The previous Tory government may not have been very successful in containing the global ambitions of China, but at least it tried. Whether David Lammy’s Foreign Office has the same ambition to stand up to Beijing’s bullying is unfortunately becoming more doubtful. A straw in the wind is the announcement by China this week that it has revived plans to build a spanking new ‘super embassy’ – ten times the size of Beijing’s current outpost – on land it owns in the heart of the capital, a stone’s throw from the Tower of London.
This isn’t any old exercise in replacement of one piece of real estate with another. What China wants to build is a massive campus covering about 5.4 acres of prime City land just across the road from the old St Katharine Docks. Its slightly sinister-looking concrete cuboids would dwarf the old Royal Mint building partly designed by Robert Smirke; if constructed the complex would form the largest diplomatic compound in the UK.
A number of features of this plan ought to give the government and the Foreign Office pause. One problem is its physical effect on London. Hiving off a sizeable part of London’s growing commercial district to high-profile embassy use seems short-sighted. More importantly, there may be more immediate social problems. The Chinese regime is hardly uncontroversial: demonstrations against it are frequent, and likely to become more so. Beijing cordially detests the idea of people being allowed regularly to exercise their freedom of public protest, and will undoubtedly demand tight and prominent security throughout the site, which will feed into a great deal more traffic and inconvenience for those who work and live in the City and the neighbouring areas.
But there is more to it than that. This scheme is not new, but revived. Planning permission was first sought some time ago, after Beijing had quietly bought the land in 2018. Tower Hamlets Council subsequently overruled its planning inspectors and refused consent, saying the construction of what would effectively be a diplomatic fortress was inappropriate for the area. London Mayor Sadiq Khan, to his credit, supported their decision and declined to intervene.
The government could have overruled the local authorities and allowed the plan to go ahead. But that it did not was hardly surprising. It did not see that it owed China any particular favours: indeed, it had any number of reasons, in so far as it supped with Beijing, to do so with a fairly long spoon. These included concerns over espionage, in particular; Beijing’s malign influence on UK higher education through one-sided co-operations and the setting up of Confucius Institutes to apply discreet pressure; the strong-arm tactics used by staff at the Chinese Consulate in Manchester against demonstrators in 2022. And that was quite apart from Beijing’s appalling treatment of the Uyghurs, which then foreign secretary Liz Truss pointedly called out in May 2022.
The Chinese government did not appeal, confining itself to complaining huffily that the UK had fallen down on its international obligations to provide it with proper embassy facilities. But the matter has raised its head again, perhaps because it sees the new Labour government as a softer touch. In March this year, Catherine West, then shadow minister for Asia, quietly visited Beijing; and shortly before the election, David Lammy, now Foreign Secretary, said he intended to overhaul the UK’s relationship with China. Although he formulaically referred to the previous government’s neglect of national security, China has read this as a willingness to talk.
Lammy needs to resist the temptation. The issue of the embassy site is actually vitally important for China. A great deal of symbolism rides on it. China desperately wants to demonstrate its power to pressure a major Western government to give it what it regards as diplomatic premises worthy of its world status; that it should be the biggest embassy in London is an additional bonus (the fact that the new US mission in Nine Elms is slightly smaller, at just under five acres, will not have been lost on it). Equally, if the UK government does allow the scheme having previously blocked it, China will be able to say that it cannot be pushed around on issues such as espionage or human rights.
These are big matters. If he gives China what it wants, what will David Lammy get in exchange? Besides professions of an era of friendship and co-operation, a few photo opportunities and perhaps a tit-for-tat promise to allow the UK embassy in Beijing (which is also highly cramped) to move or expand, very little. For the sake of being able to say that he has put yet another Tory policy behind him, he will have given away his best bargaining chip and demonstrated to the world that, when it comes to the game of diplomatic poker, president Xi Jinping can run rings round him. Will he realise this in time? We can only hope, but the omens are not promising.
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