Senior Tories warned Britain must stop giving foreign aid and business investment to the “dangerous” Chinese state.
Increasing aggression towards the West from Beijing, along with Iran and Russia poses the greatest security threat in a generation and must be tackled head on, MPs warned.
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They called for an end to aid to China and the repatriation of key industries to Britain.
Robert Jernick said it was “ludicrous” that the UK sends hundreds of millions to China and other nuclear powers.
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Latest figures show Beijing received ￡48 million in 2021-22 in UK aid.
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Senior Conservatives warn it is time to turn the taps off to Beijing (Image: Getty)
“We have no choice but to increase defence spending to three per cent of GDP to deliver the uplift we need to defend ourselves,” Mr Jenrick wrote in the Mail on Sunday.
Mr Jenrick said hiking up spending involves trade-offs but cannot be at the expense of NHS, police or pensions budgets.
The former immigration minister called for a relentless pro-growth approach with liberalised planning to get Britain building, major reforms of welfare and radical reforms of the “increasingly bloated” public sector.
Mr Jenrick said the money should be found in the short term by cutting the foreign aid budget and redirecting that money to defence.
“While the aid budget does outstanding work alleviating extreme poverty that we should continue to support, a significant chunk of our 'development' spend is incoherent and wasteful. It's ludicrous that we send hundreds of millions to nuclear powers China, India and Pakistan.
“Roughly a third of our aid budget goes on the ballooning costs of supporting asylum-seekers in the UK. If we ended the abuse of the system by economic migrants and closed the farcical asylum hotels, billions of pounds can be freed.”
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He said that only ten per cent of the total spent by the Foreign Office on aid goes on dealing with humanitarian emergencies.
Halving the aid budget would free about ￡7 billion a year that could be used to immediately increase defence spending above 2.5 per cent of national growth.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith called on the government to repatriate key industries from China.
The former Tory leader, who is one of more than 40 MPs who has been hacked by Beijing, said it “almost everything” linked to net zero area is run by China, including batteries, electric cars and wind farm components.
He said: This is a very dangerous regime, and we are handing more and more and more of our industry over to China. The government needs to be able to say, we're not doing any of this with China. We should be diversifying our business and industry and bring advanced manufacturing back to the UK".
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