Kowtowing to Communists

 

This anti-slavery day, while the Human Trafficking Foundation (HTF) was hosting awards to raise awareness of modern slavery, our foreign secretary visited Beijing. There Mr Lammy cosied up to the Chinese Communist Party- arguably the most successful authoritarian regime on Earth. Following the meeting, a foreign office statement reassured us that Lammy had raised human rights issues and the case of British citizen Jimmy Lai's detention in Hong Kong. The statement did not make any mention of Taiwan, the same week that the People's Liberation Army surrounded the island in their latest invasion drill.

What the foreign office neglected to make a song and dance about was the snubbing of former Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-Wen. The British-Taiwanese all-party parliamentary group had been due to hold talks with Ing-Wen the week before Lammy's trip to Beijing, until the foreign office politely requested its postponement to next spring. So off Lammy went for his goodwill photo opportunity, safe in the knowledge that he had done the communists' bidding.

Our very own foreign secretary shook hands with his counterpart Wang Yi, a man who has claimed allegations of genocide against the Uighurs are a Western conspiracy to hold back China's development, and that proponents of Taiwanese independence should be "nailed to a pillar of shame." A lovely bloke by all accounts then.

Over the last decade or so, the CCP has built the largest and most all-encompassing digital prison the world has ever seen, aspects of which (such as facial recognition deployments and plans for CBDC) are increasingly being adopted by our own envious authoritarians in Labour and the Conservatives. Criticise the party online, and you suddenly find yourself unable to purchase a train ticket. Use a VPN to access foreign media, and watch your social credit score tumble — a score which determines your employment opportunities, where your children go to school and even where you are permitted to live. Most urban Chinese are now even required to pass facial recognition cameras simply to access their own housing estates.

That's the scenario for the majority Han Chinese. At least a million ethnic Uighurs, almost 10% of their total population, currently live in mass internment camps. The "free" population are subject to mass sterilisation and re-education programmes - while monitored by the same Hikvision cameras we eagerly import for our own surveillance purposes. Many components of our solar panels, plastered over our countryside in the Long March to Net Zero, are produced by forced Uighur labour in occupied East Turkestan.

Then there is the small issue of Hong Kong, returned to China on the understanding that internal democratic governance and the rule of law would persevere for at least 50 years after 1997. Instead, Beijing's fist has fallen on the territory hard and swift. Virtually all pro- democracy activists are now either incarcerated, or have fled abroad, many to the UK. While we welcome the resulting influx of hard working taxpayers, we should be brave enough to call them what they are — political refugees. Sadly, even British residency has not protected them: shown by the shameless government inaction following the assault of a Hong Kong activist by Chinese consulate staff in Manchester last year.

Can we realistically cut economic ties with China without harming ourselves? Perhaps, not yet. But do we really have to kowtow to the extent that we cancel the visit of a foreign dignitary to placate a communist dictatorship, so eagerly sacrificing our principles and self-respect on the altar of foreign trade? I will leave this question here for you to answer.