The government’s Chagos handover is entirely in China’s interests – Chinese direct investment in Mauritius was $46 million in 2020, taking its total cumulative investment to a whopping $887 million. Over 18% of Mauritius’s total imports came from China that year – which has only increased. Meanwhile the Pentagon warned that it was concerned over any potential ceding of strategic territory to a state under Chinese influence…

In a cozy conversation with the Lowy Institute in May, Lammy said exactly what the Chinese would want to hear:

“We have an important trading relationship. Climate requires cooperation. Health requires cooperation, AI requires cooperation. And so it’s important that we’re engaged. We have been very concerned that the government seems to have given up entirely on engagement with China. No one seems to have gone from our government to China, which is very, very bizarre.”

Labour has repeatedly criticised the Tories for refusing to “engage” with China while promising to “reconnect” with it. This year then-Shadow Asia Minister Catherine West, reporting to Lammy, visited the country specifically to meet with Xi Jinping’s strategic mastermind Wan Huning. Highly irregular…

On entering government Lammy curiously refused to honour his promise of accusing the Chinese of genocide in in Xinjiang. He subsequently met with China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Laos at the end of July and “set out that the government would cooperate where we can.” Cooperation means give and take…

Labour dark lord Peter Mandelson is busy lobbying for an end to the “Tory boycott” of Hong Kong and the reopening of relations with China. Both Lammy and Reeves are angling for visits to China as part of a reorientation towards “engagement” with the totalitarian state. The decision to give up strategic military assets in the Indian Ocean to a China-aligned country will be warmly received in Beijing ahead of those talks…

The government has just announced that it is handing sovereignty of the Chagos Islands away to Mauritius. Confirming long-held fears that the British strategic interests were to be trumped by progressive waffle…

The joint announcement states:

“Under the terms of this treaty the United Kingdom will agree that Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia. At the same time, both our countries are committed to the need, and will agree in the treaty, to ensure the long-term, secure and effective operation of the existing base on Diego Garcia which plays a vital role in regional and global security.  For an initial period of 99 years, the United Kingdom will be authorised to exercise with respect to Diego Garcia the sovereign rights and authorities of Mauritius required to ensure the continued operation of the base well into the next century.”

The Chagos Islands are 2,152 kilometres away from Mauritius itself and have belonged to the UK since 1810. They have never belonged to Mauritius. There goes vital strategic access to the Indian and Pacific Oceans…

Despite claiming that the agreement secures the use of the US military base on Diego Garcia there’s no getting away from the fact that the government has now agreed to hand over a UK/US military asset to a firmly China-aligned country. Massively harming UK interests – you can hear the cheering in Beijing from SW1…

Sky News reports that Rachel Reeves is set to revive the UK-China Economic and Financial Dialogue talks in January. That will be the first time since 2019…

Reeves is to go to China for the event to revive trade and investment ties as the Treasury conducts “detailed discussions” ahead of the EFD. The resistance of the Tory government to China’s pernicious human rights violations, behaviour over Covid, and destruction of democracy in Hong Kong led to plans for the last one in 2022 being abandoned. Now that Peter Mandelson has criticised the “Tory boycott” of the CCP it looks like it’s goodbye to those morals…

The outflow of UK millionaires triggered by Starmer and Reeves has begun in earnest as tens of thousands up sticks and leave for sunnier (and less heavily taxed) countries. Most millionaire Brits are moving to the UAE and the US…

Only repressive communist China is seeing a higher rate of outflow of the rich than Britain according to research from advisory firm Henley and Partners (which is pretty remarkable given China’s authoritarian capital controls). A record 9,500 millionaires are forecast to leave Britain in 2024, up from around 4000 the previous year…

Starmer said during the general election campaign: “I think it’s a good thing that people are aspirational. When I say our number one mission is economic growth, you could say our number one mission is wealth creation. Now that’s an odd thing for the Labour party to say. It might have been in the past.” More fool those who believed him…

George Monbiot has released a new video on Double Down News praising that ecological champion…China. After claiming that the West has always criticised it in order to peddle “the old yellow peril myth” and mocking world leaders for talking about the threat from China on a state level, Monbiot touts the country’s green credentials. Everything else is waved away with a “China is doing some bad stuff”…

“It’s massively investing in green infrastructure and green industries and if there’s one thing we should be concerned about it’s that we’re being completely left behind by China’s investments… We are being left behind in the fossil age.”

Monbiot finishes: “China, for all its faults, puts us to shame.” News to anyone who thinks lowering emissions is a good thing…

Last time Guido checked, China, while building some solar farms, added a record 47 Gigawatts of coal power in 2023, which is double the amount from the rest of the world combined. That’s the equivalent of two new coal plants every week, as the country accounted for a whopping 30.9% of carbon emissions in 2021 and is currently rated “highly insufficient” on climateactiontracker.org. Guido didn’t realise George was such a fan of carbon…

Monbiot goes on to say how brilliant it is that the “French government is training every single public servant in ecological principles. 5.6 million people everyone who works for the state in any capacity at all is going to have ecological training.” More powerpoints for bureaucrats, that’ll solve climate change…