BOB SEELY: If Burnham was extra serious about Beijing than buses, we would not be so weak to China’s relentless aggression

When I was a Tory MP and our Parliamentary committee visited Beijing in 2018, we were given two extraordinary warnings.

First, that every room in the British embassy was bugged. Second, that a key part of our diplomacy was to ‘reassure’ China that Britain posed no threat.

I had to pinch myself.

Here was a Communist superpower building a military machine, conducting brazen espionage on British soil and pursuing global domination of the industries on which the West depends.

Meanwhile, Britain was shrinking its Royal Navy and our diplomats appeared to be engaged in Operation Kowtow. Since then, successive governments have only continued down this ruinous path.

This week, Parliament’s Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee delivered a damning verdict on Britain’s relationship with Beijing.

Despite its waffly name, the committee produced – unusually, by Parliament’s standards – a punchy report. It repeats what many of us have been saying for years: Britain has no coherent China strategy, no consistency and no clear idea where to draw the line.

Labour was ‘making up its China policy as it goes along’, said chairman Liam Byrne, who is a cut above most deeply uninspiring Labour MPs. Decision-making on China – the single greatest strategic threat facing our nation – was marked by ‘reactivity, inconsistency, and opacity’.

Coming from a Labour-dominated committee, that’s quite an indictment.

On China, our political classes seem trapped in a perpetual Groundhog Day. Warnings about the threat; promises of a coherent strategy to deal with it; and nothing delivered. Then another scandal, another espionage revelation, another economic or political humiliation. And round we go again.

Almost every expert group now recognises our economic dependency on China as a critical danger to the UK: they warn that through weakness, temerity and poor planning, we’ll allow Beijing to so dominate our supply chains and build up such influence here our political leaders will have no choice but to acquiesce to their demands. We will become a satrap of a Communist superpower.

It does not have to be this way. Yet the miserable irony is that Labour’s own economic policies are making Britain increasingly vulnerable to that very dependency.

The true reasons for our stagnation stare us in the face: the highest peacetime taxation in our history, crippling energy costs and a socialist Government that sees employers less as engines of prosperity than as convenient targets for ministers desperate to appease the trade unions.

And unsustainable and damaging levels of low-skilled immigration, alongside hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants, are only adding to the burden.

But Labour politicians don’t want to talk about that. Instead, they go cap in hand to China, hoping Beijing will somehow rescue Britain economically from the consequences of its own suicidally destructive policies. This is simply displacement activity.

If anything, I would argue this week’s Parliamentary report does not go far enough. There is a troubling naivety about its conclusions.

Take this statement: ‘Low-cost, increasingly high-quality Chinese imports are a boon to UK consumers at a time when household incomes are squeezed.’ Let me translate: China has deliberately exploited the rules of global trade to undercut our industries, drive our firms out of business and flood our markets with cheap imports.

The committee argues we should negotiate better market access and pursue fair trade. Good luck with that. China does not want free trade, but trade dominance over us.

Beijing’s economic model is built around strengthening its own industries, reducing dependence on foreign suppliers and expanding its influence abroad. In other words, there is no golden economic El Dorado waiting for us, a pot of gold at the end of Beijing’s rainbow.

The highly-respected IPAC – the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a coalition of more than 320 parliamentarians globally – recently produced a study, which is more honest than the one the trade committee produced.

China, under the Communist Party, is and will remain a threat to Britain economically and politically, it said. It offers limited opportunities for trade while exposing us to enormous strategic risks. IPAC, led by former Tory leader Iain Duncan-Smith MP, is spot on.

China is not interested in mutual growth. It is interested in using economics as a weapon: stripping power from the West and accumulating in Beijing.

China has grown rich through the theft of intellectual property and the aggressive exploitation of global trading rules to undercut Western firms. It does not play by the same rules, and it has no intention of doing so.

Yet, we still fail to take even the most basic steps to protect ourselves.

Take Net Zero. In our rush to decarbonise, we have become increasingly reliant on Chinese solar technology, even though researchers have uncovered serious evidence of forced labour involving Uyghurs in parts of the industry’s supply chains.

This is an utterly absurd arrangement: our zealotry forces up energy costs and either destroys business, or drives them away from our shores. Then, with all its cheap energy, partly derived from burning coal – the dirtiest pollutant on the planet – China sells us the solar panels that we need to drive our Net Zero obsessions.

If China’s President Xi Jinping actively controlled our politicians, he could not come up with a better policy to damage Britain.

But the contradictions do not end there. We have the National Security and Investment Act, designed to protect sensitive British assets from hostile acquisitions. And yet it was made deliberately weak so as not to damage Chinese investment in Britain. So what’s the point?

We have the Foreign Interference Reporting System to make foreign influence-peddling more difficult – but have not put China on the upper tier, which undermines the entire purpose.

We’ve spent years debating a deal that would transfer sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to China’s ally Mauritius. That agreement has stalled. But the wider question remains: why does Britain so often appear willing to entertain strategic concessions before establishing a coherent national security policy to protect us from China?

There has to be a better way. We need an honest appraisal of our policy towards China – which recognises that Beijing is a threat. It therefore must cover economics, politics, defence and technology.

While we are at it, let’s throw the cynical stance on slavery of China’s Communist rulers back in their faces.

Last week, the PM declared himself open to a formal apology for Britain’s role in the slave trade. I wonder if Andy Burnham has any idea that China – which now has untold influence in the Caribbean, having invested heavily in the critical infrastructure there – has quietly been encouraging the slavery reparations movement as a tool against the West.

And this, despite the fact it has been accused of practices tantamount to modern-day slavery. In response, let’s ban everything from China made with forced labour or slave labour.

This shouldn’t even be up for discussion. It should be part and parcel of ethical, global free trade championed by Britain.

Let’s shame China into behaving – and remind them that we were the nation that abolished slavery.

Sadly, Andy Burnham’s Government seems more interested in bus fares than Beijing.

Dr Robert Seely MBE is a military expert, former MP and author of the book The New Total War, out in paperback on November 10.