Exclusive: British foreign secretary says failing to engage ‘closely and regularly’ with Beijing would be ‘really counterproductive’
Britain should not “pull the shutters down” on
Next week, Cleverly will set out the UK’s approach towards China explicitly in a major speech following the government’sThe head of the National Cyber Security Centre, Lindy Cameron, is also expected to He suggested the UK needed to adopt a more sophisticated approach. “I keep being asked to sum up the nature of the relationship in one word. Are they competition? Are they a threat? Are they a challenge? Are they an opportunity? But we don’t distil any other bilateral relationship into one word.
“There are areas where we will want to dial back the relationship and they are not contradictory or incompatible. Throughout, we need to be clear-eyed, focused on what is in our national interest, and what is in the interest of the world more generally.” However, the foreign secretary said that his willingness to engage with Beijing did not mean the government would not also hold it to account in “a number of areas” where they disagreed. “That doesn’t mean that we are not going to pull them up on the areas where we’ve got serious disagreement,” he said.
Cleverly also denied that the UK was a “vassal state” to any other nation after Macron controversially suggested that being a US ally did not mean being a “vassal”.
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