Government rejects calls to label China a threat despite parliament ‘spy’ arrest
The government is facing renewed calls to label China a threat after the arrest of a parliamentary researcher on suspicion of spying for the superpower.
Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden was delivering a statement on the matter in the House of Commons.
Earlier in the afternoon, Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle warned MPs against going into details on the matter – or naming the suspect who was arrested – during the debate.
Politics latest: Deputy PM giving update on ‘China spy’ allegations
A slew of Conservative MPs – some of them sanctioned by China – shared their displeasure about the fact they were not told about the arrest of the researcher when it happened.
They, alongside MPs on opposition benches, called on the government to label China a threat to the UK.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also spoke in the Commons after meeting with China’s premier Li Qiang at the G20 over the weekend.
Mr Sunak said: “The sanctity of this place must be protected and the right of members to speak their minds without fear or sanction must be maintained.
“We will defend our democracy and our security – so I was emphatic with premier Li that actions which seek to undermine British democracy are completely unacceptable and will never be tolerated.”
Oliver Dowden said the government had been ‘clear-eyed’ about China
Mr Dowden repeated the government’s position laid out in the integrated review refresh earlier this year, that China was a “systemic challenge” to the UK.
Liz Truss, the former foreign secretary and former prime minister, labelled China as the “largest threat, both to the world and to the United Kingdom, for freedom and democracy.”
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, another ex-leader of the Conservative Party, said: “It’s appalling news that we have a potential cell operating in and around Westminster, an espionage cell, and I as a sanctioned individual alongside many of my colleagues are particularly perturbed by this particular news.”
He added: “The problem lies in the mess we’ve got into over what we define China as in respect to us. Are they a threat or are they not? If they are a threat, why don’t we call them a threat and take the relative action that is necessary to deal with them on that basis and sanction some people?”
Conservative MPs Tim Loughton, Theresa Villiers and Sir Bob Seely also called for the government to take more action.
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How much difference is there between a challenge and a threat?
Quite a lot, according to several Conservative MPs who got up to call for a more robust approach to China in the Commons this afternoon.
Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden did say the government was “clear about the threat that China poses” but the core position still appears to be that Beijing represents a “systemic challenge”.
That’s not hard enough for many on the backbenches who want China officially designated as a threat, sanctions imposed on individuals and the country barred from an artificial intelligence conference being held in the UK this autumn.
Such a change seems unlikely for now.
The Foreign Office has set out a clear policy of cautious engagement with Beijing, on the grounds of economic necessity and in the search for global solutions to problems like climate change and pandemics.
In a Commons session where any talk of the arrested individual was quickly shut down by the Speaker, one specific question connected to the case did come up.
Did Foreign Secretary James Cleverly raise the alleged Chinese spy with Beijing when he visited two weeks ago?
No, came the answer from Mr Dowden, who said while ministers regularly raise the broader issue of interference – they wouldn’t talk about specific cases, especially ones currently subject to a police investigation.
Mr Dowden conceded China was the “number one state-based threat” to the UK’s economic security.
The minister added the UK government had been “clear-eyed” about the threats China poses towards the UK, and was taking action to tackle them – such as banning Huawei from UK infrastructure and banning TikTok on government phones.
Sir Keir Starmer, who responded to Mr Sunak’s statement, pushed the government on whether Foreign Secretary James Cleverly knew about the arrests before he became the first foreign secretary to visit China in five years.
The visit took place in August, five months after the arrest took place.
Mr Sunak said: “I am sure he will appreciate that as there is an ongoing investigation, as you have also said Mr Speaker, I am limited in what I can say specifically.
“But I have been emphatically clear in our engagement with China that we will not accept any interference in our democracy and parliamentary system.”
Sir Iain asked Mr Dowden a similar question earlier, and was told by the minister that a running commentary could not be provided.
In a statement released by his lawyers, the arrested man said: “I feel forced to respond to the media accusations that I am a ‘Chinese spy’. It is wrong that I should be obliged to make any form of public comment on the misreporting that has taken place.
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“However, given what has been reported, it is vital that it is known that I am completely innocent. I have spent my career to date trying to educate others about the challenge and threats presented by the Chinese Communist Party.
“To do what has been claimed against me in extravagant news reporting would be against everything I stand for.”
People granted asylum in the UK will only be allowed to stay in the country temporarily, in sweeping reforms expected to be announced on Monday.
Modelled on the Danish system, the aim is to make the UK less attractive for illegal immigrants and make it easier to deport them.
Planned changes mean that refugee status will become temporary and subject to regular review, with refugees removed as soon as their home countries are deemed safe.
Under current UK rules, those granted refugee status have it for five years and can then apply for indefinite leave to remain and get on a route to citizenship.
In a social media video trailing her announcement, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said: “We will always be a country that gives sanctuary to people who are fleeing danger, but we must restore order and control.”
She called it “the most significant changes to our asylum system in modern times”.
An ally of the home secretary said: “Today, becoming a refugee equals a lifetime of protection in Britain.
“Mahmood will change that, making refugee status temporary and subject to regular review. The moment your home country is safe to return to, you will be removed.
“While this might seem like a small technical shift, this new settlement marks the most significant shift in the treatment of refugees since the Second World War.”
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UK looks to Denmark for tougher immigration policy
Time and money ‘wasted’ on Rwanda scheme
While the number of asylum claims across Europe has fallen, numbers in Britain have risen.
Ms Mahmood said the previous government had had “years to tackle this problem” but had “wasted” time and money on the £700m Rwanda scheme.
Read more: Could Danish model save Labour’s bacon?
Some 39,075 people have arrived in the UK after making the journey across the Channel so far this year, according to the latest Home Office figures.
That is an increase of 19% on the same point in 2024 and up 43% on 2023, but remains 5% lower than at the equivalent point in 2022, which remains the peak year for crossings.
Other changes expected to be announced on Monday include requiring judges to prioritise public safety over migrants’ rights to a family life, or the risk that they will face “inhuman” treatment if returned to their home country, the Telegraph has reported.
Denmark’s tighter rules on family reunions are also being looked at.
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Pic: Reuters
Changes will prevent refugees from ‘integrating into British life’
While some research has suggested that deterrence policies have little impact on asylum seekers’ choice of destination, but a 2017 study said Denmark’s “negative nation branding” had proved effective in limiting asylum applications.
The number of successful asylum claims has fallen to a 40-year low in Denmark, with 95% of failed asylum seekers deported from the country.
But some believe the changes could damage future generations seeking a haven from war, persecution and violence.
Enver Solomon, chief executive of Refugee Council, said: “These sweeping changes will not deter people from making dangerous crossings, but they will unfairly prevent men, women and children from putting down roots and integrating into British life.
“Refugee status represents safety from the conflict and persecution that people have fled.
“When refugees are not stuck in limbo, they feel a greater sense of belonging, as full members of their new communities with a stable future for themselves, their children and generations to come.
“We urge the government to rethink these highly impractical plans, which will also add to the backlog and chaos that the Home Office is tackling.
“Instead, they should ensure that refugees who work hard and contribute to Britain can build secure, settled lives and give back to their communities.”
Shabana Mahmood will be appearing on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips from 8.30am tomorrow.
Cryptocurrency markets have extended their decline despite much-awaited political developments taking place in the US.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed a funding bill to end the record 43-day US government shutdown, after the bill passed through the Senate on Monday and was approved by the House of Representatives on Wednesday.
The bill provides funding to the government until Jan. 30, 2026, and gives Democrats and Republicans more time to strike a deal on broader funding plans for the year ahead.
The end of the shutdown failed to lift demand among Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) buyers. Spot BTC ETFs saw a brief resurgence on Tuesday, attracting $524 million in inflows, but outflows quickly resumed, with a whopping $866 million in daily net outflows on Thursday, according to Farside Investors.
Bitcoin fell to a six-month low of $95,900 on Friday, a level last seen in May as its biggest demand drivers continued to lack momentum.
Investments from ETFs and Michael Saylor’s Strategy were the two main vehicles driving demand for Bitcoin’s price this year, according to Ki Young Ju, founder and CEO of crypto analytics platform CryptoQuant.
Bitcoin ETF demand stalls as US shutdown optimism fails to lift sentiment
The lack of demand for spot Bitcoin ETFs is raising concerns about Bitcoin’s prospects for the rest of the year.
On Monday, the US Senate approved the funding bill and brought Congress a step closer to ending the shutdown. The legislation headed for a full vote in the House of Representatives, which occurred on Wednesday.
Despite optimistic news from the US, spot Bitcoin ETF investments remained flat on Monday, with just $1.2 million of inflows, according to data from Farside Investors.
“Despite the US shutdown seemingly ending, and the S&P and Gold bouncing hard, Bitcoin ETFs saw NO bid yesterday,” said Capriole Investments founder, Charles Edwards, adding that this is not a dynamic we want to see continue.
“Risk assets usually see a strong bid in the weeks out of the Shutdown. Still time to turn this ship around, but it needs to turn,” Edwards wrote in a Tuesday X post.
Spot Bitcoin ETF inflows were the primary driver of Bitcoin’s momentum in 2025, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, Geoff Kendrick, told Cointelegraph recently.
Bitwise exec says 2026 will be crypto’s real bull year; here’s why
Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan is more confident that crypto markets will boom in 2026, particularly as there hasn’t been a late 2025 rally.
Speaking to Cointelegraph at The Bridge conference in New York City on Wednesday, Hougan said a crypto market rally at the end of 2025 would have fit the four-year cycle thesis, meaning 2026 would mark the start of a bear market, similar to 2022 and 2018.
When asked to revise his prediction about whether the crypto market will boom in 2026, Hougan said: “I’m actually more confident in that quote. The biggest risk was [if] we ripped into the end of 2025 and then we got a pullback.”
Hougan said interest in the Bitcoin debasement trade, stablecoins and tokenization would continue to accelerate, while arguing that Uniswap’s fee switch proposal introduced on Monday would reinvigorate interest in decentralized finance protocols in the coming year.
“I think the underlying fundamentals are just so sound,” Hougan said. “I think these earlier forces, institutional investment, regulatory progress, stablecoins, tokenization, I just think those are too big to keep down. So I think 2026 will be a good year.”
Arthur Hayes tells Zcash holders to withdraw from CEXs and “shield” assets
The privacy coin sector returned to the spotlight after BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes urged Zcash holders to withdraw their assets from centralized exchanges (CEXs).
On Wednesday, Hayes told holders to “shield” their assets, a feature that enables private transactions within the Zcash network. “If you hold $ZEC on a CEX, withdraw it to a self-custodial wallet and shield it,” Hayes wrote on X.
The comments came as Zcash (ZEC) saw sharp price swings in the last few days. The token rallied to $723 on Saturday before dropping to $504 on Sunday. It then surged to a high of $677 on Monday, only to see another sharp decline. At the time of writing, ZEC was trading at about $450, marking a 37% decline from its Saturday high.
Analysts had warned that ZEC might undergo a sharp correction due to its relative strength index (RSI) reaching its highest reading after continuing to rally above its overbought zone.
Vitalik Buterin champions decentralization in “Trustless Manifesto”
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has authored and signed the new “Trustless Manifesto,” which seeks to uphold core values of decentralization and censorship resistance and push builders to refrain from adding intermediaries and checkpoints for the sake of adoption.
The Trustless Manifesto, also authored by Ethereum Foundation researchers Yoav Weiss and Marissa Posner, said crypto platforms sacrifice trustlessness from the first moment that they integrate a hosted node or centralized relayer, explaining that while it feels harmless, it becomes a habit, and with each passing checkpoint, the protocol becomes less and less permissionless.
“Trustlessness is not a feature to add after the fact. It is the thing itself,” the Ethereum Foundation members said in the manifesto published Wednesday. “Without it, everything else — efficiency, UX, scalability — is decoration on a fragile core.”
“When complexity tempts us to centralize, we must remember: every line of convenience code can become a choke point.”
While the manifesto wasn’t aimed at any particular person or company, some Ethereum layer 2s have been criticized for sacrificing decentralization to focus on scalability to speed up adoption.
Sonic Labs pivots from speed to survival with business-first strategy
Sonic Labs, the organization behind the Sonic layer-1 blockchain, announced a major strategic shift as it pivots from emphasizing transaction speed to building long-term business value and token sustainability.
After claiming industry-leading performance last year, Sonic Labs said its next chapter will focus on upgrades that deliver measurable financial outcomes, including new Ethereum and Sonic Improvement Proposals (EIPs and SIPs), token supply reductions and revamped rewards for network participants.
“Every decision we make moving forward will be guided by the principles of building real value, with price, growth, and sustainability always in focus,” said Mitchell Demeter, the new CEO of Sonic Labs.
The focus aims to bring “measurable, lasting value” for builders, validators and tokenholders, wrote Demeter in a Tuesday X post. “Our mission at Sonic is to move beyond hype and build a sustainable business model for a layer one, that creates, captures, and returns real value to tokenholders.”
The new fee monetization upgrade will include a tiered reward system for builders and fixed rewards for validators.
Sonic Labs will also increase the rate of programmatic Sonic (S) token burns, which means permanently removing tokens from circulation to tighten the supply.
Sonic claims to be the world’s fastest Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chain, with a “true” finality of 720 milliseconds (ms) — the assurance that a transaction is irreversible, which occurs after it is added to a block on the blockchain ledger.
DeFi market overview
According to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView, most of the 100 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization ended the week in the red.
The privacy-preserving Dash (DASH) token fell 45% to stage the biggest decline in the top 100, followed by the Internet Computer (ICP) token, down over 27% on the weekly chart.
Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education regarding this dynamically advancing space.
The UK’s central bank, the Bank of England (BOE), has released a proposed regulatory regime for stablecoins. The consultation paper took into account the perspectives of the crypto industry, but some observers say it remains restrictive.
BOE released the document on Nov. 10 — some two years after it announced the initial discussion paper. The original offered a vision for crypto that many in the industry claimed would doom the UK’s digital asset space.
The BOE said that it received comments and feedback from a broad range of 46 different stakeholders, including “banks, non-bank payment service providers, payment system operators, trade associations, academia, and individuals.”
The UK’s central bank may have scrapped some more hardline requirements, but some in the industry believe that it isn’t enough. Tom Rhodes, chief legal officer at UK-based stablecoin issuer Agant, said the bank remains “disproportionately cautious and restrictive.”
Bank of England still cautious on stablecoins
The new iteration presents a number of improvements on the 2023 version, Rhodes told Cointelegraph.
“The latest proposals do include some innovative features, such as direct BOE liquidity lines and the ability to repo reserves for liquidity purposes.”
He said that, as it concerns the UK market, “these proposals can be further explored and potentially expanded to create a more competitive backing asset regime, without compromising on stability.”
But despite the “welcome progress in the BOE’s sentiment towards stablecoins,” it has been “unusually vocal about the perceived risks of stablecoins,” said Rhodes.
One of the more controversial restrictions in the paper was limits on what the BOE called a “systemic retail stablecoin.” In the paper, this is defined as a stablecoin that is “widely used by individuals to make everyday payments such as for shopping and receiving salaries.”
The central bank wants to see limits of 20,000 pounds for individuals and 10 million pounds for businesses that accept it as a form of payment. This is an increase from the initial proposal, but the idea of limits on how much crypto you can hold didn’t sit well with some.
Crypto influencer Aleksandra Huk wrote, “Bank of England wants to cap stablecoin holdings at £20,000. Who gave them the right to tell us what to buy, where to store our money and how much we can have? […] Honestly, this is the best advert ever for privacy coins and for leaving the UK.”
Related: UK crypto hopes stall, but ‘encouraging signs’ are there
There are a few caveats to the suggested rule. Geoff Richards, head of community at the Ontology Network, noted, “The proposal applies only to sterling-denominated stablecoins used in UK payment systems that could become ‘systemic.’ Not USDT, not USDC, not random DeFi tokens.”
Ian Taylor, board member of crypto industry advocacy group CryptoUK, told Cointelegraph that he understands the central bank’s more cautious approach, at least as it applies to the stablecoin limits:
“The Bank of England has a mandate to protect against financial stability. And that financial stability is connected to the banking system. So insofar as banks take deposits and they issue loans against those deposits […] creates credit, this is an economic benefit to any economy that we have.”
The BOE is rightfully worried that taking deposits out of banks would reduce their ability to lend, affecting financial stability. “So, that’s why they want to baby-step this.”
Rhodes said that the “vast majority” of UK stablecoins will not fall under the regime anyway, at least not as stated in the paper. He noted that Mastercard was only recognized as a systemically important payment system in 2021 and that non-systemic stablecoins will be regulated under the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) ruleset, “which is less restrictive.”
Still work to be done as UK opens up to crypto
Access to central bank liquidity and deposit accounts at the BOE was a welcome update for stablecoin issuers. But crypto industry representatives believe that there is still room for improvement in the central bank’s plan.
Regarding the stablecoin caps, “The systemic thresholds remain uncertain,” said Rhodes. He said it would be helpful to have clarification from His Majesty’s Treasury when an issuer has reached sufficient scale to “pose a risk to the UK economy as a whole, before they will recognize the issuer as systemic.”
Taylor also noted the difficulty of enforcing these stablecoin caps. If the government is licensing an issuer, then they’re the ones “responsible for monitoring each individual client or customer, whether wholesale, corporate or retail, as to how many stablecoins they’ve given them.”
The problem is that many people get their stablecoins on secondary markets or a “host of different sources.” People can receive stablecoins as compensation at work or on an exchange or peer-to-peer transaction. “So, the actual operational enforcement of that I question, and we’ve seen no detail in regards to that.”
Overall, “clarity and speed” will make the UK stablecoin ecosystem more competitive, said Arvin Abraham, partner at Goodwin Procter. He told Cointelegraph that regulators need to give issuers “a clean runway and predictable timelines” to navigate the approvals process.
Speed isn’t the government’s strong suit, however.
The British government has been working on crypto regulations since 2017, when it first adopted Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer requirements for crypto-related businesses like exchanges. Now, eight years later, the central bank is still developing its policies based on industry feedback.
The slow pace of progress presents a problem. According to Taylor, “We’ve been consulting on a wider framework to regulate stablecoins for almost five years, and we still haven’t gotten any actual license framework in place, which is problematic for a number of reasons,” he said.
“It doesn’t help businesses that want to launch stablecoins in the UK. They don’t have a clear roadmap of how to do that,” he said, “which in turn forces them to move offshore to jurisdictions where there are other regulatory frameworks already live.”
This is for a number of reasons, Taylor explained, including consecutive changes in government, as well as a lack of “real champions in any of our key stakeholders, be that the current government, be that Treasury, be that the FCA.”
Progress on crypto regulations may be slow in the UK — slower than many in the industry would like — but for Abraham, “The Bank is being pragmatic and fair. The overriding message is that innovation is welcome, but if you want your token to function like money, you need money-grade controls.”
Magazine: 2026 is the year of pragmatic privacy in crypto: Canton, Zcash and more
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