Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)

My Lords, I will be brief. I was going to intervene on the speech from the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, but we reached a point at which there was a triangulation of interventions such that, for a brief period, perhaps the only person who was unable to contribute to that speech was the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, himself. If we are to base this decision on where we stand on international law, the Government must explain much more clearly why they believed there was going to be an imminent binding ruling against us. At present, we have simply been served with an advisory position that, by definition, clearly does not hold any legal weight. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, has highlighted how weak the legal position is and that it would, in effect, be impossible to force us into a binding position. I do not want to reiterate all his points, but I very much support his amendment. As I think was mentioned earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, we have heard the opinion given to the Committee on this subject, which, in effect, is an opinion from a third party. It may be a very well-informed third party, but we have not heard directly from the Government themselves. The Government need to explain their opinion. The suspicion of many of us is that that silence—the absence of a watertight explanation from the Government—signals a lack of confidence that this is going to be binding on the UK. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, indicated, in the absence of a binding legal position, we should undoubtedly be looking towards the self-determination of the Chagossian people. Self-determination is more than simply independence, because it is clearly not self-determination if you give people only one choice. Self-determination is about the level of choice, and it is very clear that the Chagossian people want to maintain the link with the UK. At times, the Government, and some Members on Second Reading, disputed that, saying that there are other Chagossian voices who want to go down a different path. There is obviously a very good way to test that out: to pursue the self-determination of the Chagossian people. The noble Lord, Lord Hannan, noted that part of the complication stems from the fact that, in terms of the hierarchy of principles, we have seen the subjugation of self-determination to signing up to a fashionable support for anticolonialism. The noble Lord may well be right that this is the motivation of some people, but I would contend that some of the nations keenest to jump on the bandwagon of anticolonialism do not have a particularly good record themselves. China is perhaps the most colonial nation on the face of the earth. It is not the old 19th-century version of sending a gunboat and an invading army; it is a lot more insidious. No nation is more colonial in trying to spread its effective control over a range of third countries. I do not believe that China or many of the other countries lecturing us on this are in a good position to hand out lessons to the United Kingdom. As the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, indicated, we have a much better record on decolonisation. While there have been some problems, the UK does not have in its past an Algeria, an Indochina, a Belgian Congo or even a Mozambique, as other European countries do. Our record is much better.