New Statesman: End of the Golden Decade

Two important developments have forced Johnson’s hand. The first, clearly visible even as he tossed out those Brexit promises, is the growing systemic competition between the US and China – a competition in which both superpowers will increasingly insist that smaller countries, such as the UK, take sides. The second is a startling reversal of attitudes to China within the Conservative Party. Its leaders, only a few years ago, declared undying friendship with the People’s Republic (a relationship that George Osborne embarrassingly titled as the “golden decade” of UK-China relations); now the party is settling into unremitting hostility.

The beginnings of this remarkable U-turn pre-date the pandemic. The process has been greatly reinforced, however, by Beijing’s early cover-up of Covid-19 and its subsequent aggressive propaganda, and by the imposition of a draconian security law on Hong Kong that effectively tears up China’s agreement with the UK to leave Hong Kong’s way of life unchanged for 50 years. The UK’s recent promise of a “pathway to citizenship” for Hong Kong citizens who hold British National (Overseas) passports – which was described by the Global Times, China’s ­nationalist mouthpiece, as a ­“rubber cheque” – provoked an angry ­response from Beijing, where the move was ­characterised as an ­imperial power trying to interfere in ­China’s internal affairs. [...]

The Huawei decision should also calm the fury that has been simmering in Washington, DC since Johnson’s initial failure to fall in line. Yet this reversal will, inevitably, provoke ear-splitting volumes of complaint from the Chinese government, along with threats of a general retreat of Chinese investment from the UK and retaliation against UK companies and interests. British companies that depend on the Chinese market – such as the bank HSBC, which backed China’s new security laws in Hong Kong – should be nervous. [...]

Pro-Brexit Atlanticists such as Duncan Smith and Owen Paterson sit alongside Remainers, such as William Hague and Tugendhat, concerned about China’s encroachment on liberal democratic values. Others, such as David Davis, are there for the civil liberties ques-tions, and human rights advocates such as Fiona Bruce, the MP for Congleton, and the activist Benedict Rogers, who runs the Conservative Human Rights Commission and is a co-founder of Hong Kong Watch, form another sub-set. A further group comprises those who fear the economic impacts of Chinese trade practices, and long-standing China sceptics such as Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s former aide and occasional New Statesman essayist.

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The Guardian: The Tories now treat the nation as they have long treated the poor

In truth, universal credit was doomed from the start. The right failed to see the poor as they were rather than as they wanted them to be. People are losing tenancies and going without food not only because universal credit is underfunded but because it imposes delays of five weeks or more before it pays anything at all to claimants. The delays are a matter of deliberate policy. In 2010, rightwingers wanted poverty to be the result of chaotic lives, alcoholism, drug addiction and, above all, for this is was what got the religious right’s rocks off, the breakdown of traditional families. They blamed individuals, not the system. A month’s wait for money would make the feckless pull themselves together and learn to live like members of the respectable middle class, who must wait a month for their first salary cheques when they take new jobs. [...]

A second delusion flowed from the first: that the countries of the European Union would quail before the newly resurgent British as we awoke like lions from their slumber and scramble to meet our demands. This is what David Davis meant when he said British negotiators would be striking deals in Berlin rather than Brussels. As it is, the supposedly squabbling nations of the EU have held together, while the British political system has imploded. [...]

Now Norman sits in a “Conservative” party surrounded by immodest men and women who prefer to wreck the nation’s finances and threaten the peace in Ireland and the union with Scotland rather than consider, even for a moment, that they might be wrong. Whether the Conservative party can survive the loss of its Burkean tradition is a question that will worry only Tories. Whether Britain can is the only pressing concern for the rest of us.

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Politico: Salzburg Brexit failure stems from insular UK government

There’s a rather more convincing explanation for this massive failure: It’s a failure of the ecosystem of May’s government, rather than the individuals involved. British government machinery tends to be more comfortable executing a task than questioning fundamental assumptions. [...]

This is not the first time that geopolitical disasters have resulted from an overly narrow approach. In the run-up to the Iraq war, British diplomats and spies were tasked with making the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They set about delivering with determination and energy. So successful was this work that, in early 2002, then-CIA Director George Tenet complained to his own spies that “all the good reporting I get is from [MI6].”

Unfortunately, nobody thought to ask the prior question: “Have they actually got these weapons?” The results are now all too well-known: Iraq was invaded on the false premise of a threat from WMD. The country collapsed into anarchy which still plagues it and the wider region, leading directly to the rise of ISIS and a new wave of global terrorism. [...]

Inside this pressure cooker, particularly the extreme pressure that the Brexit process is generating, there is an understandable tendency to focus on the narrow task at hand. This leaves British officials feverishly developing a plan that respects May’s self-defeating red lines rather than the bigger task of finding a plan that can actually be accepted by Europe.

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