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When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire

A while ago I treated you to a dissertation entitled “Does The Sun Set On The British Empire?”, and concluded that it doesn't. The UK's widely scattered overseas territories, sparse though they are, mean that the sun is still always shining, somewhere in the world, over British territory.

The current proposal suggests that the military base would be maintained under a long-term lease agreement, in which case British sovereignty would be lost, and BIOT would cease to exist. The SBAs are worth a few paragraphs, both because they’re relatively obscure, and because their existence, as sovereign military territories, perhaps has some slight relevance to how the situation on Diego Garcia might play out, should the Trump administration raise strong objections to the current plan. The relevance, here, to the current situation of Diego Garcia, is because the UK government made plans to hand the SBAs back to Cyprus in 1974, but were persuaded to retain sovereignty by the USA, which valued access to signals intelligence in the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as a convenient location from which to fly, among other things, U2 spy planes.

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