Sir Iain Duncan Smith

Indeed. In fact, rather than us winning the argument, the Government have simply lost the argument. That is even more powerful, because they are making no effort to explain it. I honestly feel sorry for Ministers. I have sat in government, and I know that Ministers are sent out to bat and to defend the indefensible, which they have to do well. I have a high regard for the hon. Member for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, as he knows, but good luck to him on this one—he will need to make his speech brief, because we will intervene. I simply say that the cost is nonsense. My hon. Friend the Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans) brilliantly laid it out, so I will not repeat the specifics. As I said to him, having sat in government, I know how these figures are put together. There is no way on earth that a Government should use net present value for a foreign treaty that covers a period of over 90 years—it is an absurdity. We have no control over the social obligations in Mauritius, which may shift and change. We have no control over what the Mauritians’ economic policy will be and the impact of inflation. The treaty can only really be used for domestic issues, and I think this is a shimmy by the Government to try to get the cost down, absurdly, to £3.4 billion, when in fact it is £34.7 billion. That figure is probably wrong, because I think it will be more than that over the long term. This is another absurdity and an excuse to be got rid of. All the other points have been made, so I will not dwell on them, but I do want to dwell on this point. It was wrong to have chucked the Chagossians off their islands in 1966—it was a bad decision and an immoral one, and we need to own up to that fact. My Government should have done so, and we should own up to the fact that we owe the Chagossians something better. The hon. Member for Bicester and Woodstock (Calum Miller), who speaks for the Liberal Democrats, has talked about a referendum, and that is one of the possibilities, but I will tell the House what I would do if I was in government. I would say to the Chagossians, “Listen, we’re not going to do the deal with Mauritius; we’ll do the deal with you. You’ll be allowed back to the islands, with full rights, and we’ll negotiate with you on how we will work together, with British control overall but with you being paid.” I would rather pay the money to them, so that they can live their lives better, than to Mauritius. We know that many of the Chagossians have had terrible problems in Mauritius and have been treated like second-class citizens. For that reason, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has come out and said that the treaty should not go ahead, and I agree with that. There is both a factual problem and a human rights problem with the treaty, and there is an overarching threat to our freedom and to the freedom of those elsewhere in the free world. If we give way, let the treaty go through and do not end this nonsense, we will forever have it over our heads that we lost control of the most critical area in the world.