Marking Territory

Rushed off my feet yesterday, so didn't write about the vigil for the Chagos Islands. But the fight goes on.

The whole of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories; by extension, the whole of the Commonwealth Realms, their dependencies, and the states in free association with them; and, by further extension, the whole of the Commonwealth, now expanding beyond countries in any direct way related to the British Empire: that is the ancestral and cultural heritage of the Chagossians, as it is certainly mine, and probably also yours.

That heritage includes the Welfare State, workers' rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, and a base of real property from which every household can resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State, all bound up inseparably with the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, grammar schools, traditional moral and social values, controlled importation and immigration, and a realistic foreign policy.

And a realistic foreign policy is incompatible with subjugation to a foreign power, least of all where that entails evicting Britons from British territory and forbidding them ever to go back, even to the extent of David "Torturer" Miliband's declaration of the world's largest marine reserve in order to make any such return economically unviable.