Chinese Consul General: Manchester Protest Debate
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Chris Bryant
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Chinese Consul General: Manchester Protest
Chris Bryant Excerpts(1 year, 6 months ago)
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Jesse Norman
I fully recognise that the House has a very strong view of this, but if this apparent offence had taken place elsewhere on the streets of the United Kingdom, it would be subject to the same kind of police investigation and determination and, potentially, a prosecution as a result.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
I welcome the Minister to his post, because I know him to be a decent, intelligent and honourable man. He talks of diplomatic niceties, but the time for diplomatic niceties is long, long past. Does he think that the Chinese Government care about diplomatic niceties? Of course, what the Minister should be doing is saying to the ambassador, “Get yourself back to Britain, so that you can meet with the Minister. If you don’t get back, it will be a Minister who will be meeting with the chargé d’affaires on Monday morning, or preferably tomorrow, and, for that matter, we will be expelling the consul general tomorrow because he has clearly been engaged in something that would have got him arrested if it had happened on the streets of the United Kingdom.”
Jesse Norman
The fact of the matter is that we have already laid out an approach to this. As I said, the last time an ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Secretary was in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are diplomatic channels through which these things occur, and we need to respect them. As regards the question of arrest, an individual might have been arrested, or they might not have been; that is at the discretion of the police. That remains the case whether they are outside the embassy or on any other parts of our streets.