'The paranoid bunkum behind Jimmy Lai’s conviction is a wake-up call for Britain', Lord Patten of Barnes

An instinctive deference to China from our Government has let down the jailed pro-democracy advocate

The media mogul and pro-democracy advocate Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in jail in Hong Kong on Monday, under the city’s draconian national security law.

Mr Lai, a 78-year-old diabetic, will remain in Hong Kong’s sweltering prison system, where he has already spent 1,800 days in solitary confinement. He is facing an effective death sentence.

At first glance, this might seem like simply another political activist jailed by a foreign regime in a faraway land. Yet that assessment couldn’t be further from the truth. The case of Mr Lai, beyond being a humanitarian tragedy, is a litmus test for the United Kingdom’s ability to stand up for itself on the world stage.

Mr Lai, who fled to British Hong Kong as a child and became a British citizen in 1994, has always remained passionately attached to the values which the British government tried to preserve in Hong Kong – freedom of the press, the rule of law, an independent judiciary and democracy. When the UK handed Hong Kong to China in 1997, it was under a treaty agreement that these freedoms would be retained, and that Hong Kong would continue to move towards full universal suffrage.

Mr Lai’s pro-democracy advocacy – much of it through his newspaper, Apple Daily – was designed to uphold the rights and freedoms guaranteed to Hong Kongers under the Sino-British Joint Declaration. For the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), this made him worse than a common-or-garden political dissident. Mr Lai had fled the glorious People’s Republic to a British colony and, worse, become a British citizen! He openly preferred the values of liberal democracy to those of Chinese communism. For the CCP, he is no less than a race traitor.

This became clear during his national security trial on charges of sedition and collusion with “foreign forces” – an already vague term that was stretched to cover essentially any contact Mr Lai had with foreigners. On nearly every page of the 855-page judgment handed down at the end of the trial, there are references to Mr Lai’s “hatred” of China and the CCP and his supposed preference of “Western” values over Chinese ones.

At one point, this line of argument became explicitly ethnonationalist. When Mr Lai argued that he was a Hongkonger, not Chinese, presiding Justice Esther Toh rebutted him: “Is your skin yellow, Mr Lai? You’re a Chinese person.”

To see Hong Kong’s formerly independent judges reduced to litigating skin colour speaks to the sorry state of the rule of law in the city. The evident truth is that Mr Lai, while sharply critical of the CCP and Chinese influence in Hong Kong, is not guilty of what the Beijing and Hong Kong government alleges: that he was the secret “mastermind” behind the 2019 mass protest movement, and that he was involved in a shadowy conspiracy with British and American officials to bring down the CCP.

This is paranoid bunkum and the attempt to construct a legal case around it has made a mockery of Hong Kong’s once-independent judiciary.

The treatment of Mr Lai should be a wake-up call to the British Government. The current Government has evinced a desire to play nice with the CCP, in the hope of cadging some extra investment or some desultory agreement on trade. Sir Keir Starmer, in his recent trip to China, said he had raised Mr Lai’s case “respectfully”. Two weeks later, Mr Lai was sentenced to effectively life imprisonment. That is how far politeness gets you in Beijing.

Yet the instinctive deference remains. In response to the sentencing on Monday, the British government announced it was closing a loophole in the British National (Overseas) (BN(O)) visa scheme to enable children of BN(O)s born before 1997 to join their families in the UK. It is about as mild a diplomatic rebuke as one can get. And yet Beijing still lambasted the decision as “despicable and reprehensible”, claiming that Hong Kongers are “second-class citizens” in Britain. We make our case “respectfully”, and we get insults and tongue-lashings in return.

Enough with the cringing respect paid to dictators. Mr Lai’s conviction and sentencing are unjust and inhumane, and we should not shy away from saying so. Nor should we stop advocating for his release. Australia, Canada and the US have all secured the release of their citizens from Chinese prisons – so why not the United Kingdom? All that is required is that we be bold enough to demand justice – the time for asking nicely is past.

This article was published in The Telegraph on 12 February 2026.

Photo: Pakkin Leung @Rice Post, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons