Amazon should help shoppers boycott Chinese goods, says Duncan Smith
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Chinese products should be labelled on Amazon and other online shops so customers concerned about human rights issues can avoid buying them, Sir Iain Duncan Smith has suggested.
Sir Iain, a former Tory leader, said many people wanted to buy less from China but struggled to do so when shopping online because they did not know where an item comes from until it was “too late”.
He called on the Government to “do more” to tackle the issue as pressure mounts on Rishi Sunak to toughen his stance on Beijing after MPs described sanctions over cyber attacks as “feeble” and “pathetic”.
On Monday, Oliver Dowden, the Deputy Prime Minister, announced in the Commons that Chinese state-affiliated actors were behind two cyber attacks on the UK, targeting the Electoral Commission and hawkish parliamentarians.
In response, Britain has sanctioned two individuals and a company linked to the APT31 hacking group.
Mr Dowden said the Chinese cyber threat was “more than equalled by our determination and resolve to resist it”, but his announcement sparked a backlash among some MPs who felt the measures did not go far enough.
Sir Iain, one of the MPs spied on, said the statement was “like an elephant giving birth to a mouse” and called for China to be officially labelled as a threat to Britain.
Speaking to LBC on Tuesday, he described China as a “dangerous” country and suggested more could be done to help online shoppers boycott goods from Beijing.
“If you go onto an online website like Amazon and try to buy something, you don’t know where it comes from until it arrives in the package – and of course it’s too late to deal with it then,” he said.
“Lots of people in my constituency and elsewhere have said ‘we’d like to say we’ll try and buy less from China because of the use of slave labour, but we don’t know until that thing arrives’.
“I want [the Government] to do more, but the UK is no different from others around Europe in this regard.”
Defending the Government’s response to the cyber attacks, Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, said the UK would be “firm” in its dealings with Beijing.
But she stressed that Britain wanted to avoid “trade issues” with China and said there needed to be an appreciation of the complexity of the relationship between the two nations.
She told GB News: “It is a complex issue, clearly. What they’ve said is there are sanctions obviously for what the National Cyber Security Centre have said have been breaches and there are two individuals that have been sanctioned and there are some other travel restrictions as well.
“And what Oliver [Dowden] has said is that is the first step along the way. I will be going to Cabinet after this morning round so we will be, I guess, talking about it there.
“But I do recognise the complexity because clearly starting some sort of trade issues is what we want to avoid as well.”
