Britain should set up a specialist watchdog focusing on countering foreign interference operations by hostile states such as China, a group of Conservative Party lawmakers has suggested.
The paper, which was authored by Charles Parton OBE, a veteran diplomat who spent 22 years working in or on China, argues Britain needs to recognise that there’s a “values war” with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and must reset its China strategy without delay.
Parton said the values war “is patently incompatible with the concept of a ‘Golden Era’” of Sino-British relations, which was championed by former Prime Minister David Cameron and former Chancellor George Osborne.

According to the report, the remit of Britain’s Joint State Threat Assessment Team (JSTAT), which was set up in 2017 in the Security Service, is not wide enough, as it currently only focuses on “espionage, assassination, interference in our democracy, threats to the UK’s economic security, and the UK’s people and assets overseas”.
The JSTAT should look at broader CCP interference so as to adequately assess the threat from the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD), and should be sufficiently staffed and resourced to deal with the size and nature of the problem, the report suggests.

As the UK government conducts a comprehensive review of its foreign, security, and defence policy, a number of British security officials have recently identified the Chinese regime as a major threat.
McCallum said the Chinese regime has sought to hack commercially sensitive data and intellectual property as well as to interfere in British politics, and has also been caught engaging in an espionage plot aimed against the European Union.