When Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the British general election on July 4, there were hopes he would get UK-China relations back on track. “After 14 years of damaging Conservative inconsistency over China”, his government intended, according to its election manifesto, to “bring a long-term and strategic approach to managing our relations”. There was, moreover, to be an “audit of our bilateral relationship”, which would assess the challenges and opportunities China posed.
If relations between the two countries are to improve, the role of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy, will be pivotal. He has been setting the stage for greater engagement since well before the election and appears keen to reconnect with China. According to Politico, he believed that the UK’s China policy had “oscillated wildly over the past 14 years” and wanted to “adopt a more consistent strategy”.
When Lammy attended a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Laos on July 26, he met China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi. According to officials, he said his government would “cooperate where we can, compete where needed and challenge when we must”. This has raised hopes he will uphold the relatively friendly approach to China adopted by the previous Labour prime ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and that the emphasis will now be on continuity.
However, after years of confrontation with China, promoted by the Conservative prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and, to a lesser extent, by Rishi Sunak, it will not be easy to restore good relations. And Lammy, unfortunately, has just made it a little bit harder.
On Sept 12, he issued the UK’s 55th report on Hong Kong. Although in the initial years after 1997 these reports were generally objective, they degenerated into propaganda broadsheets during the foreign secretaryships of Dominic Raab and Truss (both Johnson appointees). This continued once James Cleverly and Lord (David) Cameron, succeeded them, and they now have zero credibility. Although the latest report has gone out under Lammy’s name, its venom suggests it is the work of Cameron, his immediate predecessor.
Once again, the report trots out the hoary old chestnut about there being “a continued drift away” from the commitments in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 (absorbed into the Basic Law of 1990). This was hard to fathom, as there is now far more democracy than during the British era, fundamental rights are underpinned by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the rule of law is alive and well (as confirmed by the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index 2023, which Lammy did not mention, but which placed Hong Kong at 23rd out of the 142 places surveyed).
Lammy also claimed that the focus on national security threats was “undermining Hong Kong’s international reputation”, which was naive in the extreme. Like the UK, Hong Kong is entitled to have effective national security laws in place, and their absence almost resulted in the overthrow of the “one country, two systems” governing policy during the insurrection of 2019-20 (which Lammy would presumably have lamented, given his newfound interest in the Joint Declaration).
In any event, the UK enacted its own National Security Act in 2023, which is far-ranging and provides the police with sweeping new powers and curbs the rights of suspects. Its enactment vividly demonstrates that the UK realizes that national security threats cannot be countered with kid gloves and makes Lammy’s carping about Hong Kong all the weirder. Indeed, as Hong Kong’s Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO) was formulated with the UK legislation in mind, with some of its offenses, such as sabotage, bearing an almost uncanny resemblance to their British counterparts, Lammy should have felt flattered (assuming he knew).
He was also clearly unaware that the Joint Declaration made no mention of Hong Kong’s future national security arrangements. As Britain’s then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher (and her foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe) realized, national security was a matter for China alone, just as it is in the UK. Thatcher never once presumed to lecture China on national security during the handover negotiations, and it is remarkable that Lammy seeks to do so now.
He is, however, skating on very thin ice. When he expressed concerns over “attempts to apply Hong Kong law extraterritorially”, he was out of his depth. When the Hong Kong government gave the SNSO’s offenses extraterritorial effect, it simply followed the British paradigm. The UK’s National Security Act 2023 specifically provides that if the offenses were committed in a place outside the UK, the person responsible is prosecutable (s36).
If, moreover, Lammy was genuinely concerned about the extraterritorial application of laws, it begs the question of why the UK, without any serious objections from him or Starmer, allowed the US to use the extraterritorial reach of its Espionage Act 1917 to pursue the Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, in the UK, where he was incarcerated for over five years as he fought extradition for having exposed US war crimes and prisoner mistreatment.
In another bizarre twist, Lammy’s report declared that “governments must ensure fundamental rights are protected when implementing national security legislation”. This showed he had read neither the Hong Kong National Security Law 2020 (NSL) nor the SNSO, which both place human rights protections at the heart of their operations. Whereas the NSL stipulates that “Human rights shall be respected and protected in safeguarding national security” (Art 4), this is repeated in the SNSO (s2). Both laws also provide that the rights and freedoms that residents enjoy under the ICCPR “shall be protected” in national security cases. In contrast, the UK’s national security laws contain no such references to human rights guarantees.
It is clear that Lammy has been kept in the dark about key aspects of the Hong Kong situation, which is worrying. It can only be concluded that the Beijing-hostile elements at the Foreign Office’s China desk, having been given their head under his predecessors, want to derail the more realistic policy toward China that he and Starmer are planning
Although the report highlights the arrest of 13 suspects under the SNSO, its interest is feigned. After all, Lammy has had nothing to say about the numerous arrests made by the British police under the UK’s National Security Act 2023. Whereas, for example, five individuals were charged in April, a further three suspects were charged in May (including Bill Yuen Chung-biu, the office manager at the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London, and Matthew Trickett, a former soldier who has since died in mysterious circumstances).
In recent years, moreover, the UK has, with contempt for the global rule of law, given safe haven to an assortment of convicted felons, national security fugitives and bail jumpers from Hong Kong. As if this were not bad enough, it has allowed them to conspire on British soil to harm Hong Kong and its people, often in cahoots with US-based entities. Although Cameron called this the exercise of “free speech”, the harboring of malign individuals is an affront to the comity of nations, and an act of hostility toward China. Any self-respecting government would have shown them the door. It would be surprising if there were no monitoring of the conspirators’ activities, as most people wish to protect their homeland from those who wish it ill.
No UK report would be complete without the mandatory reference to the media magnate, Jimmy Lai Chee-ying, who is undergoing trial on national security and sedition charges. Whereas Lammy’s predecessor, Cameron, in what was tantamount to an attempt to pervert the course of public justice, demanded Lai’s immediate release, Lammy was more restrained. He said Lai’s trial was “a particular concern for the UK”, although he failed to clarify that the reason for Lai’s current imprisonment is his conviction in 2022 on two fraud charges (for which he received five years and nine months imprisonment).
If Lammy believed that Lai, because of his wealth and influence, is somehow above the law that governs everybody else, he is sorely mistaken. He is receiving a fair trial before professional judges of the highest quality, and if the prosecutors cannot prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt he will be acquitted. If, however, he is convicted, he can, as provided for by the ICCPR, appeal to a higher court (as he did in 2023, when the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction for organizing an unauthorized assembly).
It is clear that Lammy has been kept in the dark about key aspects of the Hong Kong situation, which is worrying. It can only be concluded that the Beijing-hostile elements at the Foreign Office’s China desk, having been given their head under his predecessors, want to derail the more realistic policy toward China that he and Starmer are planning. If, that is, they can rile Beijing by fatuous reports like this, it may be less receptive to any overtures the British government may be intending to make.
Although Lammy is a political novice, his Labour Party colleague, Lord (Peter) Mandelson, most definitely is not. He was previously the UK’s first secretary of state and president of the Board of Trade, and also served as the European Union’s trade commissioner. He is currently the chairman of the Great Britain-China Centre, and an adviser to Starmer.
When Mandelson addressed a University of Hong Kong seminar on Sept 16, he spelled out some home truths. Having emphasized that the rule of law and the independence of the Judiciary in Hong Kong were intact, he said it was time to “stop mud throwing”. He said the new Labour government needed to “re-create the strategic dialogue that Britain has had with China in the past”. It must be hoped that the UK consul general in Hong Kong, Brian Davidson, has faithfully reported his remarks to the Foreign Office in London, and that its China desk fully reflects them in the next six-monthly report it drafts for Lammy.
Once Lammy has found his feet, he will hopefully realize just how badly he has been misled. At that point, heads should roll at the China desk, as there can be no justification for misleading the new kid on the block. If he authorizes another report (and, frictions apart, they serve no purpose and waste Davidson’s time), Lammy should by then have mastered his brief. If so, improved relations will hopefully no longer be bedeviled by the type of misleading assertions displayed in the UK’s latest Hong Kong report.
The author is a senior counsel and law professor, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong SAR.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
