As Alicia Kearns, Tory security spokesman and China critic, has pointed out, Starmer surrenders the right to be taken seriously on matters of diplomacy when, on the one hand he says the West must redouble its efforts in Ukraine, while on the other having a cosy fire-side chat with the leader of a country that has been arming Russia.
Meanwhile, whatever happened to Starmer the great human rights advocate, who once declared that it was “shameful that the Government plans to reward countries who commit human rights abuses with trade deals”?
Ditto, whatever became of the principled MP who backed a Commons motion in 2021 calling for China’s persecution of the Uyghur community to be formally branded as “genocide”? Labour has been eerily silent on such issues since the election.
With all the talk of the need for a “pragmatic relationship” and “serious engagement” with Beijing, Starmer’s clumsy attempts at rapprochement risk coming back to bite him in a manner reminiscent of George Osborne’s dreadfully naive “golden era” of Sino-British relations.
Osborne’s approach was built on the arrogant assumption that we could get the Chinese to be more like us, but China’s world view is utterly alien to us and Beijing will never compromise on that. Instead, China ruthlessly uses Western countries they think they can get close to, then exploits those ties at the first opportunity.
If Starmer wants a model for how it can all go spectacularly wrong, he needs look no further than Berlin. Germany spent decades forging close trade relations with China, only to now find its car market decimated by a flood of cheap Chinese imports.