Russia and China’s twin threat place Britain at peril – Patrick Mercer

Instead of the judicious muesli of ideas we used to get, we now have a solid brick of Weetabix: rough, ugly, easy to serve but hard to digest.

But now, in the wake of Brexit, Covid-19 and other issues, two real bogeymen have come to the table. Happily for the hapless newsrooms, we can now choose whether Russia or China is the worse villain, yet both will be top of the menu until something tastier, more immediately frightening comes along.

Now, I’ve never hidden my liking of Russia nor, I hope, a fair understanding of her history and our two countries’ sometimes strained relationships.

That’s why I found the whole Salisbury/Skripal affair so difficult to explain. So, hands up, I can’t find any reason to excuse the Kremlin for this and even if I could, it’s got to be the toxic backdrop for any thinking about Russia.

But, remember that, conservatively, the Soviet Union lost 30 million souls to European enemies in the 1940s. And still most Russians believe that their US and British allies against fascism betrayed them and took the former enemy under their wings.

Today, though, whilst the images of the Cold War might be fading, the memory of this mass slaughter is still burnished by parades and memorials which look deeply threatening to Western eyes.

Maybe, then, these events explain why Russia regularly snoops in British airspace and why she reacted so robustly to the German/US coup which toppled the democratically elected leader of Ukraine in 2014.

To Russians, the ‘liberation’ or ‘seizure’ of the Crimea (a major Russian naval base despite being in Ukraine) seemed like a wholly reasonable thing to do when, once again, enemy forces were manoeuvring on her borders.

Yet, it’s the coverage of the Intelligence and Security Committee’s just released report that I find so breathtaking.

If you’re Woke, Russia is an easy target because she can be criticised without suggestions of racism and you’re convinced that she interfered with our electoral process and helped to twist British thinking into the grotesque decision to leave the EU. Except Russia didn’t: at least, that’s what the ISC says.

No matter how the BBC 
bends it, the best that Dominic Grieve, a Remainer-in-chief 
who chaired the committee when the report was written, could conjure up was that the Government and the spy agencies simply failed to investigate the matter. That’s very different from implying that the referendum was rigged by a malevolent dictator and that we must have another go in order to get the ‘right’ result!

And look again at Russia’s wealth and reach. Certainly, we need to constrain her oligarchs in this country and rigorously examine business connections with the Kremlin by both MPs and Lords, but Russia’s economy is small and struggling to expand.

It’s about one third the size of Britain’s and whilst she spends a lot more on conventional defence, that’s not where the threat will come from. No, 21st century confrontations are not about tanks and guns, they’re about technology.

And it’s here, of course, 
where China scores heavily. 
It’s debatable whether she’s 
the world’s leading economy 
or not, but China’s up there.

Clearly, it makes economic 
sense to try to harness her wealth to ours, but should David Cameron’s government have been quite so craven when they allowed China unfettered access to our markets from 2014 onward?

We will probably never know how Covid spread across the globe, but we do know it came from China. Rightly, in my view, that must now influence all our dealings with this superpower, and whilst it would be wrong to believe that anyone saw this pandemic coming, we have known for years that China is hostile and that she has conducted cyber operations against our businesses, forces and infrastructure.

Yet we still let thousands of her students into our universities (paying fat fees, I grant you) and opened the door to Huawei with all its patronage from the Chinese Communist Party. Isn’t this a bit like contracting Krupp to help design our radar equipment in the 1930s?

And it gets better. A country with an appalling human 
rights record, especially 
against the Uighur Muslims and which is now brutalising the people of semi-autonomous Hong Kong, receives £71m from us a year in foreign aid. This is a country that has just announced that it’s sending a rocket to Mars: how can we allow such nonsense?

Bashing Donald Trump for his supposed collusion with Russia and the way that he’s meant to have bullied Britain into scrapping the Huawei deal is grand sport in an election year.

But let’s see both these countries for what they are: Russia an impoverished former ally who is trying to punch above its weight and China an increasingly sophisticated, murderous dictatorship with dangerous ambitions.

We would do well to dine with a long spoon with both – but one spoon should be longer than the other.

Patrick Mercer is a former soldier and ex-Conservative MP for Newark.

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