Procurement Bill [Lords]

Debate between Debbie Abrahams and Bob Seely

Report stage
Tuesday 13th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Bob Seely]

I agree completely and I thank my right hon. Friend for that point. I would not even like that dependency on our allies. Would I like that level of dependency on the United States? No. On Australia? No. But to have that level of dependency on a Communist dictatorship that is investing massively in AI and big data to spy on their own people and increasingly on us as never before, to threaten peace in the Pacific, and to have a stated aim of dominating while freeing itself from dependency on the west, is really an extraordinarily dangerous position for us to find ourselves in.

We know that Chinese Communist party companies such as Huawei actively seek to gain a monopoly position by systematically destroying economic rivals. That is not fair trade; it is trade as a weapon for a Communist party dictatorship. It did it with Huawei, undercutting and deliberately destroying rivals on price through cheap subsidies. It is now doing the same with cellular modules, seeking to dominate and take control of the market. It does that through IP theft, economic espionage, subsidy, access to super-cheap finance, shared technology and other forms of state support.

Companies such as Quectel and Fibocom—the manufacturers of cellular modules—will, like Huawei, claim to be private. They are not. Nothing is private, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green said, in a Communist state. It was profoundly depressing for me, a couple of years ago, to hear two former senior Conservative Ministers, who should know better, say that Huawei was a private company. That is a rather more serious way of accidentally misleading the House than whether somebody ate cake or not, but that is another matter.

What are the dangers? We know that the Chinese leadership see themselves as being in competition with the west. Why? Because they tell us. A 2013 “Document No. 9” concludes that western constitutional democracy and universal values were a fundamental threat to the PRC. Of course our values are a threat to dictatorships. Our values are always a threat to communists. Earlier this year, a work report delivered to the National People’s Congress set out the belief that

“external attempts to supress and contain China are escalating”,

and the term “self-reliance” appeared multiple times. Again, the idea is to create dependency on China for us, while at the same time freeing China from dependency.

What is the worst-case scenario? Frankly, it has happened in Russia, so we should at least be alive to the idea that the worst-case scenario may be happening in the Pacific.

President Xi has told his army to be ready to re-take Taiwan by 2027. As I said, let us please stop pretending that dictators do not mean what they say, because they have a depressing habit of meaning what they say. I wish they did not; I wish they would overpromise and underdeliver, but they tend to do what they promise.

Either the UK is militarily involved or it is not. Either way, an assault on Taiwan, either by slow strangulation—a sort of Berlin scenario—or direct invasion, would profoundly alter the state of the world. We would have to put on the mother of all sanctions. The minute we do that, we will risk not only a global economic meltdown, but an economic meltdown probably worse than covid. It will strain to breaking point our relationship with the United States, the European Union and Australia—and not just our relationship but the interdependent relationships.

I am not saying that will happen—although, I think we are heading in that direction—or that we should stop trading with China; I am saying that it makes a great deal of common sense, frankly, to know what our levels of dependency are. That is why I would love the Minister to commit to at least developing an understanding of what our trade dependency is.

There is another reason to be concerned about supply chains: what is happening in the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, which other Members have rightly mentioned. A 2022 UN report found serious human rights violations in the region. They seem to be about the most significant human rights abuses currently happening in the world, whether we use the “G” word or not—genocide. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps alone produces 8% of the world’s cotton. China overall produces 20% of the world’s supply of cotton. Effectively, this is a new slave trade in cotton, as shocking as that sounds. It is not happening 200 hundred years, in the 19th century, in the southern United States; it is happening now, in the early 21st century, in Chinese-controlled central Asia.

There are many other things coming out of the Xinjiang province that tell the story of using forced labour, as both Opposition and Government Members have eloquently spoken about. There is forensic technology available, which we could be using in this country, that can pinpoint the region of origin for items tainted by modern slavery, such as cotton. When it comes to new clause 60, on eradicating slavery and human trafficking in supply chains, I ask the Government to set an example by saying that we will, at the very least, commit—a good Government word—to bringing in that forensic technology within a period of time. That would enable us to understand whether western companies are using slave cotton—an incredibly horrible phrase to use in this age—in their manufactured goods.

Finally, we have spoken about Chinese surveillance technology, and I speak again in support of new clause 1. We have got to get this stuff out of the country for a start. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green says, with all the dual-use capabilities and new styles of conflict, not just in conventional military but in data domination, it is really difficult nowadays to say where security starts and finishes.

In summation, we need to understand, as a critical matter of national importance, our supply chain dependency on any country, but specifically China. I implore the Government to use the Bill, even at this late stage, to bring in a statement of dependency so that we can begin to understand and to take measures to work out not how to stop trading with China, but how to trade more safely. That way, if we need to take sanctions in future, and for the health of our relationship with that superpower, we can begin to work out how to diversify our supply chains in future and, at the same time, do something about the horrors happening in Xinjiang.

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

I rise to speak to my new clause 12 on the protection of subcontractors’ payments under construction contracts. As the explanatory statement describes, the new clause

“ring-fences moneys due to subcontractors in construction supply chains through mandating the use of project bank accounts and ensuring that retention moneys are safeguarded in a separate and independent account.”