Lord Hermer (Lab)

I entirely agree with my noble and learned friend. The test remained the statutory test: was China, beyond reasonable doubt on the criminal standard, an enemy between 2021 and 2023? The immediate difficulties will be obvious if I tell the House what the official position of the Government was during that period. The then Foreign Secretary, Mr Cleverly, said the following in his Mansion House speech—which was delivered a year before the men in these cases were charged—and obviously set out the official position of His Majesty’s Government: “I’m often asked to express” the UK’s policy towards China “in a single phrase, or to sum up China itself in one word, whether ‘threat’, or ‘partner’, or ‘adversary’. And I want to start by explaining why that is impossible, impractical and—most importantly—unwise.” One can immediately see, even though there was a CPS team who obviously wanted to get this prosecution across the line, the real difficulties because of the 1911 Act, which the Law Commission in 2017 said was no longer fit for purpose. Those difficulties give an insight into the problems faced by the Crown Prosecution Service.