Two men have become the first in British history to be found guilty of spying for China under the National Security Act 2023. The case, brought by counter-terrorism prosecutors in London, concerned material gathered around Westminster and shared with handlers identified as agents of the Chinese state; sentencing follows in the autumn. The verdicts arrive at an awkward moment for the British government, which has spent much of the last two years insisting that what it calls a “consistent, durable, respectful” relationship with Beijing can coexist with a genuine national-security posture. The Crown Prosecution Service’s choice to charge under the new Act, rather than the older and patchier Official Secrets framework, was itself politically loaded: the 2023 statute was passed precisely so that the activity now proven in court could be described, prosecuted, and publicly understood as espionage on behalf of a foreign state.
The received wisdom
The official line, both from ministers and from much of the foreign-policy establishment, is that the verdicts demonstrate the system working as designed. New legislation, new charges, successful conviction; this, on that telling, is what mature liberal democracies do. They do not panic, do not over-react, do not allow individual cases to derail wider engagement with the world’s second-largest economy. The City of London still wants Chinese capital. British universities still want Chinese students. The Foreign Office still wants a stabilising voice in Beijing on Russia, on the Middle East, on climate. The fact that prosecutions are happening at all — when ten years ago they would have been quietly dropped to spare embarrassment — is itself, the argument runs, evidence that the British state has adjusted to a more contested world without falling into Cold-War caricature. Read in that spirit, the case is a reassurance, not an indictment.
A different read
The reassurance does not survive much scrutiny. Begin with chronology. The activity these men were convicted of took place over years during which successive British governments — Conservative and Labour alike — treated even modest counter-intelligence pushback against Beijing as an embarrassment to be managed rather than a duty to be performed. The “Golden Era” of George Osborne’s chancellorship was not an aberration; it was the maximalist version of an attitude shared across Whitehall, in which Chinese investment in nuclear power, telecoms, ports, and university research was treated as evidence of Britain’s openness rather than a question to be answered. Niall Ferguson’s warning, published a decade ago, that the City was outsourcing its strategic judgement to people who did not share Britain’s strategic interests, was treated at the time as the grumbling of an ageing historian. The verdicts in London suggest he was, if anything, understating it.
The deeper point is structural. A country with a serious counter-intelligence posture does not require a new statute in 2023 to prosecute behaviour that was a crime in 1923. The 2023 Act exists because the older laws had been allowed to atrophy; because successive directors-general of MI5 publicly warned, year after year, of “ten thousand” approaches to British targets by Chinese state actors and watched as ministers nodded and changed nothing; because the political cost of acting was higher than the political cost of pretending. The men in the dock are, in this sense, the cheapest possible illustration of a much larger problem. They did not penetrate GCHQ. They are not alleged to have stolen the AUKUS submarine designs. The case does not begin to address the parallel allegations about foreign money flowing through British political donations, or the long shadow cast by the Mandelson appointment over the question of who in the British state can be trusted with what. Conservatives who once laughed at the American obsession with foreign-agent registration laws now have less to laugh about.
There is a third reading, available to those willing to be honest about the trade-offs. Britain cannot afford a wholesale decoupling from China; it does not have the industrial base, the energy reserves, or the alliance depth to absorb the cost. But it can afford to stop confusing engagement with credulity. That means resourcing the Security Service properly rather than congratulating it after the fact. It means saying out loud that universities which depend on Chinese tuition fees are not the right places to host certain research programmes, however tedious the resulting administrative reshuffles. It means treating the purges in Beijing’s own military as a signal that the regime running the espionage operations against us is itself growing more brittle and more arbitrary, rather than as a curiosity for the China-watcher pages. Ross Douthat once argued that the right’s intellectual mistake of the late 1990s was confusing the absence of an enemy with the presence of friendship; the verdicts in London are the bill for that mistake arriving thirty years late.
What to watch
First, sentencing in the autumn: the length will tell us how seriously the courts judge the offence, and whether the political class is willing to defend the sentence against the inevitable diplomatic murmuring. Second, whether further charges follow under the same Act — the more isolated this case looks, the more it will read as a token. Third, the government’s own posture: does the Foreign Secretary’s next speech in Beijing acknowledge the verdicts at all, or does the ritual of “respectful relations” continue as if the courtroom had been a private matter? Fourth, Reform’s pressure on Labour on national-security questions; this case is exactly the kind of issue that turns into a campaign theme.
— J