1x2 The rise of isolationism in the Conservative Party9 May 2020 00:16
Britain is starting to look like a very lonely little country
A few years ago Britain liked to think of itself as the belle of the globalisation ball. David Cameron invited Xi Jinping, China’s president, for a state visit that involved a trip down the Mall in a gilded carriage and a banquet in Buckingham Palace. He wooed Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, in a bid to breathe new life into Britain’s membership of the European Union. He liked to boast that his friendship with Barack Obama, America’s president, was so close that Mr Obama had once tucked him up in the presidential bed on Air Force One.
Boris Johnson came to power promising, in a very Johnsonian manner, to preserve Britain’s pro-global stance while also delivering Brexit. He routinely referred to the Europeans as “our neighbours and partners”. He got on famously with Donald Trump. Shortly before taking over as prime minister he told a Chinese tv station that his government would be “very pro-China”. He repeatedly insisted that there are two possible versions of Brexit: Nigel Farage represented the inward-looking and xenophobic one while he represented the outward-looking and cosmopolitan one.
Yet Mr Johnson’s party may be turning against his global vision. One piece of evidence is the emergence of the China Research Group (crg). Founded a couple of weeks ago to “promote debate and fresh thinking” about China, in the words of one of its founders, Tom Tugendhat, it has attracted interest from all sorts: moderates like Damian Green, Eurosceptics like Mark Francois and human-rights advocates like Benedict Rogers. Mr Tugendhat is a moderate Remainer; Neil O’Brien, the co-founder, a moderate Leaver. It has already drawn some blood: on May 5th the foreign-affairs select committee, which Mr Tugendhat chairs, asked some difficult questions about whether, acting through surrogates, the Chinese government took over a British-based firm, Imagination Technologies, in order to get control of security software.
The rise of the crg is not evidence, in itself, that the Conservative Party is losing its enthusiasm for “global Britain”. There are plenty of good reasons for criticising a country that distorts trade through industrial subsidies, soft loans from state banks and discriminatory standards while conducting industrial espionage and supporting authoritarian regimes around the world. Keeping China at arm’s length may also be a price for maintaining a close alliance with America: some senators are trying to block the deployment of the latest generation of American fighter jets to Britain because it is allowing Huawei into its 5g network. Still, the crg’s name, a deliberate echo of the European Research Group (erg) that masterminded Brexit, is ominous. You cannot pick fights with China without China hitting back.
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