Dr Bob Seely MBE is a former MP who sat on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and is the author of The New Total War.
What on earth is happening with Keir Starmer’s Labour Government and China?
And why have our governing classes become so torn and confused that for a decade and a half we have collectively behaved like a Pushmi-Pullyu, trying to move in opposite directions, like the animal from Dr Doolittle.
The latest scandal, which has been playing out in the media, is the alleged binning of the trial of two men alleged to have spied for China -one of whom worked for the discredited China Research Group – because Starmer and his advisors are prioritising good relations with China over national security.
The allegations against the two, Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, are serious. According to a Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) report obtained and made public by the respected Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, the two men are alleged to have produced nearly three dozen reports for Chinese intelligence, ten of which were prejudicial to our national security. Both deny the allegations.
This material, some of it allegedly an exercise in mapping figures in the UK Parliament, found its way to senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in Beijing. I remember being told that my name was on such a list.
It’s true that neither of the accused had access to classified material. But reporting on gossip and human ‘vulnerabilities’ are nevertheless important building blocks of intelligence gathering. The accused were young. If they had been recruited, who knows where they might have ended up in 20 years? In Parliament as MPs, in the Foreign Office or perhaps as well-financed lobbyists?
I do not know if Cash and Berry are guilty. That should be for a court of law.
But what is becoming clear is that while the CPS wanted to bring charges, ministers did not. If the tampering of justice for political ends took place – and from a Government led by a human rights lawyer – that is a serious charge.
Yet this is just the latest of a growing line of decisions that are confirming a depressing pattern.
These include: the inexplicable refusal to put China on the enhanced tier of Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS) – and there is little point in FIRS without China and Russia both on it; an inability to decide on the Chinese super embassy whilst allegedly refusing to accept evidence from our security agencies, accepting an increasingly dangerous dependency on China in solar panels and across our economic supply chains, paying to give away the Chagos Island to a Chinese ally and a refusal to confront Chinese financial influence in our universities.
The list does not even begin to include China’s abuse of WTO rules, the growing evidence that Covid came from a Chinese lab or Chinas determination to ensure that Russia does not lose the Ukraine war. So what is happening?
Seemingly, Labour has decided to ignore national security warnings and pretty much abrogate out vital interests in a desperate – and almost certainly forlorn – attempt to attract Chinese investment. In doing so, it is offering itself in a supplicant relationship with a one-party communist superpower many of whose policies are actively damaging for the UK.
I’d love to know, for instance, how this aligns with Labour’s laughable attempts to play the patriotic card or pose as a champion of human rights – especially given China’s solar panels are almost certainly made with slave labour. Not only is this humiliating, but it’s almost certainly a major strategic error, as has been made clear by the US.
Reports now suggest that it is considering withholding some intelligence sharing.
Yet, this abject strategy follows a decade and a half of confusion.
That path was set after 2010. Prior to that, China’s relationship with Western nations was broadly positive. There were warning signs for sure; Intellectual Property was being stolen on an industrial scale and World Trade Organisation rules were being abused, but China was still seen as a friendly-ish, growing power.
From 2010, under new Conservative leadership, David Cameron and the callow George Osborne – both sadly Tony Blair acolytes – committed the UK to a ‘golden era’ with China, just as President XI started to take his country down an openly dictatorial route, threatening those abroad and building up an increasingly oppressive digital dictatorship at home.
As China’s malign direction became clear, the last Conservative Government was forced to adjust. The banning of Huawei from our 5G infrastructure was a turning point. With Iain Duncan Smith, Damien Green and others, we fought a rearguard action to make this happen. The CCP’s purpose in getting Huawei into our networks was, to put it bluntly, to dominate the future, both in terms of economics but also cyber espionage.
The more I learned during the campaign, the more staggered I was by what I found.
I found a conspiracy of silence, starting under New Labour when unquestioning civil servants sign-offed Huawei, to Minsters in the last Government reassuring Parliament that Huawei was a private firm and not therefore a state actor. A private firm? In a Communist state? Really? I’d expect such naivety from Labour, but others should know better. Worse, we were assured that GCHQ could handle the potential threat. Yet when I pinned their senior cyber spooks down, they admitted to me that they could probably keep a handle on the threat for 7 years – maximum.
Thanks in part to Donald Trump’s 2020 China chip announcement, we eventually won the Huawei battle, but at the time I felt I had wandered into the scenario of political thriller.
In July 2024 the tsunami of the general election took place and any semblance of policy collapsed before our eyes. Labour has abandoned not only its human rights agenda, but our calamitous net-zero strategy is driving more of our industry to China, which builds two new coal fired power stations a week to sell us the products that we have chased away from our shores. Our policy is one of national self-harm.
Given Labour politicians are wrapping themselves in the Union Jack, it’s truly astonishing.
At this point, the fallacious argument generally advanced by China realists is to present a false dichotomy: ‘work within the status quo’ versus ‘damaging confrontation’. It’s the same argument used by British appeasers against dictators for a century.
The answer is neither extreme, but a policy of robust scepticism over China and a determination to defend our national interest and what we stand for. In particular, whilst recognising that China is part of the global trading order, we need to insulate ourselves from overt and dangerous dependency – we need to ‘de-risk;’ our relationship as much as we can. If Australia, which is much closer to China and much more economically dependent, can do so, so can we. Yet we are doing the very opposite. We are doing what China wants, not what Britain should.
So what could we do?
Here are very brief suggestions in four paragraphs to produce a coherent China policy. It sees China as an adversary, albeit one that we need to interact with in a responsible manner. My ‘patriot policy’ combines the following:
First, national security is non-negotiable, so we get Chinese industrial spies – sorry, military PhD students – out of our universities as part of a wider reform of the university sector. We should name and shame – and prosecute where we can – anyone acting as covert agents of CCP influence. We have an honest conversation with China over its Confucius Institutes; either they stop peddling Communist propaganda on campuses or we will replace them with Taiwanese alternatives. I’d also sell weapons to Taiwan and do everything we can to build its defences to prevent an opportunistic Chinese invasion that will destroy the global economic and stability.
Second, Government should produce an annual statement on foreign economic dependency, especially but not exclusively on China. We need to understand our dependency on others to mitigate against it. We can use it as a call to action to diversity supply chains, and – combined with lowering energy prices – start on-shoring at least some industry which has left in previous years. If China moves against the US or Taiwan, we must have the freedom to act to support them without fearing the collapse of our economy.
We need to be clear what China’s aim is: its Communist rulers want us to be so dependent on them that when they go to war with the US or Taiwan, we – with other European nations – will no choice but to break our alliance with the US. Such a move would signal the end of West power and would be a century-long strategic catastrophe for the UK – yet that is the direction in which Sir Kier Starmer is taking us.
Third, we need an annual national report on military and non-military threats to the UK and Western democracy; everything from info ops to espionage, cyberattacks to economic stratagems, all the way through to military threats. Submissions should come direct from all departments, but led by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – with no watering down from weak Governments allowed. I’d suggest it be co-ordinated by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, the one body I trust – more or less – to deliver a report both robust and independent.
None of these happened under the last Gov’t, despite my pleas that they should – and none of this will happen anyway without deep reform of the Foreign Office, a body both depressingly defeatist and hostile to post-Brexit Britain. Will anything of the above change under this Government? Not a chance. The next Government? One can but hope.
But in the meantime, let’s be clear, our current China policy will bring neither prosperity nor a promotion of our values, but only long-term impoverishment and shame.
It is the policy of appeasers, not patriots.
