Tim Collard

Opinion | Bear with Britain: Brexit mess and antagonistic China approach show UK needs time to sort itself out

A post-Brexit Britain needs trade deals, including with the likes of China. So why is it provoking Beijing by saying it will send an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea? These are signs of a government that has lost its way

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Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May has yet to bring a Brexit plan before Parliament that the majority will support. Photo: Reuters

Tim Collard

Published: 11:00pm, 18 Feb 2019Updated: 5:27am, 19 Feb 2019

Countries all over the world have been asking recently: what on earth is the UK government up to? Only six weeks before the country is set to leave the European Union, there appears to be no withdrawal agreement in place and no clear plan towards achieving a deal.

This is not because of deadlock between government and opposition; it is because of an internal deadlock within both major parties, with some members of parliament frustrating a deal because they would be happier with a no-deal clean break, while others are muddying the waters in the hope of preventing Britain from leaving the EU altogether.

The government, whose majority depends on a small party which is only active in Northern Ireland, has already lost two parliamentary votes on a proposed withdrawal deal, and no one can see how they might arrive upon a deal which might pass through Parliament.

Normally, in a parliamentary democracy, if a government loses repeated votes and can see no way forward, it will stand down and hold new elections, but no one is keen on that either: if the governing Conservative Party is in a mess, the opposition Labour Party is in a worse one, rived by feuds and lying up to seven points behind the government in the polls.

And the latest development has been even more bizarre. The rationale for Brexit was that it would facilitate trade deals with major non-European economies. By any assessment, this must include China as well as the Anglosphere. Even before Brexit became a factor, former prime minister David Cameron agreed with the Chinese leadership that a new “golden era” (President Xi Jinping’s words) of Anglo-Chinese relations was about to begin.

Chinese goodwill was therefore in place, and all the UK needed to do was keep bilateral relations positive while it worked on mutually beneficial trade deals. Given that Britain may well face a messy and acrimonious exit from the EU, surely the sooner we can put together deals with a powerful economy like that of China, the better? With that in mind, Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond was due to visit China to lay down some framework agreements.