From mega-embassies to alleged spies, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is struggling to recast the U.K.’s relationship with China to create a best of all worlds situation. But the U.K. doesn’t have the clout to pull this off successfully, and Labour doesn’t seem to realize this. It wants to both cooperate and challenge, without any plan for what happens when Beijing won’t play ball.
On Wednesday, Starmer blamed the Tories for Labour’s soft approach to China. He was speaking about a letter that the director of public prosecutions, Stephen Parkinson, sent to MPs on Tuesday. Parkinson’s letter clarified that the Labour government was at fault for dropping the case against “the two Chrises” accused of spying for Beijing between 2021 and 2023, Christopher Cash and Christopher Berry.
Since the government refused to provide evidence to British prosecutors that China presented a threat to the U.K. at the time of Cash and Berry’s alleged spying, this left the prosecutors office no choice but to drop the case, Parkinson said. The Official Secrets Act only applies to states considered an enemy — or a country that “represents a current threat” to the U.K.’s national security. Without the government’s support, the evidentiary requirement to bring a case against the two Chrises wasn’t met.
During a trip to India this week, Starmer responded that he was “disappointed” that the case didn’t reach trial and blamed the Tories. He argued that the government’s inability to provide this evidence against China was not a political issue but rather a legal one because the three Conservative governments that were in power at the time of the alleged spying did not classify China as a threat.
But Starmer’s justification is incredibly unsatisfying. For one, it’s not at all clear that his interpretation of the law is sound. Mark Elliot, a professor of public law at Cambridge University, told Sky News that the idea that a country needs to be formally classified as an “enemy” to be counted as such under the Official Secrets Act is wrong. There is no reason why the Starmer government couldn’t provide evidence that China posed a threat to the U.K. two years ago.
Blaming the government’s failure to assist in this case on the Conservative Party also seems unlikely to land. Conservative leadership was responsible for the U.K.’s hawkish turn on China around 2019, and Labour has received an unbelievable amount of pushback from the Conservatives for the “soft on China” approach they have championed thus far at the helm of government.
For those who were inclined to give Starmer the benefit of the doubt, there was some indication that his government would be tough on China, too. How did it get to this point?
A political consensus on China had seemed to emerge by the time Labour took over the government. Labour’s “cooperate, compete and challenge” approach to China seemed nearly identical, at least in theory, to the Conservative approach: “protect, align and engage.”
In 2021, the Labour Party voted to recognize Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang. Starmer himself was a human rights lawyer. When David Lammy was shadow foreign secretary, he spoke about China’s “greater repression at home and more assertive behavior abroad.” Catherine West, who was known as “an outspoken China critic” while she was shadow minister for Asia and the Pacific, was given a role as a foreign office minister. Shortly before assuming the office, West publicly congratulated Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) on his victory. West lost her position in the recent government reshuffle, a move that left observers confused.
Moreover, there is a ceiling on the U.K.-China relationship that cannot be broken without a fundamental reordering of the international picture.
The U.K.’s “Strategic Defense Review 2025” in June labeled China as a “sophisticated and persistent challenge.” This review, released by Labour in government, also states that the British military is “likely to face Chinese technology wherever and with whomever it fights,” and that “China is likely to continue seeking advantage through espionage and cyber-attacks.” China also continues to oppress British nationals who still live in Hong Kong.
Britain’s primary strategic partner and ally, the U.S., is locked into a generational geopolitical struggle with China for global superpower preeminence. Australia and Japan, the old friend and the new, are exposed to the physical ramifications of Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific. The U.K. has chosen to lean into these partnerships rather than keep its distance.
The U.K., along with the rest of its allies, is supporting Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion, the worst conflict on European soil since World War II. China, whatever its denials, is aiding and abetting Russian aggression.
Perhaps the Starmer government is working against these structural factors and Labour’s historical proclivities due to economic pressure. Labour has consistently framed economic growth as its top priority. And there seems to be a mistaken understanding among those in leadership that expanding the U.K.’s trade relationship with China is the answer to its economic woes.
China has escalated this economic pressure into an explicit threat. The Guardian reported earlier this week that back in the spring, China warned the U.K. that it would retaliate if Labour decided to classify China as a top-tier threat under the foreign influence registration scheme, which would have heightened the risk of criminal penalties for anyone who failed to disclose their activities with a Chinese state entity. In the end, Labour did not classify China as a top-tier threat.
It’s not hard to make the leap that China is likely applying similar pressure on the Starmer government to approve its proposed “mega-embassy” at the heart of London. Even though the application was shot down by the Tower Hamlets Council in 2022, China resubmitted an identical version of the application after Starmer became prime minister.
As Domino Theory previously reported, China’s refusal to explain the grayed-out areas in its building plans — which the media has jumped to all sorts of conclusions about — will make it all the more politically challenging for Starmer if he ultimately approves the embassy. China has declined to be any more transparent about how it intends to use the space.
In Beijing, China has leveraged the city’s physical infrastructure to exert pressure on the U.K. The Daily Mail recently reported that China is periodically cutting the water supply to the British Embassy in China’s capital. A plan to renovate the aging facility is also being kept on hold. It is widely understood that these actions are a Chinese negotiating tactic to pressure the U.K. government to approve the new Chinese mega-embassy.
London explicitly said in its China audit statement that “we will cooperate where we can and we will challenge where we must.” But the U.K.’s China policy is laboring under a misapprehension.
This framing asserts that the U.K. has enough freedom of action to force cooperation with China in the areas it wants, even as it challenges elsewhere.
China explicitly rejects this. “Only by maintaining a correct perception of China and adhering to mutual respect and open cooperation can dialogue and exchanges across various fields between China and the U.K. proceed smoothly, and bilateral relations achieve steady and sustained progress,” the Chinese embassy said after the audit was released.
More importantly, China’s actions speak louder. China is pressuring the U.K. government to approve the new embassy in London, even with areas of interest grayed out. China is pressuring the U.K. government not to be labeled as a threat, to the point where a court case reportedly collapsed as a result.
Labour is on the road that every government of non-great powers must walk: learning that you cannot have your cake and eat it with China. Eventually you arrive at a crossroads where you have to decide whether to acquiesce or not.
Right now, the government’s actions suggest that they haven’t admitted this, even to themselves. After all, in other areas they are still pursuing relatively challenging approaches. Labour’s approach to Taiwan policy has been robust, in the main. The U.K. took control of British Steel after its Chinese owner Jingye halted orders of the raw materials needed to keep it running, with the then business minister Jonathan Reynolds saying that previous British governments had been “naive” to allow Chinese companies to be involved in the steel sector
But when it comes to these domestic questions that pertain directly to China, senior officials either cannot see, or cannot voice, that which is obvious to others. China cannot be a dependable partner in cooperation, because China makes its cooperation subject to foreign policy goals that are fundamentally unaligned with Britain’s own. Realism, this is not.
The irony is, it is because both Whitehall and the Chinese diplomatic staff in London mismanaged their handling of the alleged spy case that it may be politically impossible to approve the new embassy this autumn. And if what currently looks like a brewing scandal comes to the boil and there is a high-level resignation or firing, the ramifications could be more long-term.
Gray Sergeant, a research fellow in Indo-Pacific Geopolitics at the Council on Geostrategy, recently wrote a Substack post about the U.K.’s position on Taiwan, pointing out that last month Chinese jets practiced attack runs on a Royal Navy frigate in the Taiwan Strait. China-U.K relations, he concluded, “cannot, and should not, be good.”
The question is, when Labour will realize this?
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