Chris McDonald

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I thank the hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) for securing the debate. It is a pleasure to follow him, because I want to expand on some of the points he made about the dependence of our industry and economy on China. I have worked in China and have friends there. I am certainly no Sinophobe, but I do think we need to be clear-eyed about the fact that we are in economic competition with China. The hon. Member for Farnham and Bordon described it as a relationship of dependency, and I fear that that is the position. An inter-dependent relationship would be fine, but we are in more of a dependent relationship. I remember being in China in 2015, at the launch of the 13th five-year plan. I was shocked at what I saw as a big competitive threat to the UK. At that time, President Xi was in London—we had done a bit of a swap—and was meeting the Prime Minister here. The Prime Minister said he was enthused by President Xi’s plan for the belt and road initiative, and he directed the City of London to fund it. From where I was sitting, that seemed like an extremely bad idea. I was talking to British engineering companies that had been told they would get three contracts in China. In the first contract they would deliver a machine, in the second contract they would deliver the drawing, and in the third contract they would supervise the Chinese company that would do the installation on their behalf. Many of those companies no longer exist because they have been competed out of the market by China. It is the job of the UK Government to make sure that we site jobs in south Wales rather than Wuhan, and in Teesside rather than Tianjin. I fear that over the past couple of decades we have been too keen to pursue lower-cost goods rather than invest in our own industries. The industry that I know best is materials. Some of the critical raw materials we need for our future are gallium, germanium and neodymium—I apologise to Hansard reporters for sounding like a Tom Lehrer song. Those are incredibly serious minerals that are essential for our future. For most of them, China either dominates the mining or has the materials processing capability for about 90% of the global market. It is important for us to consider how we can secure materials processing in future. Just this week Richard Holtum, the chief executive of Trafigura, the world’s biggest private metals trading company, recommended that Governments nationalise their metals-processing industries in order to compete with China.