Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. My name's Megan McElwry and I'm joined today by James Heel, our deputy political editor and Sophia Gaston Research Fellow at King's College London. James, let's start with the news that the government has approved the Chinese Super embassy after years of debate about the security

risks. Can you tell us a bit about how we got here and how it's been received?

Yep. So back in 2018, the Royal Mint site was sold to China where they wanted to build an embassy.

And ever since we've had eight years of back and forth, the local planning decision was

referred to MCHLG, which was going to be taken under, I think it was first of all, it was, you know, Angela Rainer then obviously left, and so under Steve Reed. And Steve Reid has now approved this application and said that it can go ahead. But of course, it's a hugely controversial proposal. There's concerns, it's going to be China's largest embassy in Europe. There's concerns about the purpose of the buildings, about potentially allegations that it were used for espionage purposes, and also things such as the concerns of local residents, Tower Hamlets, for instance, is a third Muslim. Obviously, China's record on the Uighur Muslims is, shall we say, suboptimal. And already, of course, in the first hour or so, after this decision was taken, 40,000 pounds

been raised for judicial review. So it's very controversial, but of course, it's a sort of tip-for-tack thing. You know, we have an embassy in Beijing. There's been lots of sort of issues there. The light's potentially going out and the people there complaining about how terrible it is. And essentially, I think, you know, the moody government was this was an inevitability. the foreign office clearly wanted this to happen. It's happened. But I certainly don't think it'll be under the controversy. And it's a good thing that China certainly thinks in centuries because they're about to come up against English planning system. So they may think the interminable Westerners have one or two more tricks on their sleeves when it comes to getting this over the line. Sophia, as James says, you know, this is a hugely complicated issue, but also the debate has gone on for years.

What's your view on the level of risk and how we got here?

Well, I think the original sin does go back to the 2018 sale of the Royal Mint site to China.

And, you know, it's a little bit on the nose to be selling a site of that strategic

and symbolic importance to China, a country which uses economic entanglements to foster

dependencies around which it can then practice and exert coercion, economic coercion

to countries all around the world. So I think once that decision was made to sell that site,

it became very difficult for the British government to reverse course on this. So essentially what they've been doing is just buying time.

And I think it's important to contextualize that decision to sell that to China,

the Royal Mint site, as very much a different place

than where we are now in our China's security policy.

This was before the decision was ultimately made to strip Huawei from our critical

national infrastructure, our technology infrastructure.

And of course, the government putting all sorts of new legislation and regulations

and procedures in place to better defend our

security interests towards China. So, you know, that was a decision taking in another time.

Subsequent governments from when that decision was taken over, you know, eight years ago,

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