According to Sky News, “Britain may need anti-subversion laws to counter threats from states determined to undermine democracy, a government watchdog has said” in a report to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. According to the watchdog, led by “Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of state threat legislation”, states are interfering in British democracy and in some cases, attempting to engage in terrorist acts.
The article refers to the historical precedent of how MI5, the United Kingdom’s domestic counterintelligence and security agency, used to conduct such activities during the Cold War from the 1950s to the 1970s, where they would “infiltrate protest groups” and were “associated with McCarthyism”.
Although China is not named, alluded to or referenced in this report, which is targeted at other states which have a more hostile relationship with the United States, it is nonetheless clear that Britain reserves the right to national security itself to prevent other states from interfering in its affairs. In theory, this is legal, reasonable and correct, as all states are inclined toward national sovereignty and “noninterference” is the idealized norm which every country strives to maintain. A number of foreign nationals in the UK have been arrested recently on charges of plotting various terrorist attacks in the country, and this is a serious security problem.
However, the issue at hand is not that the UK should uphold its right to national security and countersubversion; rather, it is the unwillingness of the UK to permit other states to uphold that same right. What the UK believes is lawful and right, which increasingly involves jailing protesters, especially those who paralyze, vandalize and destroy infrastructure and disrupt public order, it otherwise opportunistically frames as “oppression” and “authoritarian” elsewhere. This is particularly true pertaining to British attitudes toward the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
While Britain rails against foreign states conducting illegal activities on its own soil, it has never confronted the political reality that this is precisely what was happening in Hong Kong from 2019-20, which was simplistically defined as a binary struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. We have to ask ourselves, given the events in the territory, would the UK have permitted such widespread scenes of violence and destruction by protesters who were being funded and supported by American NGOs and elite-level officials and politicians accordingly? And given such, what might the UK have done in that same situation? Are we going to pretend those responsible wouldn’t have been jailed? The answer, if we look at the August 2024 riots in the UK, is absolutely not.
The point is, the UK frames itself as a tolerant and progressive-minded democratic state that uses these values as a weapon against others, believing it has a right to “guardianship” over the future of the HKSAR. Yet, it has taken the political position that Hong Kong should be denied any right to uphold its national security, even as it did itself when it ruled the territory. What the UK allocates for itself, and is increasingly strengthening, is likewise denied to the city’s governance on a “matter of principle”. For the UK, its ways of dealing with protesters — especially foreign-backed protesters — are deemed to be upholding law and order, but for Hong Kong such ways are considered oppressive and authoritarian.
National sovereignty and national security are the prerogative of all states, and they would not be what they professed to be if that were not the case. However, some states believe that they have more of a right to this than others — that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and that one man’s police officer is another man’s oppressor. Given this, we might ask ourselves how honest the Western — especially British — media coverage has been of past events in Hong Kong.
The author is a British political and international-relations analyst.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
