25 January 2025.
I was not surprised to learn that, despite continuing stiff opposition from London’s Tower Hamlet’s borough council, the new Labour government in the UK recently made clear that – subject to minor changes – it would support the long delayed building of China’s massive new embassy near Tower Bridge, thereby no doubt allowing the stalled plan for the badly needed re-building of the UK’s own embassy in Beijing to proceed.
Clearly anticipating the possibility of an improvement in relations, the Chinese government re-submitted the planning application for its proposed new embassy in London just two weeks after the victory of the Labour Party in the UK general election on 4 July 2024; it contained no significant changes. (For the full background, see my earlier blog.) In the middle of October, David Lammy, the new foreign secretary, made an ice-breaking trip to China, and shortly afterwards Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister and housing secretary, took the decision on China’s plan out of the hostile hands of the Tower Hamlet’s council, although she ordered a local inquiry that would report no later than May 2025. On 18 November, the Chinese premier, Xi Jinping, confirming the importance he attached to the matter of the embassy, raised it with British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer when the two met at the G20 summit in Brazil. By this time, with the new British government publicly committed to a more pragmatic approach to China than that of the outgoing Tories and increasingly desperate for the economic opportunities this promised, the writing was on the wall for the Tower Hamlets borough council, despite its renewed rejection of the new embassy plan, by unanimous vote, in early December.
In mid-January 2025, shortly after Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves returned from her own growth-promoting visit to China, the Foreign Office and the Home Office let it be known that they would approve the new embassy, to which the Metropolitan Police had also withdrawn objections based on the fear that limited space for protestors would put them at risk and also threaten to disrupt London traffic. The UK’s welcome of the project is subject only to minor changes to the application plus China’s surrender of diplomatic accreditation to buildings in London more or less remote from the main embassy in its current location at 49-51 Portland Place.
The last condition of approval is interesting because, according to The London Diplomatic List, January 2025, there are five of these properties: a Consular Section only a two minute walk away at 31 Portland Place, a Defence Section over three miles away at 25 Lyndhurst Road, an Economic and Commercial Office almost a mile and a half away at 16 Lancaster Gate, a Cultural Section four and a half miles away at 11 West Heath Road, and a Science & Technology Section two and a half miles away at 10 Greville Place. (Oddly enough, on 29 January a Foreign Office junior minister stated in the House of Lords that there were seven such properties.) The prospect of surrendering these premises is unlikely to cause the Chinese Embassy any loss of sleep since part of the point of building a vast new embassy is presumably to achieve the greater convenience of bringing all of these functions literally in house. But it is also likely that the resource-stretched British Security Service (MI5) will also be relieved at the prospect of having significantly fewer places to keep an eye on, even though technical means are no doubt more relied on for this purpose these days.
As a rule, the proper purpose of foreign policy is the foreign (not domestic) policy of other states (political, commercial and financial) and Britain and China both need fit premises for the conduct of their important relations. The Labour government’s open support for the new Chinese embassy is the right decision.