Brexit Britain is only able to have one enemy at a time – and it’s not Russia any more

The long-awaited report on claims of Russian interference in UK political life is finally expected to see the light of day next week, just before parliament rises for the recess. All the necessary ducks are finally in a row: parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee has been reconstituted, though not with the chair the prime minister wanted. The government has a big majority, so there is no election on the horizon, and there are plenty of diversions for public attention, including the continuing ups and downs of the coronavirus and what remains of people’s plans for the summer.

But the government apparently needed another one – another diversion, that is. And it came in the form of an accusation by the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, that it was “almost certain that Russian actors” had interfered in the 2019 election. Regrettably, that “almost certain” qualification works almost every time. Think about it. If the government or the Intelligence and Security Committee could prove that Russia did interfere, you can bet your bottom dollar they would have said so. The “almost” in such contexts means “not”.

This is about pre-emptive defence. With no evidence of any Russian electoral interference pre-2019, I surmise, the government is trying to deflect attention from the other likely strand of the report: the use of money, and not just Russian money, to influence UK politics. Let’s see.

But I would also bet that – for all these diversionary tactics and for all the efforts by Boris Johnson’s enemies to hold his feet to the fire over questionable donors – any impact of the report will be short-lived. Why? Because the UK has suddenly found another enemy No 1. As of Tuesday, when the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, briskly announced the government’s decision to end the involvement of China’s telecoms giant in the UK’s 5G, this country’s foreign policy is suddenly in a different world.

The U-turn on Huawei – which presents itself as a private company unbeholden to China’s communist state, yet for all that has been doughtily defended by China’s ambassador in London – could hardly be more comprehensive. No UK company may buy anything from Huawei after the end of this year and all kit already installed will have to be “ripped out” by 2027.

What a difference five years makes. In October 2015 China’s leader, Xi Jinping, made a state visit to the UK, amid much talk – especially from the then chancellor, George Osborne – of a golden moment, the start of a golden age even, in relations between this country and China. When, in the following year, the EU referendum produced a victory for Brexit, the potential for increased trade with China became the centrepiece of the new “Global Britain”, freed from the constraints of the EU to roam the oriental seas.

Small matter that Germany had managed to establish a successful trading relationship with China despite those very same constraints, or the fact that the UK would be trying to build on what was still a small base. The logic then was that the interests of the UK and China could be elegantly aligned, with China’s consumer sector providing an expanding market for the UK to export its services, while China could find a home for its spare cash by investing in UK infrastructure.

There were always dissenters, but the first sign of trouble came soon after Theresa May became prime minister and called a review of China’s involvement in the funding of Hinkley Point nuclear power station. Objections were largely overcome, however, and the goal remained for China to become the UK’s second largest trading partner (after the US) by 2020. It took a whole chain of developments – Xi Jinping making himself leader for life, a Beijing-dictated law on security in Hong Kong, insistent reports about the persecution of the Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, Donald Trump’s trade war with China, and objections from the UK’s intelligence allies – to trigger what amounts to a total reversal of UK policy on China.

For me, at least, the ease with which China was able – no, positively invited – to penetrate the UK economy over the past decade or so has been astonishing, and a source of considerable misgivings. This partly reflects the questions I had, and still have, about how far this one-party state will be able to sustain its development without risks to social stability. Remember Tiananmen Square? Apparently not. Another is the glaring double standard in how the UK treats China and Russia. While a blind eye has routinely been turned to China’s flaws, Russia’s defects have become a pretext to exclude Russia from “normal” relations. Russia has fallen foul of the UK’s much-vaunted “values” agenda; China – not so much, indeed hardly at all.

A small symbol of this double standard, for me, is the huge Huawei sign that looms over the M4 as you drive past Reading. Imagine Russia’s Gazprom or indeed any Russian concern being allowed to have a commercial presence in the UK and boast about it like this. Once upon a time, Russia was interested in buying into Centrica (British Gas as used to be), but – surprise, surprise – it did not happen.

Yet Chinese interests have been allowed into such critical sectors as telecoms and nuclear power, the former with the apparent blessing, for a while, of the UK’s intelligence services. There are also – or at least there were at the start of the past academic year – nearly 120,000 Chinese students at British universities, raising questions about the solvency of some universities if they stay away after the pandemic and how far they might be used by Beijing as a potential fifth column. Rarely have any of these considerations rung any alarm bells; the appeal of Chinese money has been too seductive. Human rights, freedom of expression, rights for ethnic minorities, the intrusion of the state into private life – these were rarely, if ever mentioned, by UK officials in public.

Contrast this with Russia, where practically every mention by officialdom or in the UK media is accompanied by references to Vladimir Putin as a dictator from the Soviet-era KGB, who invades other people’s countries, shoots down other people’s civilian airliners, assassinates enemies at home and abroad in particularly nasty ways, and persecutes LGBTQc+ people. How often do you hear anyone taking care to separate condemnation of Moscow from interest in or sympathy for Russia’s people? How often, over the past 10 years or so, have any of our leading politicians sought to look behind the Cold War cliches, consider how the world might look from Moscow, and leave the preaching, as George Osborne did with China, behind closed doors?

I am not concerned here about which approach might be the more desirable or productive. I am concerned about the all-or-nothing approach to relations with certain countries and about the different treatment meted out over the years to two equally flawed potential partners. This is a divergence which has left relations with Russia in the deep-freeze, while perpetuating illusions about China that have led to the belated U-turn being executed by the government of Boris Johnson.

Two consolations might be that the UK finds it hard to cultivate more than one major adversary at once and Brexit Britain needs partners even more than it did before. So the bad news for UK-China relations – where Beijing, as seen from London, suddenly has no redeeming features – could be good news, in a way, for those of us still hoping for a warming between the UK and Russia. If the Russia report, when it appears, turns out to be less about Moscow’s innate iniquity and more about party political venality at home, a re-think of policy towards Russia in a positive direction might yet be on the cards.