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Somewhere in the bowels of the Foreign Office, civil servants are still working on the government’s ‘China audit’. The report was commissioned by the new Labour government to ‘assess trade-offs in the UK-China relationship’ and to ‘ensure consistency across government, business and academia towards engagement with China’. Little is known about its workings or who’s being consulted. Instead of bringing clarity, the process is deepening confusion, and there are worrying reports that the audit has been pared back to support Keir Starmer’s ‘pragmatic’ approach. All the while, there have been a series of troubling events that demand extreme caution about Beijing.
The British Steel debacle is only the latest. Jingye, the company’s opaque owner, run by a former Chinese Communist party (CCP) official, is accused of trying to shut down the Scunthorpe plant by sabotaging its blast furnaces. Whether or not Jingye was doing the bidding of its political masters in Beijing, Chinese officials quickly jumped to its defence. The Chinese embassy lashed out at critical British MPs, accusing them of an ‘arrogance, ignorance and a twisted mindset’.
It’s not known what the auditors make of all this, but ministers are not waiting around. Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband have both visited Beijing to woo investors. Miliband signed a memorandum of understanding on a ‘clean energy partnership’ with China, while Reeves argued for a deeper economic partnership between the two countries, saying it would be ‘very foolish’ to disengage. Starmer himself is backing China’s bid to build a giant new embassy at the old Royal Mint at Tower Hill, despite intelligence agencies’ warnings about the site’s proximity to sensitive underground communications cables.
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