Lying and Spying – often found in one happy package

The deepening repercussions of Britain’s failure to put alleged Chinese spies on trial

Chris Cash and Christopher Berry, the maybe China spies who will no longer face trial

If anyone in Whitehall thought they had got away with their miserable failure to prosecute two alleged Chinese spies, they have scaled new heights of delusion. Combining this debacle with other egregious examples of the Starmer government’s supine attitude towards dealing with the world’s largest dictatorship, leaves Britain looking absurd and pathetic.

I outlined the details of this scandal last month:

(https://stephenvines.substack.com/p/something-smells-really-bad-here)

To recap it involves a decision to withdraw government evidence against two men accused of spying for the PRC. Chris Cash and Christopher Berry were about to go on trial for breaches of the Official Secrets Act after the police collected a small mound of evidence against them.

Suddenly, and apparently much to the surprise of both the police and security services, the government decided that they could not provide evidence that the PRC was a security threat to the UK so that even if these men had been acting as Chinese agents, there was no way of securing a successful prosecution.

Both men deny the spying charge but as there is not to be a trial, the evidence against them is unlikely to be revealed.

The stench of a cover up and political intrigue has since grown with allegations that the government had decided that it could not risk angering China by perusing this case. Then speculation emerged that Johnathan Powell, the Prime Minister’s National Security Advisor, was behind the moves to scupper the trial. Mr. Powell, a stranger to modesty, has form as a China appeaser stretching back to his time at the heart of the Tony Blair administration.

He has since been brought back into Downing Street and is often at Sir Keir Starmer’s side. Despite his ubiquitous presence in all major foreign affairs matters, Mr. Powell’s role in this case has been very carefully denied by the government, in a manner which leaves plenty of room for plausible deniability but, perhaps. not the truth.

However the central claim about the reasons for retreat, elaborated by the Prime Minister himself, is weak in the extreme. He suggested that a prosecution under the now abolished Official Secrets Act would not have worked because at the time China was not designated as an enemy. He blames the previous government for this state of affairs but did not go on to say that the PRC would now be viewed in this light.

Nonetheless at the time these alleged offenses took place both the heads of the security services and indeed the former Prime Minister Richie Sunak had clearly stated that China was an adversary and a threat to British national security. No explanation has been provided as to why these statements could not have been presented to the court. Indeed witnesses were lined up to make these points.

Now, a Sunday Times report has quoted a senior Trump administration official saying that: “The United States has been warning allies about the Chinese threat to our combined national security… The US government exercises extreme caution in sharing information with foreign governments subject to adversarial coercion and influence. We are especially careful in jurisdictions where our adversaries can act with impunity.”

The US has also expressed misgivings over the building of a Chinese mega-embassy in the heart of the City of London above a network of sensitive telecommunications cabling. The UK government is poised to give the go-ahead to this project despite having issued an ultimatum to the Chinese authorities requiring disclosure of parts of its planning application that have been blanked out. The PRC has simply ignored this ultimatum and stressed that Britain needs to act to expedite its application while also threatening Britain that its more modest application to rebuild the Beijing embassy would be rebuffed.

As a carrot Jingye, the Chinese owners of British Steel, who claimed to have nothing to do with politics, had the gall to say that if the embassy plan was approved it would waive the £1 billion they are seeking in compensation for what amounts to effective nationalization of its failed business, valued at somewhere around zero.

Another trial is pending involving defendants accused of spying on and illegally entering the homes of persons of interest to the Chinese state. It is alleged that they were acting on orders from the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London. Will they also be offered a gate out of jail card?

To underline British confusion over its China policy the government recently published a much heralded China Audit, which was supposed to clearly set out a path for relations. It turned out to be a damp squib with much of its contentment redacted.

Now the Prime Minister is planning a trip to Beijing where he will be able to kowtow in person.

So, to sum up, a web of lies and misleading information surrounds this shabby undermining of British justice, Britain appears to have teed-off its self-declared closest ally and has proved impotent in tackling threats to national security by a ruthless adversary who knows how to bully and, like all bullies, will be embolden by its success.

The only upside here is that it has greatly increased awareness of Chinese spying and the dangers it poses.