Keir Starmer’s approach to China could, like many of his policies, best be summed up as “well, it’s not as bad as the way the Tories did it”.
The Prime Minister has spent much of this week blaming the collapse of the China spying case on the ambiguity of the previous Conservative government over how to relate to Beijing. There are still serious questions about why the official tasked with providing witness statements for the trial – deputy national security adviser Matthew Collins – felt it was “important for me to emphasise” in those statements the Labour Government’s desire for “pursuing a positive economic relationship”.
But while this question is inconvenient for Starmer, to him it is still not as bad as the things the Conservatives did – or failed to do – about China when they were in power. It is a self-loathing position to take, essentially saying “we aren’t great, but at least we aren’t as bad as the other guys”.
What those three statements from Collins, published on Wednesday night, reveal though is quite how self-loathing the current government’s stance on China is, too: at the same time as there being an extraordinary wealth of evidence about Chinese espionage in this country, ministers were keen to improve relations and – as much as possible – not to talk about all the awkward spying stuff.
It is not just Labour, either: while the Conservative stance on Beijing over their 14 years in power could most kindly be described as “fluctuating”, successive Tory administrations were in the habit of relying on trade with China for its economic benefits while dealing privately with repeated attempts by the Chinese state to undermine “our people, prosperity and security” (Collins’s words again). And they were all far more comfortable with talking about the former than they were in being honest about the latter.
Part of that lack of honesty is driven by a patrician attitude we see across government that the public shouldn’t be told more than they really need to know. That attitude often turns up in big public scandals, where the people with power reasoned that too much information might frighten or confuse the public.
It is, of course, much easier to fall into the habit of keeping information private when we are talking about national security, which naturally operates in the shadows, and which relies on hostile states not knowing quite how much of their activities have been uncovered by the British intelligence services. But that habit also allows cover-ups, particularly when some of the security breaches may in fact have been as a result of naivety on the part of the British state in, say, allowing the Chinese such easy access to key parts of infrastructure.
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The problem is, though, that while politicians have liked to talk about the relationship with China as being a matter of holding the economic benefits in tension with the security risk, the two are not separate issues. Collins’s statements included another key line that while “China and the UK both benefit from bilateral trade and investment”, it was true that “China also presents the biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security”.
When there is any kind of nod to this reality by a politician, it tends to be clothed very carefully in language about how “we will co-operate where we can, compete where we need to, and challenge where we must”, a phrase found in both Labour’s 2024 manifesto and in Collins’s witness statement. A balder statement of the facts would be: we still need to trade with China to keep our economy going, but we also need to stay on top of their hostile activities to keep our economy going too.
Of course, ministers don’t just avoid being this blunt because that’s not the way politics and diplomacy are done. It is also because being too clear gives the impression that a real decision has been made, when all too often ministers of all stripes have been very content to avoid being the one to make anything resembling a definitive judgment on China (or indeed many of the other big, inconveniently complex issues facing our society).
Chinese officials were particularly interested in information about politicians like Tom Tugendhat – a China-sceptic sanctioned by the country in 2021 over comments about alleged human rights violations – because they were among the few who had actually made up their minds and wanted to be honest about the trade-offs that they were prepared to make for seeing China as more of a threat. Otherwise, ministers have been very content to leave officials like Collins to take decisions on the case.
This week, Kemi Badenoch expressed incredulity at that situation, but it was theatrical: she and her Conservative colleagues know full well that avoiding decisions and passing them onto officials is not an extraordinary event, but a hallmark of our modern politics.
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator magazine
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