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....
