This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The House of Lords — just as it faces a hostile government that has fixed menacing eyes on the membership of the upper house — has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to prove its worth in the constitution and to do this by saving the country from an irreversible, strategic error.

Let’s start with the error: the almost-incomprehensible decision to surrender British sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory, handing the Chagos Islands over to Mauritius (a state with no historic links to the islands beyond having been jointly administered before Mauritius received independence in 1968).

We have negotiated a 99-year lease on one of the islands, Diego Garcia, in order to allow a military base to continue operating there for the United States. We have agreed to pay Mauritius an unnamed sum, in the hundreds of millions, for the privilege of handing the islands over to them.

The man who negotiated this embarrassment of a deal is the man who gave IRA terrorists secret “Letters of Comfort” to assure them they will not be prosecuted even though this fell outside the Belfast Agreement. He has made it clear that he doesn’t see the islands — in one of the world’s most strategic locations — to be of any more interest or significance than land being lost to coastal erosion in Essex.

Why on earth has this deal been done? Perhaps it is because the Foreign Office’s collective brain got so warped by the Brexit debates that they now believe any international court must be obeyed regardless of how badly it affects Britain, the actual jurisdiction of the court, or whether the court’s rulings are binding.

For the avoidance of doubt, they are not binding, but that didn’t stop the Foreign Office trying to slip this surrender into the red boxes of successive ministries — with success under James Cleverly, a hard “no” from David Cameron, and then feeble acquiescence from David Lammy.

Lammy’s part is particularly interesting as he, and the Labour ministry in general, seem intent on getting closer to China — and China is getting closer to Mauritius.

This is notwithstanding the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing genocide against the Uighur people, their tearing up of the Sino–British Joint Declaration on Hong Kong, their imposition of tyranny in Hong Kong, or their menacing of Taiwan and half a dozen other neighbouring nations.

Labour has brought in the former head of comms of TikTok, that propaganda tool of the CCP, to be in the heart of Downing Street. They have just banned the former President of Taiwan from visiting Britain (where she went to university) in order not to upset China in advance of David Lammy’s visit to Beijing.

Now they are handing over the Chagos Islands to a non-aligned state increasingly under the financial and political sway of the People’s Republic with only a treaty to safeguard our interests.

The Lords could demand a referendum of Chagos islanders, who would surely vote the deal down

It’s just like the Sino–British agreement, or earlier the Anglo–Egyptian Treaty, which was ripped up by one party when they wanted to exercise their sovereign rights over the Canal Zone.

So where does the House of Lords fit it? Well, this is what they were made for. Here we have a poor policy which will need legislation to be enacted. We have a policy that was not in the governing party’s manifesto and so the Salisbury Convention, that the Lords will not block manifesto commitments, does not apply.

This is the time for the House of Lords to prove its worth. They could for example insert a clause demanding a referendum of the Chagos islanders (whose disgraceful treatment by Britain is another plotline in this story and one from which this country emerges very badly).

The government knows their plans would be voted down by the Islanders by a huge majority, so would have to block it or kill the deal. If they don’t stop the deal, force the government to use the Parliament Act.

That is what the Parliament Act is for. Where the two Houses cannot agree, the elected lower house has the power to impose its will on the upper house, and that is right. But in doing so, they are forced to spend enormous amounts of political capital and will then find their humiliating treaty an albatross hung around their necks.

It would also be useful for the House of Lords’ survival. Should the Lords do its constitutional duty — to force the Commons to think again and think hard about a matter of national controversy — it will look appalling should the Labour government decide to expel opposition members of the legislature in revenge.

That is the kind of behaviour we might expect from Putin-adjacent leaders in Eastern Europe, not Europhile human rights lawyers. They might do it, but in doing so they would be trashing their reputation.

So here is the House of Lords’ opportunity. They have the chance to stop an appalling surrender of Britain’s strategic interests in the world and to remind the nation of their constitutional importance as a check on the government of the day. Now truly is their time.