwittingly encouraging.
