CHRISTMAS being the season of peace and goodwill, Britain’s war hawks are on manoeuvres.
Nervousness about the unpredictable approach of a Donald Trump presidency combines with deep-seated suspicions parts of the Establishment hold about any Labour government to fuel a propaganda barrage.
One field of media operations concerns Syria, where the fall of a regime without our bombing its country into the stone age first (though the United States and Israel are now on the case) is an occasion for score-settling.
Smugly indifferent to the carnage our armies unleashed in Iraq and Libya, the Tory press has taken up the parliamentary vote against bombing Syria in 2013 as the most shameful episode in our 21st-century history. Ed Miliband, who led Labour in opposition to that war, is hounded for apologies for this shocking lapse in parliamentary warmongering.
Another is China.
Previous China spy scares have been underwhelming. There was the strange case of Christine Lee, the lawyer whom Westminster’s sinophobe-in-chief Iain Duncan Smith wanted to expel from the country despite her never even being accused of breaking the law. Lee, spooks breathlessly briefed the papers, “may have aspired to form an all-party parliamentary group sympathetic to China.”
Vague, unproven and not illegal anyway, but apparently enough for Duncan Smith to allege that British lives had been put at risk.
Last year we were treated to the saga of the spy balloon, when the US air force shot down a Chinese weather balloon that had blown over its territory. Weeks of scaremongering headlines and questions in Parliament followed: what was the British government doing to protect us from these sinister balloons?
A few months on, the Pentagon quietly announced the ill-fated balloon hadn’t been spying after all, having collected no information as it wafted through US skies. It was, as China had always maintained, simply a weather balloon. The anticlimax generated no front-page headlines and Beijing got no apologies.
Now the nefarious alleged agent H6 stalks the airwaves. It isn’t entirely clear why, since he doesn’t stalk Britain, having been banned from the country last year under the previous government.
But the fact that at some point in the past this businessman may have been friendly with Prince Andrew — reprehensible enough in itself, to be fair — is now apparently an urgent security problem.
Cue rants from the shadow home secretary on the Sunday morning shows about how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been plotting against us for decades. Cue Labour MPs stressing the need to protect our supply chains from Chinese products. Cue Duncan Smith, not wanting to be left out, wailing that H6 is only the “tip of the iceberg.”
So it would seem, as the Telegraph ran another attack piece at the weekend, this time alleging that a freelance interpreter used by the Foreign Office also owned a Chinese-language news website accused by Microsoft of being part of “a veiled global network of [CCP] news websites.” Halfway through this extensive character assassination, which may cost its victim work, we learn he “has not been accused of criminality or wrongdoing.”
Another “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Except the determination of parts of the ruling class to prevent any warming of relations between Britain and China under the new Labour government, which has, so far, seemed marginally more willing than its predecessors to consider co-operation rather than conflict with a country that is the world’s second-largest economy, biggest manufacturer, and a global leader across multiple emerging technologies, including in the crucial renewable energy sector.
“Decoupling” from China will hurt British industry, disrupt a green transition and carries the historically demonstrable risk that trade wars precede actual wars.
Anti-China hysteria is dangerous and wrong. It needs to be more widely challenged.
