The collapse of the case against the two men accused of spying for China – just days before the trial was due to start – is one of the most extraordinary stories. Following the dots simply doesn’t work.
The two, former parliamentary aide Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry, were charged in 2023 with allegedly passing information which threatened the security of this country.
The implication was the CCP regime in Beijing was of hostile intent. The case collapsed after prosecutors said they could not obtain government evidence confirming that China was a national security threat at the time of the alleged offences.
The Director of Public Prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, was told that the People’s Republic of China was “a challenge”, according to an assessment of the last government, not a threat – let alone an enemy. And you can’t spy for a “challenge” nation or power, so the charges were dropped.
It throws up the bigger questions of the nature of neutrality and who, in today’s global confusion, is an ally and who is an enemy.
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Bluntly, China is a threat we have to trade with, and judging by the Starmer administration’s posture, it is now a frenemy.
But the case for “enemy” is rather compelling. Trade, for example, does not always seem beneficial for Britain. Negligible tariffs have allowed Chinese electric vehicles to dominate the UK market. Dumping of cheap Chinese chemical products into the British market is cited as the main reason that UK chemical industries in the North East are in financial trouble.
There is a similar story on security matters. At the recent defence industry exhibition, DSEI, the Ministry of Defence’s Cyber and Specialist Operations Command, which gathers all forms of defence intelligence, both human and electronic, stressed the extent of the cyber threat from China.
The cyber services tracked some 90,000 cyber attacks and trolls in under two years. The largest amount came from Russia, its affiliates in the criminal and espionage world, followed by China, with Iran and North Korea getting in on the cyber hostilities.
It is this kind of activity, the continuous probing, testing and hacking, that led the authors of the Strategic Defence Review, Lord Robertson and Fiona Hill, to say that we are in a state of conflict. “We are at war” both Robertson and Hill have said privately. The Government doesn’t like them saying so.
The case that China is an enemy got stronger still this June. The then foreign secretary David Lammy announced that, after all, the Government wouldn’t publish its major study into UK relations with China, the China Audit.
The intelligence assessment was too sensitive for publication. Indeed several political paragraphs in the Lammy statement itself were redacted. However, it does use the word “threat” on several occasions, warning “the audit underlined the extent of Beijing’s support for the Kremlin”.
The Starmer approach to China has looked, on the one hand, warm. The National Security Adviser, Jonathan Powell, visited the Chinese foreign minister in July – a meeting the Government hesitated to disclose. He is seen as the architect of the generous deal over the Chagos Islands, costing £10bn, deemed extremely favourable to China. He is also understood to have been involved in the move to drop the recent prosecution, though Downing Street has strongly denied suggestions of government interference.
And just a few weeks before his retirement, the head of the armed services, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, was despatched to meet opposite numbers in China, again with no official explanation from the Government.
Yet on the other hand, the Government’s plans outlined in the defence review now seem to come from an Alice in Wonderland playbook. Why plan to spend so much money on submarines, including the unaffordable AUKUS programme with the US and Australia to counter China’s influence, if you’re not sure China is friend or foe?
The Government needs to decide who are our friends and enemies, their actual value and threat. Above all they need to help us understand what friends and foes think of us and what they’re likely to do about it. The Government must publish these conclusions, as they so conspicuously failed to do in June. And Sir Keir Starmer must end his incoherent attitude towards China.
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