Britain will pursue a “pragmatic relationship” with China over trade while addressing the “sensitive” issue of global imbalances, Chief Secretary to the UK Treasury Emma Reynolds said on Tuesday.
In a Reuters interview during the G20 finance leaders’ meeting in North Carolina, Reynolds explained that the UK keeps open commercial ties with friendly allies while imposing strict sanctions and embargoes against Iran, Russia and other states starting wars or seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.
“We have a pragmatic relationship with China, one where we cooperate on things that we agree on, but also challenge in areas where we disagree,” Reynolds said.
“The whole issue of global imbalances is quite a sensitive one and a tricky one, but it’s one that we will we will navigate.”
Asked if reducing global imbalances meant meeting U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent‘s calls for G20 countries to consider more trade barriers to Chinese goods like the U.S. has done, Reynolds said Britain would generally seek to maintain open trade.
“As a general rule, we are a very open trading economy, and we believe, sort of as a general principle, that free trade is better than putting up barriers,” she said.
Bessent says he’s urging some of his G20 counterparts to take a page from the Trump administration’s playbook of using tariffs and other measures to crack down on trade imbalances.
Bessent told reporters that he had warned other nations at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term that the new U.S. “tariff wall” would mean that Chinese goods would flood their markets.
“And unfortunately, I was right,” Bessent told reporters on the sidelines of the G20 finance minister meetings. “The rest of the world probably needs to take a hard look at what they should be doing to protect their citizens’ jobs, their manufacturing base, so that everything they do doesn’t get offshored.”
The Trump administration’s tariff policies have been criticized by economists and politicians for raising costs for U.S. consumers and, in many cases, for punishing allies. The Tax Foundation, an independent think tank, found that the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration throughout 2025 raised the overall retail price of imported consumer goods by roughly 7% relative to pre-tariff trends.
