Chagos Islands To Remain British.
It was announced on 10 April 2026 that the British Labour government had given up its attempt to cede the British Indian Ocean Territory which includes the Chagos Islands of which Diego Garcia is the most important (in size and as a vital strategically important US Airforce base) to Mauritius and then pay over time more then £30 billion to lease back the base (see Blogs 2888, 2876, 2872, 2842, 2876, 2728 and 2580).
This followed criticism of the plan by United States President Trump who described the plan as an “act of total weakness” (which was humiliating for the hapless British prime minister, Starmer, who had spent well over a year kowtowing to Trump in the hope that a successful foreign policy would rescue him from domestic unpopularity) and the running out of time for the parliamentary bill which would enable the sovereignty of the islands to be transferred to Mauritius.
Meanwhile the transfer had been strongly opposed by the former inhabitants of Chagos and their descendants who had been expelled from the islands in the early 1970s and who had formed a Chagos ‘government in exile’ under ‘Acting First Minister’ Misley Mandarin who had landed with a small group of ‘Chagossians’ on île du Coin and set up a camp there and begun restoring the buildings and graves of their ancestors on the island. After Starmer’s government attempted to remove them, the Supreme Court of the British Indian Ocean Territory (yes, such an entity really does exist) ruled that the ‘resettlers’ could not be expelled and so Misley and his group remain on Île du Coin.
The British government remains keen to carry on with its transfer of sovereignty but for the moment the plan has been ‘shelved’ and any wise government will probably recognise that any revisiting of it will cause it more trouble than it is worth.
Hence, from the philatelic point of view, the BIOT remains a potential philatelic entity even though the UPU has ruled against BIOT stamps and if the resettlement of the islands continues then we may well see postal facilities being set up there and an eventual resumption of stamp issues.
The news of the British government’s climb down as reported in The Times and by the BBC -
