Protect the Botnet

Pending the will-they-won’t-they surrender of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, there are currently 14 British Overseas Territories around the world. They are a mixture of inhabited and uninhabited areas which are not part of the United Kingdom but fall under its sovereignty; their populations amount to only 250,000 people; from the uninhabited British Antarctic Territory to the 88,000 residents of the Cayman Islands.

Before we start: if you believe it is in principle illicit for a state to exercise sovereignty over a geographically separate territory, you will regard the existence of the British Overseas Territories as intolerable. But you will also need to take the matter up with the other dozen or so countries — according to your definition of dependencies — which do exactly that, including the United States, France, Australia, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland and China. Geopolitics can be messy.

The 14 remaining BOTs came under the UK’s control by a variety of routes, and to label them all as the product of colonialism is inadequate. Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, for example, were unoccupied before English settlers arrived in the 17th century, while Gibraltar was ceded legally and in perpetuity by Spain under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 after most of the population had left.

While the British Indian Ocean Territory, of which the Chagos Archipelago is the largest part, has been in the headlines recently, this month sees a pair of centenaries. On 10 March, it is 100 years since Cyprus became a British Crown Colony, while 19 March marks a century since the government announced the construction of a major naval base at Sembawang in Singapore, then part of the Crown Colony of the Straits Settlement. These two anniversaries are a reminder that the Overseas Territories are, at least in part, strategic assets for the projection of power and the defence of Britain’s national interest.

They are not merely post-imperial anomalies, but assets of enduring value

Cyprus had effectively been under British control since 1878. In return for Britain’s support at the Congress of Berlin that year, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II secretly agreed to the Cyprus Convention which gave Britain administrative control of the island. He hoped that this would forestall Russian expansion in the eastern Mediterranean, but it also gave Britain a useful base to defend the sea route through the Suez Canal to India, its largest colonial possession.

When the First World War began in 1914 and the Ottoman Empire declared itself an ally of the Central Powers, Britain formally annexed Cyprus. In 1923, the newly declared Republic of Turkey recognised British control under the Treaty of Lausanne, clearing the way for the establishment of the Crown Colony of Cyprus in 1925. The island became an independent republic in 1960, but the UK retained sovereignty over its substantial military installations around Akrotiri in the west and Dhekelia in the east, with the Sovereign Base Areas becoming an Overseas Territory and Britain maintaining access to 40 “retained sites” within Cyprus.

These military facilities are not simply a remnant of imperial interests. British Forces Cyprus, a tri-service command, consists of around 3,500 military personnel including two resident infantry battalions, No. 84 Squadron at RAF Akrotiri and, perhaps most importantly, the Joint Service Signal Unit (Cyprus) at Ayios Nikolaos Station, an electronic listening post in the east of the island.

Why does the UK need military units in Cyprus? The blockage of the Suez Canal by the container ship Ever Given in March 2021 and the threat to maritime commerce from Houthi militants in Yemen since December 2023 has demonstrated how important and how vulnerable the shipping route from the Red Sea to the eastern Mediterranean really is. The RAF was able to join US forces in air strikes against Houthi positions with aircraft operating from Akrotiri; the station has also been used in recent years to conduct operations against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and to enforce the no-fly zone over Libya.

In addition, last autumn it seemed possible that British nationals would have to be evacuated from Lebanon to avoid the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. Although the government only needed to provide charter flights for a few hundred in the end, it made preparations for a much larger operation, deploying military and diplomatic personnel to Cyprus for a rerun of 2006’s Operation Highbrow, which saw more than 4,000 British nationals evacuated by air and sea to Akrotiri.

The former British facility in Singapore served a similar purpose. By the time it was completed in 1939, HM Naval Base Singapore boasted the world’s largest dry dock and enough fuel to supply the entire Royal Navy for six months, and had cost the equivalent of £9 billion. Along with an airfield at RAF Tengah, these bases were exercises in power projection, Singapore widely being dubbed “the Gibraltar of the East”, and their capture by the Japanese in 1942 was a shattering blow.

The Overseas Territories are not merely post-imperial anomalies, nor universally oppressed populations yearning to be free, but assets of enduring strategic and economic value. The idea that we have a moral duty to divest ourselves of them is threadbare given the fate of Hong Kong after it was ceded to China in 1997 — now subject to brutal authoritarianism. Such a belief also seems perilously naïve in the transactional geopolitical world of “Trump 2.0”.

Whatever the attitude of the Prime Minister and his Attorney General to the Chagos Islands, it is not simply a part of a process of “decolonisation”. The anniversaries of Cyprus and Singapore should give us pause, and time to reflect that the Overseas Territories in some cases have links to Britain going back more than 400 years. They are an intrinsic part of our global footprint and shape our role in the world. Some are fiercely attached to their British identity. None should be given up lightly, if at all.