Sir Keir Starmer’s visit to China has triggered a familiar reaction from the Conservatives. Predictably, they have framed the trip as a surrender and a threat to national security. This language is not only lazy, it is increasingly detached from the realities facing Britain and the wider world.
I am not an intelligence officer. But it does not require access to classified briefings to see where the most immediate threat to international stability lies. It is not Beijing. It is Donald Trump, whose open contempt for allies, international law, and multilateral institutions has done more to undermine global security than any diplomatic visit to China ever could.
Starmer’s trip marks the most important moment yet in the government’s attempt to reset the UK’s relationship with China. The chancellor, the deputy prime minister, and the business secretary have already been. Now it is the prime minister’s turn. That sequencing matters. It signals intent, not weakness.
Starmer has been clear about his frustration with what he describes as a “dereliction of duty” by recent Conservative governments in effectively shutting Britain out of Beijing. While other comparable Western economies have maintained strategic engagement, the UK chose self imposed isolation. The Canadian prime minister has been. The French president has been. Britain, by contrast, became an outlier.
That was not principled realism. It was ideological paralysis.
Dozens of British organisations are represented on this visit, spanning corporate, industrial, and cultural life. They include Barclays, Jaguar Land Rover, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. This is not a symbolic delegation. It is a statement that Britain understands where economic gravity lies in the twenty first century.
Starmer’s core argument is straightforward. China is one of the world’s largest economic players. A strategic and consistent relationship with Beijing is therefore in Britain’s national interest. That does not require naivety. It requires coherence.
Crucially, engagement is also how difficult issues are raised. Human rights are not defended through silence or absence. They are defended through sustained, direct diplomacy. Shutting doors may satisfy domestic posturing, but it achieves nothing for those on the receiving end of abuses.
The Conservative counterargument centres on the recent approval of a new Chinese mega embassy in central London, which they cite as evidence of a security threat. This is thin gruel. Diplomacy by its nature involves presence. If embassies are treated as capitulation, then Britain should close half of London overnight.
What this criticism really reflects is an outdated worldview. One in which Britain’s security and prosperity are imagined as inseparable from the so called “special relationship” with the United States. That assumption is becoming increasingly untenable. An America that openly questions NATO, flirts with authoritarianism, and treats alliances as transactional is not a reliable foundation on which to build a future.
If Britain wants to fast remain irrelevant, it can cling to that illusion. Or it can recognise that the world has changed.
A renewed relationship with China also opens doors far beyond Beijing. Many former British colonies, including Zimbabwe, have increasingly looked east for investment, infrastructure, and trade. Britain positioning itself solely as a Western appendage limits its reach. Engaging China creates indirect and direct pathways back into regions the UK claims to care about but has largely abandoned.
This is not about choosing China over the United States. It is about refusing to be trapped by a false binary. Mature states pursue multiple partnerships. They hedge. They adapt. They act in their own interest rather than outsourcing it to allies whose priorities are drifting elsewhere.
Calling this “surrender” is a failure of imagination and leadership. Starmer’s visit is not a threat to national security. It is an acknowledgement that Britain cannot afford ideological nostalgia in a world that has already moved on.
The real danger is not engagement with China. It is mistaking isolation for strength, and loyalty for strategy.
