Mark my words: Starmer is set to approve China’s ‘super embassy’
Keir Starmer is set to travel to China and has appealed for business leaders to accompany him. You don’t do that if you’re anticipating holding a foreign government to account, says Eliot Wilson
At the end of this month, Sir Keir Starmer is due to travel to China for the first visit by a British prime minister since Theresa May in 2018. The ground has been thoroughly prepared: Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, David Lammy (when foreign secretary), business and trade secretary Peter Kyle and Ed Miliband, energy secretary, have all gone east in the 18 months since Labour came to power.
The UK’s relationship with China is currently fraught by several issues. The People’s Republic is awaiting, increasing impatiently, a much-delayed ministerial decision on its proposed new embassy at Royal Mint Court in east London; 78-year-old Hong Kong businessman Jimmy Lai, a British national, is awaiting sentence after being convicted of national security offences by the Hong Kong High Court and is said to be in poor health; and ministers are still smarting after the collapse of the trial of two British citizens accused of spying for China.
Still, you may think, after a year and a half in office, Labour would have a clear, coherent and practical policy governing its engagement with Beijing. After all, its 2024 manifesto promised an “audit of our bilateral relationship” to “improve the UK’s capability to understand and respond to the challenges and opportunities China poses”.
Unfortunately, the “China audit” was not completed until a year after the general election. Then-Foreign Secretary David Lammy told the House of Commons last June that “much of the audit was conducted at a high classification and that most of the detail is not disclosable without damaging our national interests”, and he therefore provided only a “broad summary of its recommendations”.
Lammy’s report of the audit demonstrated several contradictory conclusions, and he laid them before the Commons as if that somehow provided a resolution. Ultimately, he recited meaningless verbiage: “The UK’s approach to China will be founded on progressive realism, taking the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be… we will co-operate where we can and challenge where we must.”
This simply repeated Labour’s manifesto rhetoric – “We will co-operate where we can, compete where we need to, and challenge where we must” – and gave the strong impression that the government had simply run away from difficult decisions.
Actions not words
So we must judge the government by its actions, and ministers have been consistently conciliatory and accommodating. A pledge in opposition to declare China’s treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as genocide was abandoned in favour of the milquetoast formulation of “raising our concerns at the highest levels of the Chinese government”.
The Director General of MI5, Sir Ken McCallum, has made clear the severity of the threat posed by China, but the PRC has not been placed in the enhanced tier of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme brought in by the National Security Act 2023. It is also widely expected that the Royal Mint Court embassy plans will be approved on 20 January – otherwise Beijing may cancel the Prime Minister’s visit.
There have been moments of friction. Peter Kyle’s Beijing trip for the UK-China Joint Economic and Trade Commission last September was almost cancelled by the Chinese after a visit to Taiwan earlier in the year by Douglas Alexander, then Minister for Trade Policy. But that was hardly a defiant act that echoed around the world.
The latest indication of the government’s approach is an appeal from Downing Street for business leaders to accompany the Prime Minister to China. This tells us two things. The first is that Starmer does not anticipate taking a tough and potentially confrontational stance towards his hosts on any issue. A politician who thinks there is even half a chance of a stand-up row with his foreign counterparts does not bring an audience of business leaders to stand awkwardly outside the door and listen to the shouting.
It is also revealing about the government’s perception of Beijing. Labour is transfixed by the idea of the PRC as a cash cow, a magical source of potential trade and investment which will, to use a Starmerism, “turbocharge” the UK’s economic growth. When Reeves visited Beijing a year ago, the government’s official narrative stressed the “lifting of market access barriers” and “agreements worth £600m to the British economy”. It added that the government “continues to challenge China on areas of disagreement”, but it is hard to see that as more than a formality.
Everything Labour wants to achieve is predicated on the economy growing, and so far it has barely risen above stagnant. Taxation and expenditure are at post-War record levels, public services are threadbare and the armed forces are not ready or equipped for the tasks demanded of them. Keir Starmer is hardly the first European to dream of the riches of Cathay, but he cannot pretend indefinitely that China can be treated both as a source of huge trade and investment and as a threat to national security. Eventually he will have to pick a lane, but his recruitment drive for business representatives suggests he has already done so. It is cap in hand, not donning a helmet.
Eliot Wilson is a writer and historian; senior fellow for national security at the Coalition for Global Prosperity and contributing editor at Defence on the Brink