Hong Kong: Human Rights Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
Main Page: Lord Wallace of Saltaire (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Wallace of Saltaire's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Hong Kong: Human Rights
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(4 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, Britain cannot resist Chinese Communist pressure on Hong Kong on its own. We have to work with others. I read that our Government is thinking of promoting a new “club of democracies”. The world already has two such clubs: the Commonwealth and the European Union. It is characteristic of the incoherence of British foreign policy that we are calling for the creation of something, half of which we have just left.
When Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary, he boasted that global Britain would send a carrier task force through the Malacca strait into the South China Sea. He never explained what purpose such a deployment would achieve or what place it would have in overall British relations with China. Our Prime Minister appears to have no clear idea at all of what should be Britain’s place in the world. Beijing’s abrogation of the 1997 agreement on Hong Kong requires a strategic reassessment of our relationship with China. Will the Minister tell us if this is under way?