Contribution
I think lots of positions will be endlessly stated on that; I am not going to take it any further now. I do not see anyone changing their minds about that, but I would like to address the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, who suggested that this was really about a reluctance ever to cede sovereignty and to allow any colony to go its own way.
One of the peculiar features of British rule overseas was the nature of its dissolution. The British Empire, unlike most others, had a self-dissolving quality because it had the democratic self-determination principle that was adumbrated in this House and then exported. Very few imperial moments ended so peacefully. Yes, there were tragic exceptions in Kenya, Cyprus, India and Palestine, I suppose. Ireland was a slightly different story, because it was not treated as a colony but as part of the country itself. But those were exceptional; in most places, including most Caribbean countries and Malaya, independence happened without a shot being fired in anger because there was that belief in self-determination. Quite often the imperative to decolonise, as my noble friend Lord Lilley suggests, overrode self-determination.
Some noble Lords will, I am sure, remember that in 1956 Malta voted in a referendum, by 77%, to turn itself into three Westminster constituencies and become part of the United Kingdom. It was turned down and, soon after, Malta ended up not just independent but outside NATO and the Commonwealth, and pursuing an extremely unhelpful line. During the Maltese process of accession to the European Union, I discussed this with Dom Mintoff, who was still alive. He was an old and revered figure at that time, and he said, “My wife is British and I love Britain, but how do you expect anyone to respond to being treated in that way?”
I mentioned Malta because there was a similar debate, which I do not think has come up in any of your Lordships’ deliberations, in one of the parties in Mauritius in the 1960s about whether to adhere to the United Kingdom and seek representation at the other end of this building. The idea that this is really about some kind of grasping imperial power refusing to let go is wrong in the generality and especially wrong in this case, because we are refusing to recognise the wishes of the people concerned—the only people who ever formed a permanent population of the Chagos Archipelago between 1714 and the early 1970s.
Self-determination does not always mean independence. It means exactly that: you can self-determine to be part of a larger bloc. The referendum in Scotland in 2014 was an act of self-determination; it did not stop being self-determination because of the referendum result. That is what we mean by democracy. I fear that self-determination, which is a core principle of the United Nations and of the legal order that we have defended even since the Atlantic charter in 1941, is being overridden here for no good reason at all. This is what makes me so frustrated. Every time I sit down to draft what I want to say about these amendments, I start getting angry all over again about the utter needlessness of it all, for the reasons set out by my noble friend Lord Lilley. We are surrendering to a case where there is no jurisdiction over us. If Ministers think that that is wrong, I would love to hear the Minister explain why the Government will not accept my noble friend’s amendments.
It seems that what we are doing here is creating a hierarchy of norms, not by the intrinsic importance of their jurisdictional power, but on the basis of taste and fashion. The principle of self-determination is thus ranked below the principle of general decolonisation—getting out of the way—and that is fundamentally because of a transient public mood. It is considered unfashionable to have flags with little Union Jacks in the top corner, which sets a very dangerous precedent.
It may be—I do not know—that the Government will argue that the reason we are following this non-binding resolution, which is not a legal judgment, is not because there is some hidden reason that we really have to, as my noble friend suggests, but, they may say, because we have to give an example. It would be because the international order is in danger; countries are throwing their weight around; Machtpolitik is prevailing; the whole post-war order is looking shaky; even the United States, on which it rested, is now asserting its interests without recourse to treaties. Therefore, we need to set a lead.