BOB SEELY: Keir Starmer has gone from shallow moral posturing on China to a policy of dangerous ingratiation with a regime hell-bent on destroying the West

Keir Starmer and his Labour Party were, in Opposition, figures of moral certainty.

Labour would work with our allies to designate the systematic oppression of China 's Uighur minority as a genocide. Labour would conduct an audit of our China policy to ensure consistency on human rights.

How power changes you.

On Sunday, Starmer flew to the G20 meeting in Rio and yesterday met the Chinese President Xi Jinping – the first British Prime Minister in six years to hold direct talks with him.

Starmer now says he wants a 'stable' and 'pragmatic' relationship with the Chinese dictatorship, which rules over more than a billion people and is the world's second largest economy.

But make no mistake: when a Labour politician says a 'pragmatic' relationship, that is code for ignoring the Chinese Communist Party's sinister programme of espionage that, according to the head of MI5 , Ken McCallum, is taking place in this country on an 'epic scale'.

Code for ignoring, too, China's institutionalised theft of intellectual property, its intimidation of Taiwan , its military expansion and ghastly record on human rights.

Plus overlooking the fact that China has never been held to account for Covid, which a former British prime minister, Boris Johnson , claims, among others, was caused by a leak from a laboratory in the country.

The fact is that rather than defending our vital national interests, the policy under Labour is one of dangerous ingratiation with the Chinese regime. Labour have gone from shallow moral posturing to the craven abandonment of their ethical principles.

Part of this is perhaps down to Keir Starmer and his net zero minister Ed Miliband's obsession with forcing Britain to give up fossil fuels in double-quick time, which has made us ever more dependent on Chinese-made solar panels, wind turbines and electric car batteries.

Whatever the cause, there is no doubt that the new Government is now doing its best to 'kowtow'. Wherever you look, there are signs of it.

Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, shelved planned laws defending free speech on campus after pressure from universities concerned that they might lose Chinese students – and, therefore, substantial income.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy handed over the Indian Ocean Chagos Islands – which host a strategically vital UK/US airbase – to Mauritius, a state allied to China.

This is not to say past Tory governments have got everything right on China. David Cameron, when prime minister, pursued a policy of cosying up to Beijing, effectively offering a carte blanche for the expansion of the regime's influence here.

More recently, however, a group of China-sceptics, myself included, persuaded Rishi Sunak's government to be more robust and more consistent. Progress was being made – if slowly.

But under Labour we are going backwards at speed. And following the election of Donald Trump, this could not be a worse political strategy.

Trump has made clear that he is taking a hard line on China and threatens tariffs on Chinese imports. We really cannot afford to be out of step with Washington.

Labour says what British businesses want is 'certainty'. But why, if certainty is what you want, do you not choose to do a trade deal with the US, the world's largest economy – and which happens to be an ally, not a hostile state?

I fear our ministers simply don't understand the scale of the challenge ahead.

President Xi has said he wants China to be ready to invade Taiwan by force by 2027. If he sees that threat through, this Parliament will witness some of the most devastating events of this century – and the collapse of the international order.

China's agenda is to dominate the West, not to live in harmony with us. It wishes to isolate the US from Europe, and Taiwan from the world.

Its strategies to achieve this range from economic domination of future industries to the manipulation of foreign governments and the mass collection of our data.

Xi doesn't want free trade: he wants dependency from us and others so that we cannot adopt policies against the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. And that sinister process is already well under way.

If China were to drive a wedge between the US and its allies, authoritarian states from North Korea to Iran and Russia would rejoice. It would be the beginning of the end for the West.

Don't get me wrong: we need to deal with China. For better or worse, the West bought Beijing into the global trading system earlier this century – a system it is now subverting from within. China is now our fourth biggest goods trading partner.

I worked with researcher Rob Clarke and a group of leading thinkers on a report for the Civitas think tank last month containing critical suggestions for how we can start to develop a coherent policy. It explains how we can reduce the risk, increase the benefit and live up to our principles. High on our agenda should be diversifying our supply chains so we can still trade – but with less dependency and less danger of industrial espionage.

Nor should we forget about human rights, because how a foreign government treats its own is an indicator of how it would treat us, if it could.

Under China's Communists, the Uighurs face horrendous oppression. The treatment of an entire people is brutal. For all Labour's posturing about the plight of the Palestinians, they utter not a peep about this Muslim minority.

The Government's thinking is so naive they haven't even come up with legislation to defend Britain in areas that China is already seeking to dominate. Take genomics, called the 'new gold'. China has prioritised acquiring large datasets of DNA - because who controls genomic information will control the future of healthcare for humanity and the economy, since it is crucial for producing new drugs, tackling diseases and developing resilient crops.

Already, US Congress has put forward bipartisan legislation to ban Chinese companies that have been collecting large quantities of genomic data from public contracts. Yet the same companies blacklisted by the US are embarking on new contracts with British universities.

And what about Chinese investment in UK academia? We know that around 30 per cent of Chinese funding to British higher education institutions since 2017 has been linked to the Chinese armed forces. Do we want to be responsible for helping the firms building weapons that China may, in future, use to attack Taiwan or the US Pacific Fleet?

At the very least, Starmer should challenge Xi over his use of 'Confucius Institutes', which provide Chinese-language teachers to UK classrooms to spy on students.

And does Labour have anything to say about China's increasing support for Russia or its North Korean ally's decision to send thousands of troops to die in Russia's savage war against Ukraine?

I doubt Starmer will raise any of these issues with Xi this week. But he must change his tune.

The Chinese scholar of war, Sun Tzu, said 'tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat'. Six months into Labour's first four years in power, we have neither tactics nor strategy.