Comment on Starmer pulls Chagos bill after Trump backlash
wewbull@feddit.uk 4 days ago
I never thought handing them over to Mauritius was the right thing. Using them as a naval base is also messed up but that wasn’t going anywhere.
So I see this a positive thing, but the optics for Starmer couldn’t be worse. It makes him look like Trumps lapdog.
steeznson@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’ve pretty much had the opposite reaction to this news. Starmer’s critics had painted the original decision as being the result of his legalistic tendencies triumphing over common sense. Personally, had totally imbibed that point of view because it fit with my preconceptions. (Possibly I was right and he’s using the recent anti-Trump sentiment as a smoke screen to give a post-hoc impression of competence.)
Hearing he had been acting pragmatically to curry favour with a notoriously transactional US president makes me view the original decision in a better light. If that’s true, he’s actually standing up to Trump by telling him to sort out the legality of the US base for himself. Pretty much every European leader had been taking the same tact of public flattery and private diplomacy before this week had Greenland spillover.
Sometimes I wonder if Starmer would need to put out a press statement saying, “DJT, eat shit” before he got any acknowledgement of representing the UK assertively on the world stage.