Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Main Page: Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, we should all be grateful to my noble friend Lord West for initiating this long-overdue debate. As he said, the directors of MI5 and the FBI pointed out in that unprecedented speech that our traditional defence architecture is no longer suitable for dealing with the major threats from China, because although it is developing its weapons, its major threats are hacking, as has already been said, and economic coercion.
On the hacking front, it is vital that we continue to invest heavily in cybersecurity. As others have said, we must make sure that any Chinese investment in our technology sector undergoes thorough scrutiny, and, wherever possible, reliance on Chinese technology in essential industries should be kept to an absolute minimum—if not kept out altogether.
The war in Ukraine has highlighted the dangers of any form of dependence on authoritarian regimes, so we should be concerned that in 2021 we ran a total trade deficit with China which amounted to just over £30 billion, making China our third largest trading partner. As has already been mentioned, while much of the recent debate around dodgy London property owners has understandably focused on Russian oligarchs, China continues to quietly buy up the city. Over 200,000 London-based properties are owned by Chinese buyers. As the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, rightly said, we sometimes forget that Chinese investors own British football clubs, airports, landmarks such as the Cheesegrater and, even more worryingly, strategically important infrastructure in our oil, gas, water and nuclear industries.
One of the many unfortunate consequences of Brexit is that we are now in a less favourable position when it comes to picking trading partners. But if you compare UK regulations to the strict FDI laws that operate in China, we should be tightening our restrictions on Chinese investment, even in non-strategic industries, as China could use this as leverage in areas such as climate change.
As my noble friend Lord West said, a new approach to UK-China relations is long overdue. When was the last one? The last clearly defined strategy paper was published by Labour in 2009; that shows how long overdue this is. One point I want to raise is that we need more British people, such as graduates, speaking Chinese and understanding China and its civilisation a lot better. This begins in the classroom with the promotion of Mandarin and lessons about Chinese civilisation and other similar subjects. I hope that the Minister will agree to tighten regulation of Chinese investment in this country, and that he will support a nationwide attempt to build a China-literate and China-aware workforce through increased education programmes at school level and across all government departments.