Liz Truss’s hard stance against China is unrealistic – and naive

Editorial: Truss is deluded if she seriously believes the UK, one-eighth the economic size of China, is in any position to throw its weight around

The newest front in this bidding war is China (PA)

The Conservative leadership election, an unedifying spectacle at the best of times, is rapidly descending into a depressing political auction, where Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak try to outbid one another to prove just how “tough”, “Thatcherite” or “Conservative” they are.

With the partial exception of tax cuts (Mr Sunak has performed a U-turn on VAT on energy bills), this process is pushing the next government even further to the populist-nationalist-authoritarian right than the one of Boris Johnson.

When Ms Truss suggested she would expand the Rwanda refugee deportation programme, Mr Sunak offered to extend it to other countries. Even though Mr Sunak knows the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill could spark a ruinous trade war with the EU, he has to match her enthusiasm for this disastrous policy. And because the foreign secretary likes to be thought of as slightly less green than her colleagues, so Mr Sunak has to embrace fracking even though he knows full well it will do nothing for the immediate energy crisis and take years to feed through.

The newest front in this bidding war is China. It is fashionable in rightish Conservative circles to be hostile to the superpower, and Mr Sunak has had to downplay his desire to maintain crucial economic and trade ties with the nation and swing to the requisite level of Sinophobia demanded by his party’s activists.

Mr Sunak has, preemptively, attempted to portray Ms Truss as soft on China in her role as foreign secretary. She, in turn, is now countering with a rather unrealistic plan to counter the influence of China in the world, via a revamped Commonwealth. It is, at best, wishful thinking.

Her “new Commonwealth deal” will apparently ensure it sits “at the heart of her plans for Global Britain”. It is flawed, and Mr Sunak would do well to bring some sobriety to this atavistic plan. First, even with large- to medium-sized powers such as the UK, India, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria and Canada ranked against China, they hardly pose a challenge to the world’s largest industrial power with growing military potential.

Second, Ms Truss must surely have noticed that China’s sheer economic power and “Belt and Road Initiative” partnerships have brought Commonwealth nations from New Zealand to Kenya, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Guyana and Jamaica under the strong influence of Beijing. Where once British exports, finance and overseas aid helped lend the Commonwealth a practical purpose, it is now Chinese industrial giants, banks and government agencies that hold sway. Their influence underpinned by debts owed to Beijing. The former British Commonwealth might be better called the Chinese Commonwealth.

Ms Truss is deluded if she seriously believes that the UK, with a yawning trade deficit and a GDP approximately one-eighth the size of China, is in any position to throw its weight around. Global Britain relies much more on “soft power” forces such as the BBC, which Ms Truss’ colleague and number one fan Nadine Dorries is doing her best to defund.

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None of this would matter, except that Ms Truss is now the hardest of hard Brexiteers, and seems oblivious to the economic loss that Brexit has brought to the UK and its influence in the world. Britain’s leading role in the EU added heft to its diplomatic gestures, this has now disappeared.

Despite still-lively links of family and friendship, the English language, sporting traditions and cultural affinities, the Commonwealth ceased to be a cohesive British-led geopolitical force not long after the end of the Second World War and the rise of the United States, the European Union, Japan and, now, China.

It is far too late to try and reverse the course of history when the likes of Barbados have moved to the status of a republic. The winds of change ran through the Commonwealth many decades ago, and it survived as a club of members with a shared sentimental affection for Queen Elizabeth II. Elizabeth Truss as a figurehead leading them to a cold war with China is not quite what the rest of the Commonwealth has in mind for its future.