As even Donald Trump was forced to accept in scaling back his latest tariffs, China is just too big to ignore. And so it is, on a much smaller scale, that yet another UK government is doing several contradictory things at once when it comes to Beijing.
This weekend brought a particularly resonant example. On the one hand, the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, was hinting that British Steel’s Chinese owner, Jingye, was to blame for neglect – if not worse – over the fate of the threatened blast furnaces at Scunthorpe.
