The PM will search in vain for growth from more trade with China. Our exports to China were a lowly £30bn in 2024 so a 10% boost would only be 0.1% of our GDP. Meanwhile our imports were a much larger £72.5bn, more than double our exports. A 10% increase in those would cut our GDP by 0.2%. In practice the PM claims a derisory boost of just £50 m a year to our exports in a £3 trillion economy! He doesn’t forecast the increase in our imports which are likely to exceed that tiny total, meaning less overall GDP for UK.
The truth is there is not much we produce that China needs. Meanwhile the government’s deindustrialisation policies of dear energy, bans and high taxes in the name of net zero create plenty of scope for China to export to us. China dominates the supply of solar panels. It is big in wind towers and turbines, and is coming to dominate in batteries and battery cars. These are the products that lead our lists of imports, assisted by miscellaneous manufactures as UK industry is driven to closure by high taxes and costs.
China does want to copy our success in creating great universities, in generating plenty of innovations, in financial services, in culture and entertainment and the other service exports we are good at. It will pick up much useful insight by sending some of its brightest and best students to the UK and by getting them onto important research projects for further degrees. It will encourage some UK firms to collaborate, including supplying their best intellectual property. Some Chinese business people simply copy western brands and technologies without paying royalties or buying the rights.
China is following a China first policy. It intends to control the intellectual property, own the raw materials and set up the manufacturing facilities at home. The UK government is misguided if it thinks the UK can win large amounts of goods orders from China and sustain their role as a long term supplier, given the domestic focus of Chinese policy.
January 30, 2026
Good morning.
This is about global if not regional dominance. Weakening a our nation, and in particular the Commonwealth, is China’s game. The US did much the same thing post WWII. It wanted to be the dominate global player and so sought concessions from the UK such as dismantling the Empire and handing over leases for Island bases.
The UK, post WWII, has lurched from the arms of one would be suitor to another, being spurned or mistreated in each case. It is time we stopped acting like a great power and set our own path rather than trying to imitate others or pretending to be ‘friends’. We are competitors and, the sooner we realise this and set up our nation to be competitive we will once again gain respect.
January 30, 2026
We are not competitors, we are supplicants.
Most of the Commonwealth are so poor and backward that the King has always avoided visiting. The Dominions are attacked and destroyed by the WEF and the EU.
Australia is about to sign a ‘trade agreement’ with the EU which will include ‘freedom of movement’.
More will need to be spent on bigger and faster rubber dinghies to facilitate this.
Reeves not in China with the PM, crying on the front bench again.
Is she finished at last?
January 30, 2026
And now we have the EU trying to systematically destroy our motor industry in retaliation for Brexit. This is on top of milibrains letting China floid the market with EVs.
2TK breathlessly announced tariffs on whisky down from 10 to 5%. What a plank.
But still he’s been able to reassure them that he will keep trying to give away Chagos and allow thousands of Chinese artisans in to complete the spy centre.
January 30, 2026
The visit is a charade, as today’s post indicates. China wants remarkably little from us that it can’t easier and cheaper get elsewhere. We’re just a quaint place to visit for looking at palaces, and a potential source of western security secrets.
Everyone knows they are a massive, expanding economy, but the public is being duped that a trade deal with China will necessarily bring Chinese-size economic benefits to us. It doesn’t work that way, and Starmer knows it.
January 30, 2026
What did the new, naive head UK trade negotiator give away this time? I do hope he treated this is a learning, not doing, visit. Was the trip worth giving away the new Chinese spy embassy?
Looking forward to a detailed analysis of the wins and giveaways in his report the parliament.
Meanwhile businesses in UK closing and people losing gainful employment, does 2TK worry?
January 30, 2026
The Chinese, so I have read, are masters at studying and copying.
What we think we are good at now, they will carefully study, replicate and overtake the market.
A series of articles a few years back in The Salisbury Review written by an Australian journalist, showed how China
first played the ‘friend’ and co-operative partnership card but once they’d learned all they could, played the investment card to the point of them being dominant and relied upon, then they tried to turn the soft power into a more dictatorial one.
Isn’t that what they are doing globally?
January 30, 2026
There is no plan to grow the economy. Everything Labour is doing is damaging it and weakening the United Kingdom.
His little jaunt to China appears to me to have two purposes:
1. An attempt to, politically, position the UK closer to China and further away from the USA …. in order to turn us into a Chinese-style surveillance state with no freedom of speech and a social credit system to control dissenters
2. To demonstrate his “credentials” for a Globalist role when he’s kicked out of No.10 …. probably at the ICJ, where China has a great deal of influence.
“Growing the economy” doesn’t come into it.
January 30, 2026
It’s been thin gruel so far in terms of benefits for the UK, in exchange for the new Chinese spying embassy in London and continuing commitment to the Chagos giveaway.