Coronavirus: no ‘business as usual’ with China after pandemic, Britain says
- Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab says ‘hard questions’ need to be asked following Covid-19 outbreak, in latest sign of hardening attitudes towards Beijing
- France’s Macron says there were grey areas in China’s handling of disease, adding that ‘things happened that we don’t know about’
Britain’s acting leader Dominic Raab said it could no longer be “business as usual” with China when the coronavirus pandemic is over, the latest sign of hardening attitudes toward Beijing as the crisis drags on.
“There absolutely needs to be a very, very deep dive after the event and review of the lessons, including of the outbreak of the virus,” the foreign secretary said at a press conference in London on Thursday. “I don’t think we can flinch from that at all.”
“There’s no doubt we can’t have business as usual after this crisis,” Raab said. “We’ll have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it could have been stopped earlier.”
Just as in the US Republican Party, a growing number of senior members of Johnson’s ruling Conservatives have called for a reset of relations with China because of its handling of the pandemic.
William Hague, a former Tory leader and foreign secretary who now sits in the House of Lords, said on Wednesday that Britain cannot be dependent on China as it has showed it does not “play by our rules”.
