The Price of Principles

There’s a grim irony in the latest row over the collapsed Chinese spying case. Kemi Badenoch is busy thundering from the sidelines, demanding to know why Starmer’s government didn’t sign a simple piece of paper declaring China a “current national security threat.” The answer, of course, is the same one that would have landed in her in-tray had she been in office – because doing so would have detonated Britain’s already fragile economy.

The CPS wanted a formal ministerial statement confirming that China was a national security threat during 2021–23 – a period when the Conservatives were still running the show. Labour, now in power, was being asked to rewrite the past, retroactively classifying a superpower as a threat for decisions made under Sunak’s watch. That’s not a legal technicality, it’s a diplomatic hand grenade with “Made in Westminster” stamped on the pin.

Had Starmer obliged, the fallout would have been immediate. Beijing would have recalled its ambassador, sent ours packing, and started playing cat’s cradle with our trade routes. Every British brand from Jaguar Land Rover to Unilever would have found its Chinese operations “under review.” Chinese students – whose fees keep half our universities afloat – would have been politely redirected to Sydney or Toronto. And all for what? To look “tough” in tomorrow’s Telegraph headline.

It’s theatre, not strategy. Badenoch knows full well that declaring China a hostile state would torch any chance of economic recovery. Yet she’s happy to play arsonist-in-chief, lighting rhetorical fires to distract from her own party’s fingerprints all over this mess. It was their government that hedged for years, refusing to define China’s status clearly – half-courting it for trade, half-condemning it for espionage. The result was inevitable: legal ambiguity dressed as moral outrage.

Labour, for its part, chose the cautious path – and however unsexy that may look in the headlines, it’s the only responsible one. The economy is still hanging by its fingernails after fourteen years of Tory vandalism and Brexit self-sabotage. To risk a trade war over one failed prosecution would have been the final act of national masochism.

So yes, the government could have made the statement. But in the real world, grown-ups understand that shouting “enemy” at your banker is not sound diplomacy.

Badenoch can keep firing her letters. They cost nothing, achieve nothing, and feed a base that’s more interested in outrage than outcomes. The rest of us live in the Britain her lot built – the one too indebted, too dependent, and too diminished to indulge in moral grandstanding.

Sometimes pragmatism isn’t cowardice. It’s triage.