Morning Call: Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for Xi!
The Cyber Chinese Communist Party goes on the attack.
Good morning. Last week was strange. Westminster devoted several days to discussing the membership criteria of a private members’ club in west London. Parliament shut early because the government wouldn’t give it stuff to do. Then we had a debate about the colour palette Nike used to design the England men’s football strip. Keir Starmer condemned the use of purple – in his easiest win since becoming leader. Throughout which Tory MPs were apparently in a huff about interrupting their Easter break to trot down to Westminster to vote on their supposedly flagship Rwanda bill. Freudian displacement, you say?
I suspect the longer the delay to the general election, the more silly – and removed from ordinary life – politics will become. At least until the short campaign. On that note, here’s 500 words on the politics of alpacas.
For paid readers, today we have a short, sharp piece by Claire Ainsley, Keir Starmer’s director of policy from 2020 to 2022, on that essential subject of this parliament: Red Wall voters. Then Ben analyses why Reform is actually – contrary to Peter Kellner – a problem for Labour, and I sign off on JG Farrell. Join hundreds of fellow subscribers:
That was a joke.
What’s not a joke is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) probably has your name and address. The Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden will today condemn the CCP for accessing 40 million voters’ details in a hack on the Electoral Commission. The time frame has raised suspicions that Britain’s cybersecurity is not as robust as some might like: the attack began in August 2021 but was not revealed for over a year, until October 2022. And the government has only today chosen to blame China-linked groups.
In any case, the attacks should not come as a surprise. A report from the i in February suggested that Chinese surveillance companies had a long list of Whitehall targets, including the Foreign Office. Two weeks before, US officials confirmed that the Chinese hackers had been in US systems for five years to prepare for an attack on American critical infrastructure. Christopher Wray, the FBI director, recently said Chinese cyberattacks were now on a scale not seen before.
What will also worry the government is the targeting of parliamentarians who have been critical of the CCP. Iain Duncan Smith and Tim Loughton, both Tory MPs, Stewart McDonald MP of the SNP, and the peer David Alton, will reportedly be briefed by parliament’s head of security following the attacks. The calls for sanctions from some quarters – Duncan Smith has noted how few the UK have imposed on China compared with the Americans – will grow louder. David Cameron, who is better known for drinking pints with Xi Jinping than rebutting Chinese cyberattacks, will address an unruly bunch of Tory MPs this evening.
Such episodes will increase pressure within the party for the government to be tougher on China. But there is little chance that the hawks will exert the level of influence they wielded in 2020, when parliamentary concern over the CCP takeover of Hong Kong and persecution of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang province were at their height. The government’s strategy now falls under the rubric “robust pragmatism”, which is not wildly dissimilar to Labour’s “progressive realism”. Both avoid a blanket rejection of China – they call for cooperation on some areas, condemnation on others. This will be the attitude with which the government approaches this challenge, and is what some sceptical backbenchers will seek to change.
Freddie’s picks – extended edition
Maurice Glasman reports from Ukraine, where he met the chocolate billionaire and former president Petro Poroshenko.
Successive artists boycotted Spotify and other streaming giants to protest paltry royalty payments. Most eventually caved. Ellen looks at how Spotify won.
Wes Streeting clarifies that he only wants to rely on the private health sector in the short term. His stone-cold rejection of New Labour chimes with the mood in the party (Financial Times).
“In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it.” I find it strange that so many on the left – especially politically engaged young people – view social media positively when they are often the ones who use it most. If that’s you, then read this piece from Jonathan Haidt (Atlantic).
Another Atlantic piece: Helen Lewis tells the story of Spectator columnist and convicted attempted rapist Taki Theodoracopulos.
And, not or – that’s our approach. While today we’re mostly in oil and gas, we increased the proportion of our global annual investment that went into our lower carbon & other transition businesses from around 3% in 2019 to around 23% in 2023. bp.com/AndNotOr
The Tories don’t understand the new working class by Claire Ainsley
Lee Anderson’s recent defection to Reform UK was perceived by many Conservatives as symbolic of the fracture between their party and the voters it won for the first time in 2019. For some, the views represented by Anderson have become synonymous with working-class voters. But this mistaken characterisation of today’s working class is one of the many reasons that Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives look set to lose the next general election.
Writing in the Telegraph, Conservative MPs Miriam Cates and Danny Kruger argued that Anderson’s defection is “a sad indictment of the failure of our party to listen to the voters who propelled us to victory four years ago”. This analysis promises to lock in the Tories’ strategy of pushing further and further to the right on social and cultural issues, particularly on immigration, in the mistaken belief that this will mobilise “Red Wall” voters who they suppose are animated by cultural conservatism.
Click through to the NS to read the rest, or MC subscribers can read in full in-email.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Morning Call to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.