CHAGOS DEAL UNDERMINES UK NATIONAL SECURITY, BLASTS SHADOW MINISTER

THE Shadow Security Minister has rubbished claims that the UK deal with the Chagos Islands is necessary for national security.

Tom Tugendhat also said he hoped Angela Rayner would veto the proposed Chinese super embassy in the City of London.

Speaking on GB News, he said: “The idea that if we don’t hand over [the Chagos] islands that have been British for over 200 years, have never seriously been claimed by Mauritius – nobody pretends are part of Mauritius, except in recent years, that the international telecoms union, which is a UN agency and is under Chinese chairmanship, that they will somehow block the digital spectrum is complete nonsense. It’s absolutely nonsense.

“And these stories are being made up as though there’s some sort of secret security reason. No. This is a daft deal being done to assuage some sort of colonial guilt or something. It’s completely ridiculous.

“The reality is, this deal should never have started. Yes, I know it happened when we were in government. We shouldn’t have allowed it. David Cameron stopped it first of all, when he was Prime Minister; he didn’t allow the conversations to happen. They started when he came back as Foreign Secretary and he stopped them.

“The idea that these are somehow necessary for national security is rubbish. They undermine it.

“It’s like deciding to give away your house and then paying to rent it. It’s completely insane. You wouldn’t say that that made your living arrangements more secure. Your family wouldn’t thank you for it.

“You end up with less, and you’re paying for the privilege.

“I think that there’s a few people who have somehow convinced officials that this is the sort of thing you need to do in order to look good at the UN. Well, I’m sorry, the job of the British government is not to look good at the UN. The job of the British government is to defend the British people.

“Of course we’ve got to uphold the law. Of course, we’ve got to make sure we stand by our treaties. But this isn’t even doing that.

“The International Court of Justice is much more like marriage counselling.”

Following his protest at the proposed site of a new Chinese super embassy, Tugendhat said: “There’s nothing wrong with the Chinese having an embassy in London, they’ve got an embassy in London. In fact, they’ve got embassy locations in different parts of London.

“What I question is the need for a super embassy and a super embassy right there.

“The Royal Mint and just opposite, the Tower of London, have guarded Britain’s economy. They’ve been the centre for printing or striking coins for a thousand years.

“And the idea that we should be handing over those sites to a country that is not just undermining our national security in various different ways, but threatening our economy.

“There are many people who are worried about their business, worried about their jobs, worried about their future, because their company has been hacked, because their IP has been stolen, because their ideas have been taken away and sent to China.

“Now that isn’t right now. Of course, there’s more the British government can do. We’ve got to make sure we’re bringing jobs home and stopping these daft environmental regulations that mean that they can’t be made by clean gas and instead are being made by dirty coal in China.

“But we’ve also got to stand up to people who are setting up illegal police stations in the UK, who are bullying people in the UK, and who are trying to steal our economic future.

“The point about the embassy there is, it sits at a location where protests outside are going to disturb the British economy.

“But the protest [on Saturday] was very large. There were four or five thousand people there, maybe more, and effectively it closed the roads.

“Now it was a Saturday, it doesn’t matter too much, but you can imagine that happening on a weekday. That will cost the British economy. That’s not the right place for it.

“Around that area, there have been various different reports pointing out various elements of the security challenge that that raises. That’s why it’s not the right location.

“Of course, the Chinese should have an embassy, but that doesn’t mean that we should have the CCP able to close down our city and able to put controls on our people.

“I think there’s been a long tradition of Labour of standing up for the British national interest. It was, after all, after Clement Attlee that we got the British nuclear deterrent.

“It was Labour who signed us up to NATO; negotiated by Winston Churchill, of course, but signed up to by Labour.

“I have faith that there are labour voices who can stand up for Britain’s National Interest. I really hope that Angela [Rayner] is going to be one of them.”