Welcome to the 65th Cable, our weekly roundup of British foreign and defence policy.
In response to a number of recent airspace violations by the Russian military on European countries on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) eastern flank, His Majesty’s (HM) Government announced that Britain’s participation in NATO’s EASTERN SENTRY air policing mission will continue to the end of the year, to ‘continue to deter [Vladimir] Putin from further testing the alliance.’
In a demonstration of the United Kingdom’s (UK) resolve and deterrent capabilities, the Royal Air Force (RAF) revealed last week that on 9th October, two of its RC-135W Rivet Joint electronic surveillance aircraft flew a 12-hour mission along the Russian border to monitor NATO’s eastern border and gather intelligence. The mission, which saw the planes travel nearly 10,000 miles from the Wider North down to the Black Sea, was supported by a United States (US) Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker. This was followed last week by another RAF Rivet Joint intelligence gathering mission, in which the aircraft circled Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave.
As Russian provocation continues, Britain has enhanced its material support for Kyiv, investing £600 million this year alone to accelerate drone deliveries for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, with 85,000 military drones delivered by the UK to Ukraine in six months. While co-chairing the latest meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group in Brussels on 14th October, John Healey, Secretary of State for Defence, called for allies to ‘ramp up drone production to outmatch Putin’s escalation’.
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On 15th October, Yvette Cooper, Foreign Secretary, gave a ministerial statement to the House of Commons on Britain’s support for Ukraine. She reiterated that the UK will continue to stand with Kyiv, and condemned Russia’s actions and the Kremlin’s desire to escalate the conflict rather than negotiate its end. Cooper reinforced the idea that ‘Ukraine’s security is Europe’s security’ and the strategic necessity for London to ensure Kyiv succeeds. The Foreign Minister outlined four ways in which the UK is supporting Ukraine and will continue to do so: military aid, financial aid (including the potential to use frozen Russian assets), sanctions and other economic mechanisms to pressure Moscow, and long-term diplomatic support for Kyiv.
Britain will transfer 12 RAF C-130J Hercules transport aircraft to Turkey for maintenance and modernisation following the conclusion of negotiations. The RAF retired the Hercules in 2023 with its replacement, the A400M Atlas, expected to have ‘full operational capability’ next year following the delivery of the last of the RAF’s 22 aircraft.
Plans for a rare earths refinery to be built in East Yorkshire have been scrapped, with Pensana, the company behind the project, deciding to invest in the United States (US) instead. Pensana said market dominance by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has allowed it to keep rare earth prices low, making refining in the UK uneconomic without significant government backing, whereas the US is offering the sector more support. The project in East Yorkshire would have aided Britain in decoupling its supply chains from the PRC, which produces almost 90% of the world’s refined rare earth metals. A spokesperson from the Department of Business and Trade responded to the news by stating that while the decision was ‘disappointing’, HM Government will publish a new Critical Mineral Strategy soon to ‘help secure our supply chains for the long term’.
The UK’s new Cyber and Specialist Operations Command (CSOC) revealed its blueprint for the British Armed Forces future Digital Targeting Web, which aims to improve battlefield decision making by ‘connecting sensors, effectors and decision makers into a system-of-systems’. Speaking at DSEI 2025, R. Adm. Paul Stroude, Director of Capability at CSOC, outlined that the Command, Communications, and Intelligence/Surveillance (C4ISTAR) architecture, which is the key requirement for the DTW, should cover ‘...data-centric security, zero trust architectures and data gateways that can operate across the entire defence estate to allow information to flow at machine speed, securely and seamlessly across classifications.’
For additional defence news stories, follow this link to the DSEI Gateway news portal.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero published its Clean Energy Jobs Plan on 19th October, which lays out HM Government’s new policy scheme to double the size of the UK’s workforce in green industries to 800,000 by 2030. The plan aims to develop a skilled workforce in the green energy sector, focusing particularly on training those coming from the fossil fuel industry, school leavers, the unemployed, veterans and ex-offenders. These include measures such as the establishment of five Clean Energy Technical Excellence Colleges across the country, investing £625 million and £100 million into a Construction Skills Package and Engineering Skills Package respectively, and the creation of the Office for Clean Energy Jobs (OCEJ) to coordinate these efforts.
How competitors frame Britain
Russia Today reported on a speech made by Alexander Bortnikov, Director of the Federal Security Service of Russia (FSB), at an intergovernmental meeting of security chiefs in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. In his speech, Bortnikov accused Britain of ‘masterminding’ Ukraine’s recent campaign of long-range strikes against Russian energy infrastructure, and claimed that it is also planning ‘acts of sabotage’ against the TurkStream pipeline, which supplies Russian gas to Turkey and a number of European nations. He also stated that London has been guiding Brussels’ ‘anti-Russian stance’ and ‘obstructing diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict in Ukraine’. The UK’s support for Ukraine and its European allies is strictly defensive in nature, and Russia has only itself to blame for the European Union’s (EU) increasingly hostile stance to Moscow.
Following the decision by HM Government to delay the approval of Beijing’s planned mega-embassy in London, Lin Jian, Spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, released a statement attacking the decision. Lin said that Britain has ‘shown a total lack of the spirit of contract, credibility and ethics, and has repeatedly put off the approval of the project citing various excuses…politicising the matter’. He concluded with a warning that HM Government should ‘fulfil its obligations…otherwise the consequences arising therefrom shall be borne by the UK side.’ It appears as though the mask has slipped for Beijing; Britain has many reasons to review the approval of the new embassy, and threats are unlikely to aid the Chinese case.
The PRC’s 15th Five-Year Plan and how it impacts Britain
This week, the 20th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started its fourth plenary session in Beijing. Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CCP, delivered a work report on behalf of the Political Bureau of the CCP Central Committee, and gave a speech on the draft proposals for the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030). These Five-Year Plans – and the Party machinations around them – sound dreadfully dull, but they have had a deep impact on British workers and British manufacturing, and will do so again. As free and open nations consider the PRC’s manufacturing domination and its stranglehold over rare earth minerals, these Five-Year Plans have become of great importance.
In essence, this Five-Year Plan is part of a critical phase in supporting the PRC’s stated goal of ‘basically achieving socialist modernisation’ by 2035. There are five objectives to this goal, with the first two directly impacting the UK. The first is transitioning towards high-quality growth based on domestic consumption and innovation (upgrading manufacturing technologies), while the second is making significant progress in critical technologies to become less dependent on foreign nations (assuming self-sufficient leadership in Artificial Intelligence [AI], quantum technology, advanced materials and other sectors).
In 2015, Beijing published the famous Made in China 2025 strategy. It was notable for having a two-pronged strategy, which many in free and open nations found alarming. Analysis by the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a German think tank, showed how the zero-sum strategy would bolster Chinese tech champions in the domestic market – while being disadvantageous to foreign firms – and boost Chinese champions to gain global market share.
Over the past 10 years, this has occurred across a number of sectors, including solar, telecommunications, lithium batteries, and Electric Vehicles (EVs) through the use of subsidies, non-market loans, credits and discriminatory access for local firms.
As we consider this week’s Five-Year Plan, we can anticipate that it will result in greater Chinese pressure on developed nations such as Britain for more ‘win-win’ economic trade, which will be designed to reap remaining UK technological assets aggressively, and seek a greater British market share for Chinese technological goods. As HM Government determines its own ambitions for innovation and growth, it should consider the following recommendations to help weather the next Five-Year Plan:
Firmly restrict the transfer or acquisition of UK companies in the 17 sensitive areas listed in the 2021 National Security and Investment Act, and widen the definition of a ‘national security threat’ to include protecting the future of British economic growth;
Seek opportunities to engage with the EU, Japan, and the US in World Trade Organisation (WTO) actions on glaring Chinese violations;
Promote collective action at the Group of Seven (G7) which looks at protecting G7 markets from Chinese dumping in strategic sectors;
Provide the new Industrial Strategy Advisory Council with briefings from the national security services on the PRC’s industrial strategy (and others); and
Increase the national security briefings and geostrategic training to Trade and Treasury officials who manage the economy – particularly on Chinese industrial and technological strategies.
For those interested in the potential downsides of this predatorial industrial system, ‘Chinese industrial policy, trade and the global order’, an Explainer by George Magnus published earlier today, explores its impacts in greater detail.
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Good sirs -- NATO does not have an Eastern flank, it has an Eastern front. It has Northern and Southern flanks but it's main focus on its Eastern front facing Russia.