NESTLING beside Gatwick Airport, half-way between London and Brighton, is the town of Crawley.

Among its claims to fame are that it is the home ground of England manager Gareth Southgate, while the original line up of the rock band, The Cure, were all local lads.

Even more interesting is that this West Sussex town is home to the largest Chagossian population in the world. Around 3000-strong, these are some of the Chagos islanders and their descendants, forcibly evicted from their Indian Ocean archipelago in the late 1960s.

I have personally met members of this community and they are genuine and lovely people, which makes their wretched, deplorable and unlawful treatment by successive UK governments all the more despicable. Her Majesty’s subjects have been lied to, cheated, racially abused and legally bludgeoned, by Her Majesty’s Government. Any innocent who thinks that the British State has shaken off its imperial baggage should consider carefully this very sorry and very recent story.

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In 1965, as part of a deal to grant Mauritian independence, the Chagos Archipelago was split off from the Colony and came to form the British Indian Ocean Territory. The game was quickly afoot and, as we now know, the plan all along was to get rid of the indigenous islanders and supplant them with a vast military base. Unfortunately for the reputation of the Foreign Office, their brutal, racist manoeuvres of the 1960s were exposed by WikiLeaks and the 30 year rule. The revelations provide one of many reasons why the US authorities, with the willing connivance of their British underlings, are currently so keen on sending Julian Assange to an early grave.

The following notorious cable was sent from the UK mission to the UN, to the Colonial Office head, Denis Greenhill (inset) in August 1966. It indicated that the permanent under-secretary’s view, as minuted, was that “the purpose of the exercise was to get some rocks which will remain ours; there will be no indigenous population except the seagulls”.

The later Baron Greenhill of Harrow responded, by hand, as follows: “Unfortunately along with the birds go some few Tarzans or Man Fridays whose origins are obscure, and who are hopefully being wished on to Mauritius etc. When this has been done, I agree we must be very tough and a submission is being done accordingly.”

The civil servants revelling in this cynical, racist game of real politic were all thought honourable men (in every sense since they all eventually found their way into the House of Lords) ennobled by the monarchy whose subjects they had so cruelly abused and then disposed of them as worthless aboriginal sub-humans.

And so, between 1967 and 1973, almost 2000 Chagos islanders were expelled by a combination of trickery, bribery, threats of starvation and brute force. Even their dogs and animals were slaughtered. Most of the islanders were deposited in Mauritius and condemned to a life of destitution, but some escaped to Crawley and set up shop. In their stead came not sheep, as in the Scottish Highlands, but the vast American airbase of Diego Garcia.

A few MPs spoke up for the islanders – notably the late Tam Dalyell, Alex Salmond, Jeremy Corbyn, former MP Dr Paul Monaghan and their current local MP Henry Smith – enraged that third generation Chagossians are not even guaranteed the right to remain in the UK. Mostly, however, the British Establishment of all three Westminster parties have closed ranks, and their eyes, to this barbaric, colonialist, criminal state behaviour. The islanders took up legal cudgels in the early 2000s, petitioning for the right to return to their island paradise. In May 2006 they won a spectacular victory in the English High Court only to have the ultimate prize snatched from them in the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords in a 3-2 decision.

The Government petitioner in that shabby, corrupt affair in 2008 was then foreign secretary David Miliband – something to remember next time he appears on screen in shiny armour on behalf of the International Rescue Committee. Armed with the legal dynamite of the WikiLeaks revelations, the Mauritian government entered the fray and in a series of increasingly embarrassing cases have completely eviscerated the British Government in both the United Nations and international courts.

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Britain now stands outside international law in refusing to hand over the islands forthwith. The only remaining supporter of the totally isolated global Britain is their military tenant, the US. In truth, the Mauritian moral – as opposed to legal – claim on the Chagos islands is pretty tenuous given they are some 2200 kilometres distant, about one third of the distance from London to Mauritius.

The link was one of convenience of colonial administration as opposed to any real societal connection, and indeed the Chagossian refugees were treated quite deplorably 50 years ago in Mauritius. However, from a Mauritian standpoint, reclaiming the islands now represents a bonanza in terms of access to vast maritime resources and territorial waters.

The community to whom these islands really belong are unlikely to get too much of a look in, although the Mauritian government is now showing some increased sensitivity to their claims. From the standpoint of the world community, however, the Mauritian case is substantially more just than allowing this colonial throwback to continue. The planting of the Mauritian flag this week on part of the archipelago represents the shape of things to come. Britain’s days in control are numbered, although the good old US military will almost certainly remain at post.

There was good reason why the British imperial map was coloured red. Thank God the sun is finally setting on this outrage of Empire and may God forgive those who committed this disgrace.