Readers' Letters: UK was wrong to turn over Chagos Islands to Mauritius

This astonishes me. The UK has long ceased to be a world power. The failed Suez operation was probably the last feeble hurrah. It is now a European country – one among many, and it needs to build its strength in that area to deter, if possible, the big bad wolf that is lurking about ready to seize on any tasty morsel which has not built a house of sufficient strength to deter him.

S Beck, Edinburgh

Some success

Another success trumpeted by Keir Starmer, after his victories over Donald Trump and Narendra Modi’s tariffs and the Europeans’ restrictions on trade access, has been the decolonisation of the Chagos Islands by persuading Mauritius to take them on but lease back the base on Diego Garcia. This has been achieved at a cost, estimated by the government of £3.4 billion over the 99 years of the initial lease, but estimated as something more like £30bn by the Opposition. The Chagos Islanders, forcibly evacuated from their palm-fringed beaches and settled in Crawley, stay there despite their desire to return, but are being bought off with a £40 million Trust Fund.

The main user of the base is the United States, though it would (I suppose) be available to us if we wanted to fight a war with a neighbouring state bordering on or in the Indian Ocean, such as the Maldives, or to fly warplanes in support of the USA in the Persian Gulf or over Gaza. Nevertheless, there has been no mention of the USA contributing to the cost of this trend-setting exercise in decolonisation.

How many more such triumphs can we afford?

James Scott, Edinburgh

Suffer little children

Sometimes a sentence simply leaps from the page when you read it. Christine Jardine (Perspective, 26 May) wrote one such sentence with reference to Gaza: “It's long past the point when sufficient adjectives are available to encapsulate the horror.”

That continuing, if not intensifying, horror includes the massacre of thousands of children in Gaza and the maiming of thousands more. One stricken mother is mourning the loss of nine of her ten children, killed in a lethal bomb strike. As if bombs weren't enough, there's also the equally lethal starvation.

It's sometimes said that a mark of civilisation is how we treat our children. Benjamin Netanyahu is fond of Biblical references, in particular about Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank.

If he turned the pages over to the New Testament, he would find the status given to children at the very centre of God's Kingdom.

Were that equally so in God's Kingdom on earth.

Ian Petrie, Edinburgh

Wake-up call

Scots ought to be alarmed. Despite the Supreme Court upholding what, in essence, most Scots already thought about what defines a man and a woman we are seeing kickback.

Nicola Sturgeon has unashamedly backed her pro-trans outlook forcefully and now around 50 MSPs have also expressed disquiet about exactly who can use the Ladies and Gents toilets.

The whole idea of the court judgment was to give clarity but it seems not everyone wants to accept the outcome. What hope is there for Holyrood when many of its MSPs are wanting to adjust the court's verdict?

Surely this must be a wake-up call as to the value of a legislature that wants to only pick the laws that suit it?

Gerald Edwards, Glasgow

A suggestion

David Bol's and your lead article's accurate, heartfelt accounts of the Scottish Government's zealous and suicidal Just Transition debacle were well and truly “Trumped” by the US President urging the Prime Minister to “stop with the costly and unsightly windmills, and incentivise modernised drilling in the North Sea, where large amounts of oil lie waiting to be taken” (24 May).

It’s clear that the sedimentary rocks will have to melt with the sun before Labour or the SNP let that happen.

I'd like to see the POTUS send a follow-up tweet along these lines: “… in fact , if you guys don't get your act into gear, sack Miliband, cancel that stoopid green partnership deal with Norway and get real about oil and gas we're gonna do a Greenland and buy Aberdeen and do it for ya. It's goin' cheap anyway. In fact, make that Aberdeen and the North Sea, and throw in the UK when you're at it, you'd make a great 52nd state after Canada."

Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire

Strange thoughts

Within a few days I have found myself in total agreement with the SNP and Donald Trump. Normally, I would tend instinctively to take the opposite view to either, on most subjects.

But when the SNP decided to railroad through the OK for the Flamingo Park development on Loch Lomond, I cheered. That is simply because the hapless Scottish Greens had fought against it and anything they are against I tend to think will surely be best for the country. Mr Trump's advice to Sir Keir Starmer was also welcomed on my part. He claims there is a “century” of oil and gas still out there in the North Sea and implied Ed Miliband's Net Zero is going unnecessarily way, way too fast and seemed in the hands of zealots. Drill, Baby, Drill, was good advice.

Not a scientific way to come to decisions, perhaps, but, I am certain, absolutely correct.

Alexander McKay, Edinburgh

Very soft power

“An independent Scotland would, with its fellow EU members, write the EU rules. Scotland would no longer be a rule-taker, as it was when the UK was in the EU, but one of the EU rule-makers – including on the CFP” (E Campbell, Letters, 24 May).

Who could seriously imagine the incompetent, Europhile SNP successfully challenging Brussels over anything? Why would they have any more luck at renegotiating the likes of the Common Fisheries Policy than David Cameron had before Brexit? E Campbell is also working on an unsafe assumption that Europe would enthusiastically welcome some new left-wing state boasting perennial double-digit budget deficits as a member. Besides, who wants to be manacled to a bureaucratic, protectionist block whose share of world trade has declined by a quarter since 2002?

Many voters on the Continent are currently asking themselves that same question.

Scottish separatist economic policies seem to consist of wealth taxes, building more wind farms and extending a begging bowl to Europe. They offer no concrete answers to awkward questions, only wishful thinking and empty slogans.

Martin O’Gorman, Edinburgh

Embrace EFTA

Robert Menzies incorrectly states that EFTA has signed up to the Common Fisheries Policy and is subject to EU quotas (Letters, 23 May). EFTA has its own annual negotiations with the EU over fishing rights, which is what the UK has lost through signing up to surrendering UK waters to the EU for 12 years. The loss of annual negotiations angers UK fishermen.

The EU is a political as well as an economic union. It has its own parliament, its own council and its own commission. These are political institutions and for Mr Menzies to state the “EU is not a political union” is inaccurate.

EFTA successfully sells into the EU block with a population of 450 million, with similar access to EU states. Mr Menzies states that the UK would not have benefited from this as EFTA had only a market of 20m, suggesting that Switzerland only sells to Norway and Iceland and Liechtenstein and vice versa. This is nonsense, EFTA nations benefit greatly from free trade with the EU, which is something the Government wants. By not joining EFTA, with its more comprehensive relationship, free trade with the EU will take years to negotiate.

The Government may not join EFTA for political reasons as parties like Reform would chastise it for taking the UK back into Europe. YouGov polling, however, shows 55 per cent of UK voters think it was wrong to leave the EU. Joining EFTA provides economic benefits without all the political baggage from joining the EU.

Neil Anderson, Edinburgh

Thanks, Terry

Many of us who remember Terry Smith will welcome Marina Piper’s interesting obituary of the Forth Ports Property Director (24 May).

As well as in Leith, he was crucial to Rosyth’s transformation from naval base to industrial site, and instrumental in the relocation of my company, Oceaneering International Inc, from Leith’s old and rundown Henry Robb shipyard site (now Ocean Terminal) to a new state-of-the-art factory we built on Rosyth’s waterfront – ideal for manufacturing and loading out our umbilical cables either on reels or carousel-to-carousel for offshore installation in the North Sea and worldwide. We were the first major firm to establish there.

Opened by Princess Anne, its first 25 years were celebrated last year. Thank you, Terry!

John Birkett, St Andrews, Fife

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