Contractors linked to hostile foreign powers such as China will be targeted by a new security taskforce if Labour wins the next general election. In a joint initiative from the shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, and the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, the new body will aim to anticipate risks to Britain’s national security. It comes just days after the deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden, said China represents the “largest state-based threat” to Britain’s economic security. The government intervened in eight attempted takeovers of UK firms by Chinese buyers last year…
Tag: UK news
David Cameron’s appointment to investment fund ‘part engineered by China’
David Cameron’s appointment as vice-chair of the £1bn China-UK investment fund and Sir Danny Alexander’s appointment as vice-president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank were in part engineered by the Chinese state, parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) found. Their appointment was to lend credibility to Chinese investment as well as the broader Chinese brand, according to confidential evidence given to the intelligence watchdog. Both Cameron as prime minister and Alexander as Treasury chief secretary were at the heart of the plan to usher in a golden age in Anglo-Chinese…
Fifth of UK universities’ income comes from overseas students, figures show
One in every five pounds received by UK universities last year came from international students, according to Guardian analysis that reveals the scale of the sector’s growing dependence on overseas tuition fees for financial survival. With the annual dash to allocate university places for the next academic year about to begin, there are fears UK students could lose out to their overseas counterparts, whose higher fees have become critical to university budgets. Tuition fees from international students now make up a third or more of the total income at some…
London losing out to Paris and Milan over tourist shopping, says Burberry
Burberry has reported a sales surge of almost a fifth thanks to a bounceback in China, but the luxury British fashion brand has warned that London is losing out to rivals such as Paris and Milan, which are enjoying a stronger tourist shopping boom. The British fashion brand, best known for its signature check bags and raincoats, said that global sales grew 18% year on year to £589m in the quarter to 1 July – its fastest growth rate in two years. The company pointed to a strong sales recovery…
Committee report is rightfully scathing on UK’s China strategy
If there is one constant in the UK’s policy towards China over the past three decades it has been its short-termism and inconsistency, the scathing intelligence and security committee report on China rightly finds, comparing Britain’s endless course corrections with Beijing’s capacity to think strategically about how to advance the global interests of the Chinese Communist party. If Downing Street thinks in terms of the next news bulletin, China has a planning cycle that in some of its documents takes it to 2049, as the ISC was told by one…
China engaged in ‘whole of state’ assault on UK, report says
China’s state institutions are aggressively targeting the UK, putting the country on course for a nightmare scenario that represents not just a commercial challenge but an existential threat to liberal democratic systems, parliament’s influential all-party intelligence and security committee has found. The inquiry – launched in 2019 and subject to various delays was completed in May – is scathing about the failure of the UK to wake up to the scale of the systemic challenge posed by the Chinese government’s “whole of state” assault on the British economy, politics, civil…
We’re a Tory MP and a Hong Kong pro-democracy activist, and China is trying to silence us both | Finn Lau and Tim Loughton
We are from two different backgrounds and political traditions – you’d think we might have little in common. Yet China has sought to silence us both, and we have seen at first hand how the state is trying to exert more and more power abroad. Finn Lau woke up in London on Tuesday morning to the news that he had received an arrest warrant, and that the Beijing-controlled Hong Kong authorities were offering a HK$1m bounty for any information that could lead to his arrest. Seven other Hongkongers who fight…
MPs call for sanctions on Hong Kong officials targeting UK-based activists
Hong Kong officials involved in targeting UK-based pro-democracy activists who had bounties placed on them should be subject to sanctions, opposition and Tory backbenchers have urged the UK government. A Foreign Office minister responding to concerns raised in parliament was also challenged by one of her Conservative colleagues over her recent meeting with a Chinese official whom the Tory MP Tim Loughton described as “China’s chief dissident snatcher”. MPs were discussing an urgent question in the House of Commons after Hong Kong police on Monday offered a reward equal to…
Is China really leading the clean energy revolution? Not exactly | Li Shuo
Big numbers are a hallmark of China’s economy and now its energy transition: they thrill, they mystify, and at times they contradict, at least on the surface. China’s solar capacity is now 228 gigawatts (GW), more than the rest of the world combined, according to Global Energy Monitor. And wind capacity, at a whopping 310GW, also leads the world. With another 750GW of new wind and solar projects in the pipeline, China will hit its 2030 target of 1,200GW – an unimaginable number when proposed just a few years ago…
UK Hong Kong scheme ‘funding charity with links to Chinese Communist party’
A consortium of Hong Kong community groups have accused the UK government’s flagship programme for welcoming Hongkongers of funding an organisation with alleged links to the Chinese Communist party (CCP). Last week, the government announced grants worth more than £3m to a range of organisations that support east and south-east Asian communities, including Hongkongers who have recently arrived in the UK via the bespoke British National (overseas) (BNO) immigration route. Of the grants issued, £39,990 went to Wai Yin Society, a charity that runs three community centres in Manchester. In…