The British Foreign Office has often used the excuse that resettling the Chagossians would be prohibitively expensive. But, when answering a parliamentary question that I put to the European Commission recently, the commissioner responsible for development policy, Andris Piebalgs, indicated that the Commission would consider any request from the UK for co-financing the Chagossians’ repatriation, which the EU fully and rightly accepts as a sovereign UK matter.