Is China an enemy of Britain? The Director General of MI5 evidently thinks so. In 2023 Sir Ken McCallum declared that more than 20,000 people in the UK had been approached covertly online by Chinese spies.
Sir Ken spoke about the ‘epic scale’ of Chinese espionage. Recruiting informants online would surely be interpreted by most reasonable people as an unfriendly act. It’s what an enemy would do.
However, our weak and pusillanimous Government doesn’t regard China as an enemy. It has just stopped the trial of two British-born men who had been accused under the Official Secrets Act of spying for China.
Now we’ll never know whether or not Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry were guilty of the charges which the Crown Prosecution Service originally brought against them following a thorough police investigation.
According to the Daily Telegraph, the trial was scrapped after National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell, who was personally appointed by Sir Keir Starmer, ruled that the Government could not brand China an ‘enemy’ in court.
Christopher Berry leaves Westminster Magistrates’ Court in central London last year, having been accused of spying for China
We’ll never know whether or not Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry were guilty of the charges which the CPS originally brought against them, writes Stephen Glover
It is almost inconceivable that the Prime Minister was unaware of this decision. Attorney General Lord Hermer, who is responsible for the Crown Prosecution Service, must have been involved.
Starmer, Powell, Hermer: here is the familiar dopey trio that recently handed over £35billion of our money to Mauritius to rent a base on the island of Diego Garcia, for which a previous British government had already paid more than 50 years ago.
Jonathan Powell apparently believed that calling China an enemy – which would have been necessary to bring a charge under the Official Secrets Act – would have been at odds with the Government’s publicly stated view. This is that China poses only a ‘geostrategic challenge’.
Labour has been nuzzling up to China since winning power. Rachel Reeves went to Beijing in January to flash her teeth at members of the Chinese Communist Party, and to drum up more trade and investment. One can only wonder what they made of her.
The sinuous Jonathan Powell slipped off to Beijing in July to powwow with his opposite number. Though this wasn’t exactly a clandestine trip, you would need to have been a reader of the Chinese state press to learn about it.
I’ve studied Mr Powell since the days when he advised Tony Blair about making concessions to the IRA. We can speculate confidently that the Government didn’t want a trial involving alleged spies that might have embarrassed the Chinese Communist Party.
Yet this was no trivial matter. According to a story in last Thursday’s Guardian, ‘British prosecutors suspected that China’s fifth most senior official was in receipt of intelligence from Westminster in a controversial and now abandoned espionage case’.
The paper claimed the Crown Prosecution Service said in April 2024 that a ‘senior member of the Chinese Communist Party and a politburo member’ had received ‘politically sensitive information’ from two British researchers who were charged with spying for China.
This important person is understood by the Guardian – which may have received assistance from our own security services in publishing its story – to be Cai Qi, the ‘de facto chief of staff to [President] Xi Jinping’.
Rachel Reeves meets with Chinese vice-premier He Lifeng while visiting Beijing in January
In other words, this is big stuff. Things might have been said during a court case that would have alienated the Chinese leadership. It’s not hard to see why the Government preferred the trial not to go ahead.
How supine and myopic Labour is in its dealings with China. David Cameron and George Osborne were misguided in sucking up to Beijing ten years ago, but we have learnt a lot since then about the repressive and expansionist nature of the Chinese regime.
China is a major trading partner of the UK, though it exports much more to us than we do to them. Britain trades with all kinds of disagreeable countries, and China is no exception.
But this trade should not blind naive Labour panjandrums to the reality of China – which is that it is our enemy. Remember that no less authoritative a person than the Director General of MI5 says that it is engaged in spying on an ‘epic scale’.
I’m not saying we should prepare for war against China. We are far too feeble to contemplate that. I have misgivings about the under-resourced British aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales enraging the Chinese by recently sailing through the contested South China Sea with a depleted carrier group.
This is the other, and contradictory, aspect of British policy. Reeves and Powell butter up the Chinese, and we have just sent a new sympathetic ambassador to Beijing. Yet under pressure from the Americans, who want us to play our traditional supportive role, we are prepared to annoy the monster.
But at home the Government bends over backwards to please Beijing, which will almost certainly be allowed to build a new mega-embassy in the City of London despite concerns about eavesdropping on highly sensitive information. Two suites of anonymous rooms and a tunnel were redacted in Chinese plans ‘for security reasons’.
It is reported that China is periodically switching off the water supply to British diplomats in our Embassy in Beijing to put pressure on the Government to grant its demands for the mega-embassy. A strong Government wouldn’t let itself be bullied. What do you think ours will do?
There’s another row near Oxford, where Peking University’s HSBC business school wants to expand its campus in Boars Hill, a village overlooking the Dreaming Spires. When the campus was acquired in 2017 for £8.8 million, its ultimate owner was the Chinese government.
Opponents of the scheme point out that within the direct line of sight of the campus are several Oxford University departments that conduct sensitive scientific research as well as numerous high-tech companies in the Oxford Science Park and the Culham Innovation Centre.
Many of our cash-hungry universities already welcome Chinese students into sophisticated laboratories, where they will learn things that might well be useful to the Chinese state.
Some of our universities are so dependent on money brought by Chinese students that they would collapse without them. Almost 20 per cent of students at Liverpool University are Chinese. There is a similar proportion at University College, London, rated among the world’s top ten universities.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party is believed to be behind a spate of takeovers of British private schools. More than 30 have been bought by Chinese investors in the past decade. Beijing will educate some of its own cadres on our soil.
Chinese companies (which owe complete loyalty to the Chinese state) already own large pieces of important infrastructure including 10 per cent of Heathrow Airport, and 27.4 per cent of the new nuclear power station being built at Hinkley Point C in Somerset.
China has lots of money, and we are eager to get our hands on it irrespective of the threat to our long-term interests, and despite China being our enemy. I believe that, if necessary, the Government is prepared to manipulate the criminal justice system to please Beijing.
This is what decadence looks like. We abandoned our dignity and our principles long ago. Now Labour is compromising our security to ensure that our new masters are happy.