Rachel Reeves

We want to create more opportunities for our businesses to trade with other countries around the world.

Yeah.

So we've given planning permission today for a new embassy.

Obviously, China already has an embassy in London.

This will be a new embassy, a move.

But, you know...

If you just sort of take a step back, Britain has embassies in almost every country around the world and almost every country in the world has an embassy in London.

They are absolutely vital for diplomatic relations and also for resolving tensions.

And so it is right that China has an embassy in London in the same way that it's important and right that the UK has an embassy here.

in Beijing and I was at our embassy in Beijing just last January when we restarted the economic and financial dialogue with China.

It was the first time that we'd had an economic and financial dialogue between our countries for six years and whilst other countries had been securing benefits for their financial services sectors in growing markets in China, we refused to engage and that was the wrong thing to do.

It was not in Britain's interests, and that's why we changed that approach.

The Chinese hosted the economic and financial dialogue last year.

We secured significant benefits for UK businesses, and we'll be hosting the next economic and financial dialogue with our Chinese counterparts in the UK this year.

Well, let's just look at the numbers.

The US trades more as a share of GDP with China than the UK does.

Almost every big country in Europe trades more with China than the UK does.

And that's because...

The UK under successive conservative governments retreated from the global sphere for a number of years and that was a mistake and we lost out on growth and trade as a result of it.

We are pursuing a very different approach which is to relentlessly focus on our national interest and our national interest