Britain’s love affair with ‘liberal values’ is dead – and so is its authority on the EU, Putin and China

The violence earlier this week in Hong Kong, when mostly young protestors stormed and vandalised the Legislative Council building, has not only created an extraordinarily dangerous situation in the former colony, it has also precipitated a nasty new spat between the UK and China.

For the third day in a row, the foreign secretary has warned China of “serious consequences” if it fails to respect Hong Kong’s autonomy, while Beijing has told the UK, in escalating tones of irritation, not to interfere in Chinese internal affairs.

Now, of course, there are several reasons why the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, might want to talk tough to China just now, and only one – an entirely justified fear that disorder in Hong Kong could provoke direct intervention by Beijing, with all the risks that would entail for Hong Kongers – relates directly to what happened in the former colony on Monday.

Other reasons for the heightened rhetoric might include the obligation to respond to those in Hong Kong who still hope that the UK might offer some protection from China. There’s also the continuing sense of guilt among groups in the UK about the terms on which the colony was returned to China – or that it was returned at all.

Last, but not least, there is the not insignificant fact that Hunt is vying with Boris Johnson for the keys to No 10, and cannot afford either to appear weak or to be neglecting his day job.

But the latest UK-China standoff highlights something else as well, something much bigger and broader than this so far mercifully verbal exchange. Not for the first time in recent months, the UK finds itself awkwardly straddled between two imperatives. On the one hand, it wants to present itself as a leading defender of what might be called liberal democracy – I’ll come to definitions later – and a foe of repression in all its forms. On the other, with Brexit looming, it is concerned to seize what it sees as the potentially huge trade and investment opportunities offered by a fast-rising China.

The conflict was laid bare earlier this year, when China took umbrage at talk by the then UK defence secretary of sending the new aircraft carrier to patrol the South China Sea. A planned trade mission, to be led by the chancellor of the exchequer, was then postponed. The mission did, in fact, take place a couple of months later, but since then there has been the dispute about China’s telecoms giant, Huawei. And the message from Beijing has been clear: the UK would not be allowed to woo and threaten at the same time, or at least not in such close and obvious proximity. It would have to choose.

The contradiction in UK-China policy appears especially acute now, largely because until very recently the UK gave unambiguous precedence to the economic imperative and played down the “values” aspect of its agenda. Asked about this in a BBC interview during a 2015 visit to China as chancellor, China-enthusiast George Osborne said he believed it was more productive to talk to Beijing on such issues as human rights discreetly. The recent upsurge in protest in Hong Kong, plus revelations about re-education camps in Xinjiang and detentions of dissidents, has made that preference a lot harder to defend.

And the Chinese have swooped on the contradictions. Emerging from his dressing down at the Foreign Office, China’s ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, said that it was “hypocritical” of UK politicians to criticise the rights situation in Hong Kong when, under British rule, there had been no elections or right to protest. To which the UK might respond that the British administration of Hong Kong would have been widely regarded as more benign, and anyway, the handover agreement provided for Hong Kong to retain its independent courts for 50 years, only 22 of which have passed.

While resentment that the UK wants to have it both ways might be relatively new for China, it has long been par for the course in Russia, which complains about the UK speaking loudly about “democracy” and “values”, while hardly being a paragon of virtue itself. Nor were their complaints unfounded.

With relatively little trade and investment at stake, the UK could afford to berate Russia about its shortcomings, leading the charge on EU sanctions, for instance, while ensuring that the energy sector, where UK companies did have an interest, was largely exempt.

Until recently, the UK’s approach to most of the Middle East was more akin to its treatment of China: trade first, with the “values-sermon” soft-pedalled or silent. But, again, all this works fine until something happens that makes the rights and values question impossible to avoid: democracy protests in Bahrain, for instance; the Saudi role, using UK-bought weapons in the war in Yemen; the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. So far, however, the trade consideration has won out, and there are signs that Brexit is tipping the balance in UK foreign policy even further away from “values”.

The incipient diplomatic rapprochement with Russia just a year after the Salisbury poisoning is an obvious case in point. I still maintain that the truth of that story has not been told. But the ferocity of the UK’s protests then makes it quite a climb-down for the UK to be starting to sue for peace – a development from which Theresa May’s frosty handshake with Vladimir Putin was merely a theatrical diversion.

A part of the tentative Russia-UK thaw was Putin’s recent interview with the Financial Times – the fact of his giving it, rather than what he said. But the Russian president, perhaps inadvertently, made headlines around the world with his contention that the “liberal idea” was “obsolete”, when what he actually seemed to be saying was that what we used to call the “permissive society” was facing a backlash, and that this was no bad thing. Putin was speaking as the small-c conservative he has long been on social mores, rather than an ideologist on the grand scale.

What he called the “liberal idea”, however, would also include the “values” agenda, with its emphasis on representative democracy and human rights, as preached to Russia and selectively to others by the UK – and until recently by the US. And here Putin could well be right. The tide for promoting “values” in diplomacy may be turning. Donald Trump expressly rejected any mission to convert others to US ways of doing things when he came to office, and the UK may now be having to adjust to more “realism” in its foreign policy by the need to find new partners after Brexit.

As more of a realist than a liberal idealist in foreign policy, and a critic of the UK’s somewhat differentiated approach to preaching its “values” – widely seen as a double standard – I would add one footnote. It has been common in much of the west until recently to see liberal values as defining the future. As living standards improved across the world, it was argued, so liberalism would gain ground.

At a conference on the future of UK-Middle East relations in London this week, this assumption was challenged. In a session by and about the younger generation, surveys were cited to the effect that higher living standards and more education were leading not to a convergence, but to a polarisation, of “values”, with safety and security and identity taking precedence over western-style democracy and human rights.

The UK’s admirable liberal idealists may not like this, but it could be that one effect of Brexit will be to channel UK foreign policy in a more realist direction and thus place it on the right side of international diplomatic trends – even if it is for what many would see as the wrong reasons.