Foreign Affairs Committee
Debate between Tom Tugendhat and Philip Hollobone(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Tom Tugendhat
I personally pay huge tribute to my friend the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), whose work on the Committee in recent years has been so important, and I agree with him totally. We came up with the idea of a very lateral system, as we have been calling it: a system in which the enabling element, the bureaucratic element, if you like, of the UK is the strength that brings people together. I agree with him entirely that there is a huge opportunity for us to co-ordinate and cohere with other countries.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
I commend my hon. Friend on his statement and the quality of his report. Were the Government to accept his recommendation to tilt to the Indo-Pacific and to deploy atrocity prevention capabilities, how much of the Government’s Foreign Office efforts does he think would be taken up with China?
Tom Tugendhat
It is quite clear that a lot of our effort will be taken up with China over coming years, no matter what we do. However, the tilt to the Pacific should be seen not just as a tilt towards China, but a tilt towards the countries that we also have as friends in the region—Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and I could go on—and the effort we could make there not just to balance against some of the nefarious aspects of China, but to help China grow into the integrated global system that we think will enable future prosperity for all of us, including the Chinese people.