Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Tom Tugendhat and Tim Loughton

Monday 15th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

3. What recent assessment he has made with Cabinet colleagues of the level of the security threat from China.

[The Minister for Security (Tom Tugendhat)]

I thank my hon. Friend enormously for raising this question. Let me be clear that the hostile activity we have seen from Chinese authorities and state-affiliated groups poses a serious threat to the security and wellbeing of the British people and to our partners and allies across the world. The Deputy Prime Minister came to this Chamber last month to speak about the pattern of malign activity, including the targeting of our parliamentarians and two malicious cyber-campaigns by Chinese state-affiliated actors. We must never be afraid to stand up for ourselves and to call out this kind of activity that has targeted both my hon. Friend and me.

[Tim Loughton]

Mr Speaker, may I add my personal condolences to you on the loss of your father?

I say to my right hon. Friend that we had the scandal of the hacking of MPs’ email accounts back in March and we subsequently learnt that the FBI informed our Government—as well as foreign Governments who had legislators who were affected—about these incidents two years ago. Why has it taken two years for us to be told about a serious security breach? Will he now, with his colleagues in Cabinet, make sure that China is absolutely treated and labelled as a threat, not just an “epoque-defining systemic challenge”, and everything is done urgently to put China in the enhanced tier of the foreign influence registration scheme?

[Tom Tugendhat]

My hon. Friend, who has given this House and our country exceptional service over many years, and who will sadly be standing down at the next election, has again made some strong points. On the first, he knows the language that I use and he has heard the words I have said. The reality is that we face threats from around the world, and many of them sadly are emerging out of Beijing today. We know it, we have seen it, and many of us in this House feel it. It is not something we are shying away from. The reality, however, is that there are many different ways of answering it. He has raised an important aspect on FIRS, which of course is being looked at, but he will have heard the words of the Deputy Prime Minister in this Chamber only a few weeks ago and how clearly he made himself heard.

Beijing Winter Olympics and Chinese Government Sanctions

Debate between Tom Tugendhat and Tim Loughton

Thursday 15th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes that the 2022 Winter Olympic games should not be hosted in a country whose Government is credibly accused of mass atrocity crimes; and calls on the UK Government to decline invitations for its representatives to attend the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games unless the Government of the People’s Republic of China ends the atrocities taking place in the Xinjiang region and lifts the sanctions imposed on UK Parliamentarians, citizens and entities.

I presume the time limit does not apply to me, Madam Deputy Speaker. I must first declare an interest, as one of the sanctioned—I wear my badge of honour today—although any financial interest that I would have to declare would no doubt have been frozen by the Chinese Government. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for giving us time for this very important subject.

As a spotty school student back in 1980, I proposed a motion at a local school debating competition that the UK Government should not boycott the Moscow summer Olympics, following the invasion of Afghanistan over the previous Christmas, and that politics should be kept out of sport. As it turned out, Mrs Thatcher, the Prime Minister at the time, recommended a boycott, but it was left up to the individual sporting bodies whether they sent athletes from their sports to the games. Those who competed did so under the Olympic flag, and the few gold medals that we won were collected to the strains of the choral cantata that is the Olympic anthem. My overriding memory of those Olympic games was the image of Daley Thompson emotionally collecting his decathlon gold medal and belting out “God Save the Queen” to the tune of the rather dreary Olympic hymn. Sixty-five countries carried out a full boycott of the 1980 Olympics, including such strange bedfellows as the US and Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and China. China condemned the Russians, sent no athletes and subsequently did not appear on the medal table, so China really does not have a leg to stand on when it finds itself on the end of the same treatment that it meted out to its neighbour back in 1980.

My view on sporting boycotts and keeping politics out of sport has not changed, which is why this motion does not call for a full sporting boycott, which victimises most the elite athletes who dedicate so much to compete every four years, however niche the UK’s medal prospects might be at the winter Olympics compared with the summer version. But the simple reality is that in this day and age sport is inextricably linked with, and often tainted by, politics whether we like it or not, and that taint sometimes can be no greater than when the event is hosted under the Olympic banner.

Most countries will bid for the honour of hosting the Olympics so that they can showcase their nation to the world as an impressive player on the world stage—a land of progress and plenty, where everything is just rosy and all the criticisms that we hear about them are baseless propaganda. I am sure we were guilty of some of that when London hosted the 2012 Olympics, especially in the visually and financially extravagant opening and closing ceremonies, which reminded the world why the United Kingdom is the top nation. The difference was that our people were free to criticise that extravaganza if they disapproved. Our press was free to caricature or lampoon it, as some did, especially Paul McCartney’s singing, and we in this place were free to tackle Ministers about whether it was money well spent and whether we actually wanted it.

In the same way, hon. and right hon. Members in this House are free to speak out against abuses at home or abroad, human rights or otherwise, as freely happened, including with the recent reports by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee on the Uyghur situation. In the same way, the House has spoken out about the grotesque oppression, torture and murder of more than a million peace-loving Tibetans at the hands of the Chinese Communist party since the occupation of 1959. In the same way, too, we have called out the industrial-scale human rights abuses against the Uyghur people—the slave labour camps in Xinjiang, the forced sterilisation of Uyghur woman—all leading to a motion unanimously passed in this House on 22 April, thanks to the good services of my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Ms Ghani), which called out those inhuman acts for what they are, namely, genocide, committed by the hand of the Chinese Communist Government, who in just 200 days’ time will be welcoming the world to the temporary mirage that is a free Beijing, as the goose-stepping battalions of the People’s Liberation Army take ownership of the Olympic rings and run the Olympic flag up their flagpole.

Any dissent, any protest and any adverse publicity will be cancelled, crushed and disappeared, just as the Chinese Government tried to suppress the free speech that is the hallmark of parliamentary democracy and to bully five Members of this House, including me, and two noble Lords, by responding to our exposé of their abuses by sanctioning us in the misguided belief that we would shut up and go away. Now we are apparently to be subject to China’s new counter-foreign sanctions law, too.

Of course, the opposite was true; we have been louder than ever. The crimes of the Chinese Government have been under more scrutiny in this place and beyond, as China’s counterproductive miscalculation of what democracy counts for in the west has instead acted as a recruiting sergeant for decent people across the globe determined to call the Chinese Government out as the murderous bully they are.

We should be in no doubt about the real agenda behind China’s enthusiasm to host the Olympics for the second time. The Chinese propaganda machine is being ratcheted up for this historic event, which will make the Chinese capital the first city to host both a summer and winter Olympic games. The spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Wang Wenbin, has been boasting that

“the majority of countries and people in the world recognise the fact that China’s human rights conditions are constantly improving and China has achieved notable progress in its human rights cause”—

a claim that would embarrass even the Iraqi spokesman Comical Ali, of Gulf war notoriety.

We know what the Chinese Government will use the Winter Olympics for, as they showed quite clearly at the summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008. They proudly boasted that with 105 Heads of State and Government there, it was the largest gathering of world leaders for a sporting event in world history—until 2012, that is. The People’s Liberation Army Navy Band performed the nationalistic “Welcome March” and goose-stepped across the arena. Some 56 Chinese children, representing supposedly the 56 ethnic groups of ethnic China in their respective costumes, danced across the arena to the strains of “Ode to the Motherland”, lip-synced by a nine-year-old to the pre-recorded voice of another girl who had been told that she was not pretty enough to appear on the stage. To add insult to injury, it later turned out that all 56 of those children claiming to be representatives of China’s diversity were, in fact, all Han Chinese.

The spectacular $100 million opening ceremony lasted four hours and nine minutes as the 91,000 audience enjoyed a panoply of everything Chinese. They saw everything the Chinese Communist party wanted them and the rest of the world to see. Indeed, that was made easier by the notorious use of weather modification technology to prevent clouds and rain—just one of the more extreme examples of the Chinese Communist party manipulating the environment.

It was feted as a spectacular and unforgettable ceremony. It was

“the spectacular to end all spectaculars and probably can never be bettered”,

in the mesmerised words of one Tony Blair, but it was all a sham. The awarding of the 2008 Olympics to Beijing was accompanied by the International Olympic Committee promising that the games would act as a catalyst for human rights reform in China. One widely acknowledged genocide in Xinjiang later; thousands of Tibetans arrested, imprisoned, displaced, tortured and killed later; the snuffing out of free speech, the free press and political freedom and the trashing of the Sino-British joint declaration and imposition of the national security law later—that went well, didn’t it?

To help win the 2008 Olympics, China promised to allow space for Chinese citizens to protest during the games. Spaces were indeed allocated, but those who applied for permission to protest were in fact arrested, making a mockery of the undertakings to the IOC, and no doubt the same will happen again next February, as China remains the world’s largest jailer of journalists.

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

I am delighted to be in the Chamber listening to this extremely important speech from my hon. Friend. Does he recall that we had our own contribution to the silencing of debate, sadly, at the time of the Olympics in London? Some of the so-called guards of the Olympic flame turned out to be operatives from the Ministry of State Security, and dealt with citizens and individuals in this country rather more brutally than we would ever tolerate of our own police.

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Furthermore, I remember mentioning in this House the fate of Tibetans who had been protesting in the Mall and were arrested and stuck behind crowds and, in some cases, had their homes raided by the police, and were arrested before they could go and protest. That is not the way we do things in this country, yet for some reason we kowtowed to the Chinese authorities at that stage. That must never be repeated, and we must not resile from calling out those sort of tactics, which the Chinese will use in their own country and wherever they can gain influence.