Foreign Office insists Chagos Islands deal still on track, after minister tells MPs parliamentary process has been paused
Ben Quinn
Ben Quinn is a Guardian political correspondent.
Controversial plans to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius are still on track, the UK government has insisted, after a minister caused confusion by telling MPs that the deal was “paused”.
Hamish Falconer, a Foreign Office minister and former diplomat, was speaking on Wednesday as the deal came under increasing pressure from opposition parties in the UK and from Donald Trump.
In a bombshell intervention last month, the US president said that Keir Starmer was “making a big mistake” by handing sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius in exchange for continued use by the UK and US of their airbase on one of the islands, Diego Garcia.
Speaking in response to an urgent question put foward in the Commons by the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage (see 2.31pm), Falconer said:
We have a process going through parliament in relation to the treaty.
We will bring that back to parliament at the appropriate time. We are pausing for discussions with our American counterparts.
The government scrambled to contain the confusion created by Falconer’s comments, which were immediately reported by the BBC, with sources in the Foreign Office saying that he had “misspoke.”
A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “There is no pause. We have never set a deadline. Timings will be announced in the usual way.”
However, the intervention was immediately pounced on by Conservative shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, who is currently in the US meeting political figures there about the deal, which she described as “an appalling act of betrayal.”
She said:
I am in Washington lobbying senior administration figures on this issue and I am pleased the UK Government has been forced to pause the legislation.
But ministers must go further: now it is time for Keir Starmer to face reality and kill this shameful surrender once and for all before it does any more damage.
Speaking earlier, Falconer had made it clear that the UK government was taking notice of the intervention on social media by Trump, who went against the grain not just of what he had previously said but also against US government’ policy.
Trump accepted the deal last year, criticised it in January, subsequently described it as the “best” deal Starmer could make in the circumstances, and then described it as a “terrible deal” and a “big mistake” last week.
Falconer told MPs: “The view of the United States president may well have changed but the treaty has not.”
Farage used the UQ on Wednesday to force the issue onto the agenda on Wednesday after he had accused of “performing Maga stunts” with a claim that the British government stopped him from travelling to the Chagos Islands on a humanitarian mission.
The Reform UK leader said he had flown to the Maldives to join a delegation bringing aid to four Chagossians who are trying to establish a settlement on one of the archipelago’s islands to protest against Britain’s plans to transfer control of the territory to Mauritius.
In a video posted on X on Saturday, Farage claimed the UK government had blocked his trip to the territory, which cannot be entered without a valid permit.
Wearing a striped polo shirt and sunglasses around his neck, Farage said:
The British government are applying pressure on the president and the government of the Maldives to do everything within their power to stop me getting on that boat and going to the Chagos Islands.
Key events
Afternoon summary
For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.
Unite general secretary Sharon Graham says Reeves should be moved if she does not back multi-billion defence investment
Dan Sabbagh
Dan Sabbagh is the Guardian’s defence and security editor.
The head of Britain’s largest trade union demanded that Rachel Reeves be reshuffled or sacked from her job as chancellor if the Treasury continues to hold up a multi-billion defence investment plan.
Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, warned that tens of thousands of jobs were at risk from political dithering and called on ministers to “back British industry,” by signing off on future defence contracts.
She said:
If Rachel Reeves can’t grasp that concept and doesn’t care where things are made, then she should go. Actually, you have to have a vision for Britain. You can’t just be in government, you can’t just say today’s a new day.
She also called on Keir Starmer “to do what he said he would do” in February last year he first promised to increase annual spending on military – to 2.5% of GDP by 2027. Subsequently Starmer promised to increase it further, to 3.5% by 2035 – an extra £30bn in real terms, but few new contracts have followed.
Concerns are most acute for the Leonardo helicopter factory at Yeovil, the sole bidder on a stalled £1bn manufacturing contract. It employs 3,300 people on an average wage of £58,000 a week, but its Italian owner has said it would have to close down unless it was awarded the work before 1 March.
Graham was speaking to the Guardian outside Downing Street where Unite had organised a protest in response to the government’s failure to publish the defence investment plan amid Treasury resistance to its high cost.
“Labour is supposed to be in for workers in the working class. I’m seeing very little evidence of that,” Graham said, arguing that was a problem not just in terms of creating defence jobs but across government.
The defence industrial plan was expected to be published in autumn, and then just before Christmas, but has been delayed to March or April. It is intended to set out funding for £67bn of commitments from last summer’s strategic defence review.
But the Treasury has raised concerns about the affordability of the overall package while the Ministry of Defence has indicated it needs an extra £28bn over the next four years to meet its forecast costs.
Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian
Scottish government announces its own grooming gangs inquiry
Libby Brooks
Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.
The Scottish government has announced it will establish a Scotland-wide grooming gangs inquiry chaired by Prof Alexis Jay, who led the original Rotherham abuse inquiry, after ongoing pressure from opposition parties and survivors.
Justice secretary Angela Constance faced criticism last year for her handling of initial calls for an inquiry to mirror the one ordered by Keir Starmer for England and Wales. Ministers previously said they wanted to gather more evidence but it seems an initial review by Jay has identified sufficient material to merit a full inquiry.
Making the announcement to MSPs at Holyrood today, education secretary Jenny Gilruth said her government sharing the “sense of urgency” felt by survivors. She said:
Announcing an independent public inquiry today will not cure all which has come before, but it is a statement of intent from this government that we will leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of justice for survivors of child sexual abuse.
Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin will not face sanctions over byelection leaflet error
Matt Goodwin, Reform UK’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton byelection, will not face a sanction for leaflets that omitted the party’s imprint, after a high court judge accepted this was due to an inadvertent printing error. Matthew Weaver has the story.
Britain must prepare for militaru conflict within three to five years, defence minister says
Al Carns, the defence minister, has said Britain must prepare for military conflict within three to five years.
Speaking at a Chatham House event, he also said the lack of contact that most people have with the military was a potential problem. He said:
We have never seen a disconnect between the military and our population like we’ve seen today.
Indeed, you are more likely to know a veteran than you are someone serving and, actually, the knowledge about defence and why security matters is actually, I would say, limited.
It sometimes doesn’t resonate or percolate down to all sections of society and that’s quite unique in British history, and it’s for a variety of reasons.
Speaking about when the military would have to be “war-fighting ready”, Carns said:
My view would be three to five years for geographical constrained crisis and the best thing is, if we prepare for that and it doesn’t happen, then we have succeeded because we’ve effectively deterred.
By the way, every time we guess it we get it wrong. But if you look at the some of the reports on what Europe is looking at, I think they are the type of timescales we need to we need to think about.
Carns also said cyberattacks were costing Britain £15bn year, including the targeting of Jaguar Land Rover attack in August which he said represented half the cost of the two-child benefit cap for a year. “That could be articulated as putting 225,000 children into poverty if you really want to monetise it”, he said.
Met apologises to Commons speaker for sharing tip-off with Mandelson’s lawyers
The Metropolitan police has apologised to the Commons speaker for giving Peter Mandelson’s lawyers information pointing to him as the source of a claim that the former UK ambassador planned to flee the country, Pippa Crerar reports.
Labour uses £350m slogan campaign bus in Gorton and Denton to accuse Farage of making ‘false promises’ during Brexit
Labour is attacking Reform UK in Gorton and Denton today on the basis that Nigel Farage sold “false promises” to voters during the Brexit referendum.
In a stunt which it has also filmed for social media, it has driven a red bus in the constituency with a slogan on its side saying: “Remember the £350m a week for our NHS? You can’t trust our Farage.”
In one sense this is unfair; in 2016 it was Vote Leave that claimed (falsely) that the UK was giving £350m a week to the EU that could be spent on the NHS instead, and it had this slogan on the side of its campaign bus. Farage was not involved in the Vote Leave campaign, and after the referendum he claimed he had never approved of the £350m a week claim and regarded it as a “mistake”.
But Farage did as much as anyone to ensure that Britain did vote to leave the EU in 2016, and there were other claims that he did make about Brexit where the alleged benefits have failed to materialise. It is notable that now Farage does not speak much about that process at all, and he changed the name of his party from the Brexit party to Reform UK.
The Labour advert is also notable because, until recently, Labour has been reluctant to say anything critical of the Vote Leave campaign because it has been worried about offending pro-Brexit Labour supports.
When Morgan McSweeney was Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, he was one of the Labour figures more nervous about sounding anti-Brexit. Now that he has left, the party seems more confident about making the “false promises” argument.
Foreign Office insists Chagos Islands deal still on track, after minister tells MPs parliamentary process has been paused
Ben Quinn
Ben Quinn is a Guardian political correspondent.
Controversial plans to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius are still on track, the UK government has insisted, after a minister caused confusion by telling MPs that the deal was “paused”.
Hamish Falconer, a Foreign Office minister and former diplomat, was speaking on Wednesday as the deal came under increasing pressure from opposition parties in the UK and from Donald Trump.
In a bombshell intervention last month, the US president said that Keir Starmer was “making a big mistake” by handing sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius in exchange for continued use by the UK and US of their airbase on one of the islands, Diego Garcia.
Speaking in response to an urgent question put foward in the Commons by the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage (see 2.31pm), Falconer said:
We have a process going through parliament in relation to the treaty.
We will bring that back to parliament at the appropriate time. We are pausing for discussions with our American counterparts.
The government scrambled to contain the confusion created by Falconer’s comments, which were immediately reported by the BBC, with sources in the Foreign Office saying that he had “misspoke.”
A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “There is no pause. We have never set a deadline. Timings will be announced in the usual way.”
However, the intervention was immediately pounced on by Conservative shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, who is currently in the US meeting political figures there about the deal, which she described as “an appalling act of betrayal.”
She said:
I am in Washington lobbying senior administration figures on this issue and I am pleased the UK Government has been forced to pause the legislation.
But ministers must go further: now it is time for Keir Starmer to face reality and kill this shameful surrender once and for all before it does any more damage.
Speaking earlier, Falconer had made it clear that the UK government was taking notice of the intervention on social media by Trump, who went against the grain not just of what he had previously said but also against US government’ policy.
Trump accepted the deal last year, criticised it in January, subsequently described it as the “best” deal Starmer could make in the circumstances, and then described it as a “terrible deal” and a “big mistake” last week.
Falconer told MPs: “The view of the United States president may well have changed but the treaty has not.”
Farage used the UQ on Wednesday to force the issue onto the agenda on Wednesday after he had accused of “performing Maga stunts” with a claim that the British government stopped him from travelling to the Chagos Islands on a humanitarian mission.
The Reform UK leader said he had flown to the Maldives to join a delegation bringing aid to four Chagossians who are trying to establish a settlement on one of the archipelago’s islands to protest against Britain’s plans to transfer control of the territory to Mauritius.
In a video posted on X on Saturday, Farage claimed the UK government had blocked his trip to the territory, which cannot be entered without a valid permit.
Wearing a striped polo shirt and sunglasses around his neck, Farage said:
The British government are applying pressure on the president and the government of the Maldives to do everything within their power to stop me getting on that boat and going to the Chagos Islands.
Role of Scotland’s top law officer questioned after ‘bombshell’ over Peter Murrell charges
Serious doubts have been raised about the dual role of Scotland’s top law officer after it emerged that the first minister was informed of criminal charges against Peter Murrell nearly a year before they were made public. Libby Brooks and Severin Carrell have the story.
Farage claims Maldives about to make their own counter-claim at ICJ for Chagos Islands sovereignty
Nigel Farage has claimed that the Maldives are set to issue a counter-claim to the international court of justice over the Chagos Islands in “just a few days”, the Press Association reports. PA says:
The Reform UK leader visited the Maldives, an independent archipelagic nation in the Indian Ocean, over the weekend and posted a video on X, formerly Twitter, claiming the UK had stopped him going to the Chagos Islands.
He claimed during an urgent question in the Commons that the Maldives are “upset” about the UK government’s plans to hand over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
The deal, which the government argues secures operation of a joint UK-US base on the island of Diego Garcia for at least 99 years, will also allow Chagossians to return to the outer islands.
Farage said: “I can tell you this from my trip to the Maldives at the weekend – something I hadn’t realised, and I don’t know whether the government knows it either.
“It is the Maldives that has the historical links with the Chagos Islands, both in terms of trade, in terms of archaeology. In fact, the islands, all the French did was rename the islands from Maldivian language.
“There is no basis, historically, culturally, in any way, for Mauritius to have a claim on those islands.
“And the Maldives are upset for two reasons. One, there has been great stability in this region for decades, and what happens with this treaty, if it goes through, is you finish up with a turf war going on between India and China in the region, and that indeed has already started.
“And I wish to inform the government that we are just a few days away, in my opinion, from the Maldives issuing a counter-claim to the international court of justice to say, if anybody has the right to the sovereignty of those islands, it is the Maldives and not Mauritius.
“And I would urge you to pause all of this.”
No 10 declines to say when changes to student loan system might be announced
At the post-PMQs lobby briefing, the PM’s spokersperson declined to say when the government might be announcing changes to the student loan system. (See 12.07pm.) “I won’t get ahead of the spring statement,” he said, when asked if there might be an announcement in the statement, which is next week.
He said work on this was continuing, but declined to give any more details or a timeframe, saying “we’ll update when we have one”.
According to ITV’s Robert Peston, Peter Mandelson is adamant that he and his lawyers were told by the police that the lord speaker was the person who tipped them off about Mandelson being a flight risk, not the Commons speaker – who has admitted being the source (see 11.49am). Peston thinks there was simple misunderstanding. He says:
A source close to Mandelson says “police were emphatic it was the Lords’ speaker” and his “lawyers checked specifically”.
Presumably the arresting officers were told the tip-off came from “the speaker” and assumed it must be the Lords because Mandelson was a lord.
PMQs – snap verdict
One of the rules of PMQs is that there is a correlation between the quality of the exchanges here (never high at the best of times) and at the imminence of an election. With the polling booths about to open, the crude sloganising gets even more extreme. Today was a good example.
Kemi Badenoch started quite well. At the weekend she announced a plan to cut the interest graduates pay on their student loans. She was responding to increasing media interest in student loans in recent weeks (triggered by the freeze in the loan repayment threshold coming into force in April). But ministers have noticed this too, and they are already looking at the issue, as Will Hazell explains in a story in the i today which includes this wonderful quote.
One source with knowledge of discussions said that Treasury officials were “beavering away trying to work out if there is a different combination of the interest rate and the threshold level that makes increasingly influential young graduates stop shouting at them”.
Badenoch got Starmer to concede that the government is considering changing the loan rules. She taunted him quite effectively over Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, saying before the general election “graduates, you will pay less under a Labour government.” And she was a bit more explicit than she has been in the past about disowning the policy failures of the past government. (See 12.14pm.) But her “paedo protection party” jibe was crude and excessive, and towards the end she had lapsed into low-grade insults. Another problem was that, in exchanges that were relatively routine and unmemorable, Starmer had the best line; this came when he responded to her boast about Tory MPs being under new leadership by making the point that some of them were – because they now have Nigel Farage as their boss.
Towards the end Starmer described Badenoch as “utterly irrelevant”. In some respects that is just regular abuse but, as the Gorton and Denton byelecton illustrates (see 9.11am), two-party politics in the UK has been upended and increasingly that sounds like a structural complaint about the way PMQs is organised.
All the focus is on the Starmer/Badenoch exchanges because she is the only MP who gets six questions. But today it was obvious that Starmer couldn’t wait to finish with Badenoch because he wanted to move on to what mattered to him much more, which was blasting Reform UK and the Greens – a particular concern because of the byelection, but also a fundmental Labour party strategic priority.
This is from Matt Goodwin, the Reform UK candidate in Gorton and Denton, responding to what Keir Starmer said about him at PMQs.
I see Keir Starmer is attacking me at PMQs for being “divisive”
A reminder
This by-election is being held because Keir Starmer’s MP slagged off the good people of Gorton & Denton and even joked about pensioners dying
Vote Reform
Get Starmer Out
Put Gorton & Denton First
Calvin Bailey (Lab) say the Greens want to break up Nato. Does the PM agree that they are betraying our security and “becoming Putin’s useful idiots”.
Starmer says the Greens want to pull out of Nato, and negotiate the nuclear deterrent with Putin. And Reform have a former leader in Wales who took Russian bribe. He says Reform and the Greens are both “weak on Nato and soft on Putin”.
Roger Gale (Con) says he asked the PM some months ago why, as DPP, he did not bring charges against Mohamed Al Fayed for rape. He says two dossiers were submitted to the CPS. When will people be charged for helping Fayd.
Starmer says hundreds of thousands of files go in to the CPS every year. He says he does not know when charging decisions will be taken.
Stephen Gethins (SNP) urges Starmer to campaign in Scotland on the government’s record.
Starmer says the SNP used to sit in the third party benches until the 2024. But they don’t now, because they lost so many seats.
Robbie Moore (Con) asks about a Labour councillor in Keighley who he says was responsible for a horrific assault.
Starmer says he will look into this straight away and give Moore an answer
Irene Campbell (Lab) asks about phasing out the use of animals for medical research. She says alternative research methods are increasingly available. She asks for an immediate ban on the use of dogs in these experiments.
Starmer says the government has a strategy to encourage the use of alternative methods.