China has lifted sanctions on six British MPs and peers, Starmer says

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Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has announced that China has removed “all restrictions” previously imposed on six sitting members of the UK Parliament following discussions with President Xi Jinping. This development came after Sir Keir’s recent visit to China, the first by a British prime minister since 2018, in an effort to improve diplomatic relations with the world’s second-largest economy.

During an interview with the BBC in Shanghai, Sir Keir confirmed that travel bans and other sanctions affecting four Conservative MPs and two peers in the House of Lords have been lifted. He described this outcome as a validation of his approach, emphasizing that the visit enabled a direct “leader-to-leader discussion on sensitive issues,” which facilitated the reversal of the sanctions.

Despite this progress, those MPs and peers who had been sanctioned expressed their opposition to the lifting of restrictions, stating they did not want to be “used as a bargaining chip.” They voiced a preference to remain under sanctions rather than allow their status to be leveraged to ease sanctions on Chinese officials allegedly involved in human rights abuses in Xinjiang. They also objected to any relief offered solely to current parliamentarians without extending to other sanctioned groups, including civil society organizations.

The sanctions had first been imposed by China in 2021, targeting several Conservative MPs—such as Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Nusrat Ghani, Tom Tugendhat, Neil O’Brien, and Tim Loughton, the latter having left Parliament—and peers Baroness Kennedy and Lord Alton, all linked to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China. The measures included bans on entering China, Hong Kong, and Macau, freezing of property within China, and prohibitions on Chinese entities conducting business with those affected. At the time, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson praised those sanctioned for exposing China’s “gross human rights violations.” China denies these allegations, including accusations of crimes against humanity targeting Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang. Meanwhile, the UK has maintained sanctions on Chinese individuals, with no reported easing of such measures

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