By Jessica Frank-Keyes
Labour’s Jonathan Reynolds has described newly appointed foreign secretary Lord David Cameron as showing “incredible naivety towards China”.
Speaking in Canary Wharf this morning, the shadow business and trade secretary hit out at the return of the former prime minister to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s cabinet before an audience of business leaders.
Reynolds said: “The return of David Cameron this week — as well as being proof of the desperation of this government – is also a reminder that the Cameron and Osborne government showed an incredible naivety towards China.”
It comes as US President Joe Biden met with Chinese premier Xi Jinping in an effort to renormalise relations.
Discussing Labour’s approach to the Asian superpower, Reynolds stressed: “As David Lammy has said, Labour’s approach to China ‘will be to challenge, compete and, where we can, cooperate’.”
Furthermore, he urged the government not to “send a worrying signal” by weakening takeover rules in the National Security and Investment Act.
The law was created to protect the UK from investments which may pose a threat to national security and gives the government power to block or impose measures on funding sources.
“Chinese investment simply cannot be treated in the same way we would other countries, but trade is clearly one area where cooperation is possible,” Reynolds said.
“But in respect of national security and the limits to investment in the UK in some circumstances, I do not agree with the Government’s proposals to weaken the provisions of the National Security and Investment Act 2021.
“I feel the measures as they are now are sufficient and to dilute them would be a worrying signal to send, and be inconsistent with the position of our allies.”
His speech, which outlined how Labour would approach trade policy in government, saw him promise to be as “pro-trade as we are pro-business”.
The threats of today require a “more active state, pursuing a modern industrial strategy” and cited Rachel Reeves’s so-called ‘securenomics’, Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the European Union’s (EU) Green New Deal.
Reynolds said the party won’t seek to reopen the “wounds” of Brexit but wants to secure a better deal with the trading bloc.
Labour would give the Board of Trade a statutory role tied to levelling up objectives, he said, and work with the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) on an export task force to support SMEs.
The party would also “finally” publish the Trade White Paper, he added.
