Reports have revealed that UK prosecutors' case against two men accused of spying on Parliament on behalf of China has collapsed. Executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China Luke de Pulford tells TaiwanPlus what that could mean moving forward.
00:00In this case, we see a divide between members of parliament, prosecutors and Starmer's government.
00:05What do you think about attitudes in the UK towards China and the potential threat that Chinese espionage poses to the UK?
00:12Well, I think the important thing to emphasise is that there are far fewer divisions than people make out.
00:18In fact, parliament is almost univocal on China in sharing concern around Beijing's behaviour under Xi Jinping and the contemporary Chinese Communist Party.
00:26I would also argue that the Crown Prosecution Service merely wanted to pursue justice.
00:32That's all they wanted. They had evidence relating to allegations of espionage.
00:37And all they wanted from the United Kingdom government was evidence to show that China presents a national security threat to the UK.
00:44Unfortunately, the UK government was not willing to provide that evidence. And that's the heart of this scandal.
00:49So there's not as much division as people think. And attitudes within the United Kingdom towards Beijing under Xi Jinping are falling off a cliff.
00:59What impact do you think the decision to drop this case will have on UK security?
01:03Well, this is an extremely serious scandal. And I would be very surprised if the officials involved in making this decision will have their jobs at this time next week.
01:14I think they are going to be off. And I think the reason they are is it seems pretty clear to me now that they have made a decision to collapse the most significant trial relating to the worst breach of parliamentary security in living memory in order to try to appease China.
01:33If that's the case, if that comes out in the detail, there's no way that anyone involved in that decision should be allowed within a country mile of any any decision relating to UK national security in the future.
01:45Looking at this quote from Prime Minister Starmer, you can't prosecute someone for a designation that did not exist at the time.
01:52How do you think this case and this decision align with broader UK engagement with China and Taiwan?
01:59Well, I think, first of all, I'd like to say that what the Prime Minister has said there is a line that will not hold water.
02:06He's attempted to blame the Conservative government for not being explicit enough in its threat assessment around China.
02:13It's simply untrue that there was not evidence back in 2023 of the threat that China posed to the UK.
02:20The chief of MI5 was saying it every five minutes as loudly as he possibly could, saying that China presents our biggest security threat.
02:27In terms of Beijing's contemporary activity towards the UK and what the UK should do about it, I think that United Front activity in the United Kingdom is intensifying.
02:39I think that the PRC's behavior, aggressive behavior towards Taiwan, threatens UK economic interests.
02:45And I think China's clear and obvious support for Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine, which has divided Europe and cleaved apart transatlantic alliances, is also something which is hugely deleterious to UK interests and more broadly, the interests of our international allies.
03:03So I hope that this will be something of a wake up moment, that there will be some realization within government that this effort to try to have our cake and eat it, too, to pretend that we care about national security at the same time as trying to curry favor with Beijing is simply unsustainable.
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