The Prime Minister is keen to convey his desire to build “consistent, durable” and “respectful” ties with China. At the G20 summit in Brazil last month, he became the first Prime Minister in six years to meet with Xi, the country’s premier, who spoke afterwards of “breaking new ground” on trade relations.
However, growing tensions over China’s push for a new “super-embassy” just three miles from Westminster – an issue that Xi personally raised with the Prime Minister – threaten to unravel the progress made so far.
As local pushback against the embassy increases, Starmer faces a conundrum. Overturn the decision and risk provoking China – or grant it and risk provoking the US.
China’s proposed embassy at the historic Royal Mint Court, near the Tower of London, would become its biggest diplomatic mission in Europe. If the plans go ahead, it would be more than 10 times the size of its existing embassy at Portland Place in Marylebone, and include offices, 225 homes and a “cultural exchange” building. China’s government bought the site for more than £255m six years ago.
However, there has been robust resistance from Tower Hamlets Council, the Metropolitan Police, politicians across different parties and residents over fears the plans would put the public at risk. The council, run by independent party Aspire, rejected the plans earlier this month for a second time. It will present its stance at an inquiry before Angela Rayner, the Local Government Secretary, makes a final decision on the proposals.
Beijing was thought to have abandoned its plans for the diplomatic outpost the first time they were rejected by the council two years ago, amid speculation that the Tory government would have backed the refusal. However, an unchanged application was submitted just weeks after Labour won the general election.
Sir Keir Starmer told his deputies to call in the embassy’s planning application after Xi Jinping asked him to do so – Stefan Rousseau/PA
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader who is sanctioned by China, said: “The Government’s slightly got itself up a blind alley, because the council has turned it down. If they now take it up and then give [China] the embassy, it looks craven. It looks like that was their intention all along.
“They’re going to have a real struggle to make the case for what they’ve done, when the council has twice now rejected it.”
He noted that Rayner will be “under huge pressure” from Downing Street to overrule the rejection.
Rayner called in the plans in October, just days after David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, returned from a visit to China. The Prime Minister confirmed last month that he had asked ministers to call in the decision following a request on the telephone by Xi.
In a written parliamentary answer to shadow housing minister Paul Holmes, Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, said that Lammy and Simon Hart, of tech quango Innovate UK, made representations for Rayner’s department to take control of the decision.
Representatives for the embassy project team have denied intentions to bypass the council. None the less, those actions have raised fears that the proposal is being used as a political football.
Kevin Hollinrake, the shadow housing secretary, quizzed Rayner in the House of Commons over the amount of political interference in the planning application.
He posited that the Government is seeking to “counteract the disastrous Budget” and its “growth-wrecking trade union bill” by getting into Beijing’s good graces, at the potential cost of overriding national security interests – claims that Rayner dismissed.
If plans for the diplomatic compound at Royal Mint Court are approved, London will host the largest official Chinese presence in Europe
A separate cross-party group of MPs and peers led by former Duncan-Smith, who is also co-chairman of the hawkish Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), has written to Rayner alleging “suspected interference” in the planning process for the site. Signatories included Labour MP Sarah Champion, chairman of the Commons international development select committee.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) said: “Applications for a new Chinese embassy in Tower Hamlets have been called in for MHCLG Ministers to decide. A final decision will be made in due course.”
The department insists it is standard for applications to be called in if they affect other governments or have impacts on national security. It says that the proposal raised planning issues of more than local importance and was considered in line with the Government’s call-in policy.
After Tower Hamlets voted to reject the plans, a spokesman for the embassy said: “The UK central Government has called in the planning application of the new Chinese embassy project. Host countries have the international obligation to support and facilitate the building of the premises of diplomatic missions. It is hoped that the UK side will fulfil that obligation.”
Hollinrake said: “I’m very concerned there’s some geopolitical influence, when it should be a matter that’s independent of those kinds of influences.
“You don’t call in applications because of political pressure and publicly say that you have, which is quite extraordinary.
“It seems as if Keir Starmer’s kow-towed to the Chinese government… , that as soon as they came along and said, ‘We want some help with this’, they’ve jumped straight in and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll sort you out’.
“On a number of different levels, you can see how the Chinese national interest might be served by getting a planning consent there for a super-embassy, but I’m not sure it’s in the UK’s national interest.”
Until recently, the relationship between the UK and China had deteriorated on the back of warnings from British intelligence and security services that Chinese authorities are ramping up their espionage activities, with a director at GCHQ warning in May that this “poses a genuine and increasing cyber risk”.
The case of Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong pro-democracy campaigner imprisoned by Beijing, has also been weighing on relations. So have human rights concerns about Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kongers’ long-held freedoms has complicated efforts to take a more pragmatic approach to trade with China – Hollie Adams/Reuters
Shortly after his election as Prime Minister, Starmer vowed to be “robust” with China. However, he is in the tricky position of navigating how to reset relations with Beijing in a way that would also allow him to continue raising concerns and confronting the national security challenges that China potentially poses.
William Matthews, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, says: “The problem with a decision like [the embassy] is that it shows a willingness to engage with China, but given the concerns of local residents and the prestige of the location, it risks being seen as being keener to satisfy Beijing’s reputational desire than to be serious about human rights and national security concerns, given how strongly those have been objected to domestically in the UK.”
Approval for the embassy would likely not sit well with the upcoming Republican administration in the US, with Donald Trump’s nominees including the hawkish Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Mike Waltz as national security adviser.
Trump himself criticised the US embassy’s move from Mayfair to Vauxhall in 2018, calling it “lousy” and a “bad deal” and refused to attend its opening ceremony.
By contrast, China’s super-embassy would give Beijing’s official presence in the UK an enormous, prestigious location that Trump might have liked for the US.
Matthews said: “If the Royal Mint becomes the Chinese embassy – a bigger, more prestigious location – that sends the message, whether intended or not, that China is potentially seen as more important … and that actually China is the country with the greater amount of influence and prestige within the UK.
“So, there would be a bit of an impact, given that the Trump administration on China is going to be extremely hawkish. An awful lot of Trump’s foreign policy vision is seen through the lens of the US’s competition with China. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on US allies, including close allies like the UK, to fall in line with that approach. And it probably won’t send the message that Trump would want to see.”
In the meantime, Britain’s own efforts to refurbish its embassy in Beijing have stalled while the process for the London application is under way.
Matthews said: “Beijing sees that relationship between the two embassies being rebuilt as a reciprocal one, and they have been disappointed in the past that the UK [Government] has not gotten involved in the decision, the way that it now has.”
Mr Matthews said rejecting the plans would “cast a shadow over the UK Government’s plans to engage with China”.
He added: “We’d see a cooling-off of the slight warming of relations that we have seen over the past few months.
“Ultimately, both countries have to deal with each other, but from Beijing’s perspective, the UK needs China more than China needs the UK.
“A refusal would also fit into their existing understanding that the UK is essentially a proxy for US interests. This will fit into that pattern that, from their point of view, the national security concerns are overblown, the human rights issues are none of the UK’s business, and the UK would be seen as sabotaging relations unnecessarily from that point of view.”
Duncan-Smith says that if Rayner decides to give the application the thumbs up, there is “a very good chance the Government will lose the chances of doing a trade deal with the one person who’s going to be in the White House who really does like Britain”.
“The one place it needs to cosy up to very fast, which is a growing economy, speaks our language, uses very similar laws, and therefore would make a much easier arrangement than anybody else in the short term, has got to be the United States,” he says.
“America is the largest investor in the UK, and the UK is the largest single investor in the US.
“We run a surplus in trade with the US, which is considerably different from Europe, and certainly a million miles different from China. Why not maximise that instead of maximising [with] China? And that’ll be the question on the decision.
“It boils down to: the decision on the embassy is going to offend somebody. Who do you think is worse to offend?”
