China Spying Case

Gareth Snell Excerpts

Tuesday 28th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

The right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) touched on several relevant points. There was a time in this House when a Member coming under attack and finding themselves on the wrong end of something was a moment of unification for us, and we would come together to find a way forward collectively. It should be of great regret to us all that following the events that happened to the hon. Member for Rutland and Stamford (Alicia Kearns) and the right hon. Member for Tonbridge (Tom Tugendhat), we are throwing political rocks at one another about meetings that may or may not have happened over the last six or seven years. I do not know the hon. Lady, but I know the right hon. Gentleman. He is a gentleman of the utmost standing and principle, and I cannot imagine the horrors that he has been through and how much they have disrupted his life. We should keep that at the forefront of our minds in this debate.

We have had a complex relationship with China for the past decade. I cannot be the only one who is old enough to remember the pictures of the President of China pulling pints in the Plough with the former Prime Minister, who was subsequently the Foreign Secretary when some of what we are talking about was happening. We have not had a consistent approach to China publicly. I say “publicly”, because the evidence we have heard from various Opposition Members this evening makes it quite clear that officials in the last Government were naming China as a threat. They were using that terminology, but unfortunately the political faces of that Administration were not.

I will not get into the rights and wrongs of that, but it is clear that there has been inconsistency in the language applied to China throughout this period. If I were more legally minded, I would say that that may have led to the current situation, in which the CPS is saying one thing and the DNSA is saying something else, and we are getting the interpretation of an illustrious former Attorney General, the right hon. and learned Member for Torridge and Tavistock (Sir Geoffrey Cox). By the way, I remember the debate in November 2017 when we argued for a Humble Address. Many Conservative Members said that it was a terrible idea to publish Government information, and it could never be done because it would undermine that information. They said that in the future, they might ask for such information and we would say no, and we are clearly at that point today.

We all invest a lot of time and energy into this job, and into our staff. We are at the mercy of the vetting services to make sure that the staff who work for us are looked into properly. We just do not know, for instance, whether operatives from other hostile states are active in staffing units. We can pretend we do, but we honestly do not. I hope we will get some answers from the Minister about how we have got to this point, but what I want to understand is how will we make sure that the same thing does not happen again.

How will we get to a point, in this Parliament, where we can be sure that every Member of Parliament—regardless of which political party they come from, the position they hold, their standing or their length of service—is free from such political interference, oversight and spying? How can we ensure that no more Members are sanctioned, as the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green was? He has talked eloquently to the House on numerous occasions about the disruption to his life. For us to do our job properly, we must have confidence in the people around us and the advice we receive from officials, and we have to be certain that the processes that are in place to keep us safe are doing their job.

Ultimately, we all come here to do a job, and to do it well. We are only human, and we ought to hold at the forefront of our minds the fact that mistakes have been made—I think we would all agree on that; I do not think anyone can say, hand on heart, that everything has gone perfectly up to this point—but the key thing is how we learn from that and prevent it from happening again. That, Madam Deputy Speaker, is where I will draw my remarks to a conclusion.