You’ve conflated the military control of the area with the setting up of the conservation areas. Charles Clover, a reporter and conservationist, writes a detailed account of getting these areas set up in his (frankly brilliant) book Rewilding the Sea, by badgering and leveraging contacts within the admiralty, coming to agreements with local fishermen to ensure their livelihood and financial security, and generally fighting an up-hill battle to set up a world-first conservation area. He addresses the controversies around the Chagos island in his book, and states that while he wholeheartedly disagrees with what is essentially a military occupation of the islands, he’s not above using that situation to achieve the environmental protection he was aiming for.

I really hope that this doesn’t affect the ocean nature reserves around them.

And I’ll be fucked if I can get them right first time round half the time!

As opposed to the conservatives, who just connive and scam and destroy public services. Labour have been in power for a couple of months, and have twelve years of the worst government imaginable to try to correct. The utter incompetence, corruption and mismanagement of the conservatives have left them with a multi-billion deficit to try to correct, I’d be shocked if they got everything right in trying to steer that sinking ship