In Tutela Nostra Limuria

Not that anyone could tell.

Someone called David Miliband lied to Parliament in order to create the world's largest "marine reserve" where the Chagossians are properly entitled to live, thereby ensuring that they could never return. Today, that "marine reserve" was ruled legal.

Even taking it seriously in its own terms, it seems that turtles and sharks matter more than people. Including, on British territory, proud British Citizens who are far more loyal to this country than we have any right to expect. Every so often, I really do come over all Spiked Online.

The American lease has resulted in our territory's being used to bomb Afghanistan, Iraq, and who knows where else in this Drone Age, as well as for extraordinary rendition flights, and it is being lined up to bomb Iran even if Britain does not formally participate in any such war. "Marine reserve", indeed. Just not the marines or the reserves that that term would most immediately suggest.

But that lease runs out in 2016, with an option for renewal next year. Let that renewal be subject to a referendum of the very easily identifiable British Citizens of Chagossian origin or extraction.

British Overseas Territories, such the one from which I come originally and with which I remain in close contact in this electronic age (there is no sight quite like that of elderly Saint Helenians peering into Skype), do not have the right to conduct their own foreign policy. That is just not part of the deal.

Or, rather, it never used to be. The Falkland Islanders have had a referendum, and the result, with which I was as delighted as I was unsurprised, has been deemed to settle the matter. The terms of the deal have changed. Obviously. Or are the rules different depending on the skin colour of the British Citizens involved?

The American military-industrial imperium has also thoroughly mistreated British Citizens on the British territory that is Ascension Island, the recent granting of a Blue Ensign flag to which indicates that it has now become, as it is true that it never really used to be, a permanent and distinct community under the British Crown in Parliament.

We know what abuses have been and are being committed on and from our territory in the middle of the Indian Ocean. In view of unfolding events, what abuses have been and are being committed on and from our territory, a major international listening post, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean?

And how long before another remarkable lot of turtles, as depicted on the Coat of Arms and therefore also on the new flag, is made the excuse to declare the whole place a "marine reserve"? There are also sharks.