China’s ‘super-embassy’ poses intolerable risks to the UK

Not since Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho has a basement generated as much public interest as that being proposed by China in its potential new ‘super-embassy’ in London. But then again, this would be no ordinary cellar.

Back in 2018, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spent a cool £255million buying the 200-year-old, heritage-listed Royal Mint, next to the Tower of London. It’s there that Beijing plans to build the largest embassy in Europe. It will take up more than five acres (or 20,000 square metres) and contain living quarters for at least 225 loyal members of the CCP. Unsurprisingly, not everyone is happy about it.

The size of the embassy isn’t the only, or even the biggest, issue. Planning documents, recently submitted to Tower Hamlets Council, describe a number of rooms – including a basement – as ‘redacted for security purposes’. Plans for secret underground chambers in a Chinese embassy would arouse understandable suspicion in and of themselves. Added to that is the fact the Mint is next to one of London’s main phone exchanges – the Wapping Telephone Exchange – which serves the City of London through a network of fibre-optic cables. UK deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has given China two weeks to explain the purpose of the rooms. She will make a final decision on whether to approve construction next month.

Of course, it should be said that embassies the world over are full of spies and all the IT that espionage now requires – and that doubtless goes for Britain’s own embassies, too. But the issue here isn’t really the nefarious deeds that might be enacted beneath the Mint. The problem is that successive British governments have waived through a project despite the clear security risks.

Indeed, it is hard to understand how the super-embassy plan has even got this far in the first place. It has been opposed by a range of bodies and public figures, from Tower Hamlets Council to the Metropolitan Police and London mayor Sadiq Khan. Home secretary Yvette Cooper was initially against it, too. All have had different, valid reasons – from security concerns to fears it would damage tourism.

The public, of course, is perfectly right to demand answers regarding the ‘redacted’ rooms. CCP harassment of Chinese dissidents on British soil is an established fact. The most graphic example of this happened in 2022, when a pro-democracy activist from Hong Kong was dragged into China’s embassy in Manchester and severely beaten. There will be no telling what might happen beneath the Mint, and Britain will have no jurisdiction over what does happen, anyway.

Nevertheless, successive British governments have tried to waive the plans through, simply to placate China. Chinese premier Xi Jinping must have struggled to believe his luck when Keir Starmer took office. Indeed, whatever concerns are raised, it seems a foregone conclusion that the embassy will eventually get Starmer’s tick of approval. Undermining the UK’s national interests in favour of foreign powers is one of the few constants of Starmer’s leadership. Who could forget his Chagos Islands deal, in which the UK agreed to pay China-ally Mauritius billions of pounds to use a strategically vital airbase we used to own? Or his Brexit ‘reset’, which has handed power back to the EU over critical areas such as fishing, defence and energy, for little discernible gain?

So far, Starmer has kept his cards relatively close to his chest. He confirmed that the matter of the embassy was raised in his first conversation with Xi, in August last year. But China senses a pushover. When the plans were first rejected by the Tower Hamlets Council in 2022, the CCP didn’t bother with an appeal. Its latest application, essentially unchanged from the first, was made just two weeks after Labour’s election victory. A chorus of Labour ministers, including foreign secretary David Lammy, has publicly expressed support for the embassy.

Like most foreign-policy questions, this isn’t an easy decision for the UK. Rejecting the super-embassy would provoke a fierce reaction from Beijing. Yet, difficult as it may be, the British government needs to start putting the national interest first.

James Woudhuysen is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University. He tweets at @jameswoudhuysen