The Royal Navy has conducted another freedom of navigation operation in the contested South China Sea, with HMS Spey operating near the Spratly Islands alongside the Royal Australian Navy’s HMAS Sydney.
The UK Ministry of Defence confirmed via its official ‘Defence Operations’ social media account that HMS Spey had undertaken a freedom of navigation activity in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The patrol passed near the Spratly Islands—an area claimed in part or in whole by China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and others.
HMS SPEY and HMAS SYDNEY have just conducted Freedom of Navigation Activity around the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, in accordance with UNCLOS.@RoyalNavy @Australian_Navy pic.twitter.com/rx9kTCGghh
— Defence Operations 🇬🇧 (@DefenceOps) June 23, 2025
“HMS SPEY and HMAS SYDNEY have just conducted Freedom of Navigation Activity around the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, in accordance with UNCLOS,” the post read.
The operation marks a continuation of Royal Navy deployments challenging excessive maritime claims in the region. It comes just days after HMS Spey transited the Taiwan Strait, drawing sharp criticism from Beijing, which described that earlier action as “deliberate provocation.”
However, China reacted with fury. State-run media reported that the People’s Liberation Army Eastern Theatre Command monitored HMS Spey throughout its journey, calling the passage an intentional provocation.
Senior Colonel Liu Runke, spokesperson for the PLA Navy, accused the UK of “hyping up” the transit and described the move as a “distortion of legal principles and an attempt to mislead the public.” The PLA claimed the operation “undermined peace and stability” in the region and warned that Chinese forces would “resolutely counter all threats and provocations.”
In contrast, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defence welcomed the Royal Navy vessel, stating that it had respected international norms and contributed to regional stability.
While China claims historical rights over the majority of the South China Sea under its so-called ‘nine-dash line’, those claims were rejected in 2016 by an international tribunal ruling under UNCLOS. The UK does not take sides on sovereignty disputes but routinely reaffirms its support for international law and the right to innocent passage.
The presence of HMS Spey in both the Taiwan Strait and now the Spratly Islands illustrates the UK’s commitment to its “tilt” to the Indo-Pacific, as outlined in the 2021 Integrated Review and reiterated in subsequent defence statements. The Royal Navy’s patrol vessels HMS Spey and HMS Tamar have maintained an enduring regional presence since their deployment to the Indo-Pacific in 2021.
This latest operation, undertaken jointly with Australia, is also emblematic of strengthening UK–Australia defence cooperation. Canberra has also faced increasing pressure from Beijing over its military activity in the South China Sea, including surveillance flights and naval patrols.
There has been no immediate report of interaction between HMS Spey and the People’s Liberation Army Navy during the Spratly patrol, though previous operations have seen British ships shadowed by Chinese vessels.
Honestly I would stay well clear of the Spratly Islands is a geopolitical stink pit and in reality trying to understand who rightfully owns what is flaming impossible.. everyone and his mother has tried to grab a spratly island or two..
in my view it’s not our beef and it does not come under freedom of navigation because it is not a strait..so not sure what we are really trying to prove.. this is sticking our noses into other peoples disputes.. I think if china started randomly cruising warships around and around islands in the south Atlantic we would get a bit pissed…let China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan argue the toss of who owns which island…
agree!
They sail warships through the Channel. We don’t object, either the rules based legal decisions governing laws of the sea are respected or they aren’t. Fact is China is claiming sea ways through which a substantial part of World trade passes, don’t think that is mere coincidence. It won’t be the end of its or other Countries claims either, the Gulf the Red Sea could all be closed by the same standards and as zi say if lawlessness prevails then Britain and France should ban warships of any Country they want from the Channel which could trigger war of course but hey ho it is our business so they should keep out of it. Maybe we should do the same with Rockall and tell them to keep their noses out of it too. I guess the Gulf of Mexico is owned by the Aus now it’s Gulf of America. Perhaps Australia might like to claim the waters that China decided to fire live rounds in intimidation mode, geez where does it all end, the big powerful bullies dictating who owns what? Inevitable war I would say if we take the attitude of keeping out of such matters. As for British possessions in the South Atlantic I suspect plenty of spy or warships get as close as warships in the South China Sea are from actual China but I doubt we would if they were in passage make a fuss when th Russian military park outside Irish Ports and warships follow our subs into the mouth of the Firth of Clyde before we search for a megaphone.
Channel is a strait.. we follow the law.. we don’t tend to just let Russian boats wander as they please across any water and we get upset and undertake close monitoring when they stop transiting and start loitering with intent..and china does not do any loiting around UK strategic interests to fair which it could as its got the density of ships to make a fair fist at really pissing the UK off.( it did it to to Australia not long ago). Your correct undertaking your right to transit a strait is making a really important point.. but getting mixed up in the spratly islands is a different matter, china had claimed most of these islands essentially from very early history.. the British empire decided to claim them for no particular reason in the 1880s and just planned a load of flags with no follow-up the French went along in the 1930s and essentially did the same even over that fact there was good evidence that there were Chinese fishermen on the islands at the time. Japan stole the islands in the 1940s.. then from the 1970s china, the Philippines and Vietnam have all been arguing over the various islands.. and the truth is they all have valid claims that need sorting out.. japan and the US have actually been pushing hard in that area and probably increasing tension, the US specifically has gone beyond transit and insists it has the legal right to undertake exercises and surveillance..which it does..but as we all know pushing that creates tension.. sometimes it’s important to push and sometimes it’s important to speak quietly and carry a very big stick.. the US and the west have a big stick..but so does china and in this case china is developing the bigger stick,.and in really the china seas are china’s neighbourhood.. so unless we want world war 3 we need to have an even bigger stick than we have now or we need to start speaking more quietly..because honestly at present the wests red lines and chinas red lines are to intermixed and the size of the sticks means that china is not backing away.
I really don’t think people come close to understanding the Chinese level of resolve.. unless the west and china can set agreed red lines that are not intermixed there will be a war and china will start it. China is not a bully as that is the wrong analogy and if the west thinks in that way it will misstep, china is telling the world after what it considers over a century of humiliation by the west, US and Japan that it is returning to what is it considers itself and its place, and they seriously do mean it.. the bully will back down but China is not, infact it’s going to go for the USAs throat because it sees the west as the bully and it as the victim of abuse and it essentially completely rejects the world order as set by the western powers that oversaw its humiliation.. china has a serious multi generational grudge and trauma that makes the interwar German grudge seem pretty small.
What all this means is we
A) need a very very very big stick.. as in the west needs to double its navel building rate.
B) listen to what china is going to take as minume around its red lines and have a meaningful dialogue about what will and will not cause world war 3
C) set our red lines around what we the west need, not what we want as that is no longer the guiding light.
The reality is china will go to war over Taiwan, that is inevitable, I don’t believe there is anything the west can do to prevent that from occurring.. we just need to decided if we are willing and capable of fighting a war to strategic exhaustion with china over grudge. And china will very very likely go to war over the 9 dash line ( china wants control of the chinas seas ) the question will then be is the west willing to fight a war to strategic exhaustion over the china seas.
Personally I think it’s probably to late to prevent a conflict unless the west de-escalates, simply put china now has an overwhelming advantage in industrial capacity in regards to shipping and naval construction.. it can and is outbuilding the west at a staggering rate.. and the west is not taking its seriously..last year the US funded for one new SSN in that financial year.. Not only that it’s level of professionalism within its navy is something that has been missed by most.. it’s had a massive drive in creating competent officers and crew allowing it to double in size in just over a decade.. China is the only nation on the planet that now really believes in and is utterly focused on sea power as the arbiter..the US Navel war college summed it up recently when it said that Xi is “the world’s greatest navalist leader today, and among the world’s greatest navalist statesmen in modern history.”
Basically unless someone chooses to change course china and the US will go to war, its going to be the biggest navel war in the history of humanity and they are going to take years to reduce each other and put each other through untold suffering until one population breaks and forces it’s government to capitulate and sign a peace treaty… the question for the UK is do we want to be part of that or even can we afford not to be part of it no matter the cost ? and will the rest of Europe be part of it.. will Russia use it ? Etc…
Basically in the face of all that I’m not really sure we should care much about the spratly islands and helping to force the whole agenda of WW3 forward.. by getting involved in a complex little geopolitical question that is really grey.. who owns the poxy little islands.
Inevitably, one or both sides will miscalculate and cross a red line during the prosecution of a general, conventional conflict in the I-P. Then there will be two irradiated landmasses, Asia (including NK) and North America. ENATO will then only be responsible for enaging/eliminating Mad Vlad and the Orcs.
I take your points about industrial and military advantage of China.
The big worry is Taiwan has a large concentration of semiconductor plants which the west depends upon and take years to build and cost Billions each to build. Even the US has not that concentration and you can forget the UK – we are no where in that league. The EU is not much better.
Any conflict in Taiwan would also pollute the air and disrupt the power supply, so that in itself is a problem. The west needs to co-operate to build fab capacity inside our borders just for it own security both economic and military wise.
Completely agree, that’s my issue, instead of virtue signalling ( which is what freedom of navigation with an OPV is) the west needs to either accept its giving china what it wants or man up and
1) crash build its navel capabilities so it can overwhelm the PLAN and keep a massive edge as well as have the naval industrial capability to replace its navies after a bloodbath of a conflict.
2) ensure iIts economic and industrial systems are shock proofed against a world war ( move semi conductor production and security supplies of all required rare resources).
3) ensure our alliance, internal national political systems and populations are ready to take the extreme pain and suffering WW3 will bring.. because at the moment they are not capable of defeating a bunch of tribal religious nutters or defend a European nation against the 11th largest economy in the world.. so how we would manage a years long war against the second largest is anyone’s guess.
The USA/West doesn’t want China to have the SCS because it could then use it as a bastion and it would also be able to easily project power and over come the Malay barrier which is China’s overwhelmingly Achilles heal in any conflict.
The current situation with China pissing everyone off suits the USA/West position
China is pretty dumb, it’s pissed all its neighbours off on land and at sea to gain a few scraps of irrelevant land that it can’t use.
Compare that with how the US/UK resolved Canada’s boarder in the 19th century.
Worth reading this article once you piece the string back together. Some interesting conclusions at the bottom. Sets out the basis for a Chinese claim to SCS. Question…which China
www .airuniversity.af.edu /JIPA/Display/Article/2528218/historically-mine-the-potentially-legal-basis-for-chinas-sovereignty-claims-to/
A weak article, using the term loosely. Makes meek points, with little context to those statements; for example how the 9-dash lines were drawn and by whom leading to the lines being drawn, quoting legally flimsy statements as justifications, which does make one question the authenticity of the author given their supposed professional vocation.
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The articles author tries to paint a sympathetic tone to countries understanding china’s claims, which gives china a level justification to the claim instead of forcing them change their thinking 🙃 (which is ironic considering the last few days).
Really. Take the parcel islands. It was France who exerted claims for the Parcel islands in 1884 as an extension of Vietnam under their administration and did so in dispute, at the time, with China and Japan.
see: https: // catalogue .curtin.edu.au/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=cdi_crossref_primary_10_47305_JLIA2392347q&context=PC&vid=61CUR_INST:CUR_ALMA&lang=en&adaptor=Primo%20Central
Not claiming that ‘China’ are the rightful custodians. Issue is the historical past is murky and the claims are not recent and not a function simply of an expanding ‘PRC’. From a ‘chinese’ perspective there is a basis for their claims.
Interesting that the international courts have not ruled on who controls the islands…simply its not the ‘PRC’
It is not impossible. Taiwan is not part of the PRC, just like the South China / West Philippine Sea is also not part of the PRC.
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Just a FYI, Freedom of the Seas is not limited to a water strait, with one of the core tenants that no one state controls an international waterway and that all may navigate. It should be noted both russia and china think they own more than what is internationally accepted (except for a few tinpot countries with questionable values).
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What you fail to recognise is 1. in this global economy, where the majority of manufacturing occurs in that part of the world, there is a real UK stake, as with other non-regional countries, in maintainer rules-based order and ease of access; 2. As a leading world economy and power, compared to others with more regionally local stakes, the UK should lead where others cannot be heard. 3. ‘Land’ grabs (including artificially created) by bully countries only leads to conflict, from regional to global in nature; if you want to delay the later, then you must do something, if you don’t you will find yourself being boggled by russian or chinese (lowercase lack of respect intentional 🙃) sign-posts soon enough.
I think what I’m trying to say is that it’s our rules that have set this, china never really agreed to any of it. We set the terms essentially and if your going to do that you had better be able to both enforce them and live by them.. but mainly enforce them and the simple reality is that the west has refused to fund or suffer what is required to enforce them. Now we simply play at it, but playing at it will end in WW3, because if you have set the rules and the other side does not agree with them you either adapt the rules or have overwhelming force across all domains and show the absolute will to use that overwhelming force and take all the consequences that come from that .. at present we ( the west ) now have neither the overwhelming force in a lot of domain’s nor show the will to use it when it means we have take any and all consequences..
My personal view is that the west is essentially both poking china and spreading itself thinner and thinner as well as making itself look weaker and weaker..to the point there will be a sino US war and its going to be far far uglier longer and closer than most people seem to think.
The biggest issue is china sees this as a Chinese internal issue..it sees it as the continuation of the subjugation of china by the western powers and until it has essentially unified and taken its place as the hegemonic power in the western pacific it will always be subjugated.. the west has a different view. That is the fundamental problem.. because that means the west and china have a completely incompatible set of red lines driven by deep culture identity….
So it’s either 1) one side has overwhelming force and can force the other to accept, 2) the sides give until they settle on red lines they can live with 3) there is a catastrophic war and we chose when it starts..aka we start it 4) china initiates a catastrophic war at a point it chooses.
but we have to pick one of the three options or have option 4 picked for us.. and we have failed to pick option 1 and essentially china has a naval military industrial complex greater than the western world. That core fact means we cannot get back to option 1…china is now at a point that it can fight the USN as a near peer and the trajectories for the PLAN and USN are only going in the PLANs favour in most elements.. apart from carriers and the U.S. needs carriers to offset the tyranny of distance, china does not, because the other issue is that the locus of the world has now changed.. the industrial hub of the world is now the eastern Indian Ocean and western pacific.. that is the battleground for WW3 and china holds the centre ground.
Yes the world is interconnected.. but china is almost inevitably going to follow its core belief set to an end and we the west have to decide if we will suffer to prevent that… not just send a few of our armed forces off to fight and die, but to massively suffer and hold together as a collective of nations as hundreds of thousand’s, possibly even millions die and our economies crash and burn down, with damage that will last a generation.
One final depressing thought.. modern history has been won by the nation that controlled the sea with naval power, that navel power always comes from the ability of that nation to build ships.. the catholic empires dominated the new world through naval power and ship construction ..Great Britain took control of the worlds ship building industry developed the biggest navy in the world created the largest empire the world has ever seen and shaped the foundations of the modern world.. at the same time it isolated and controlled land powers greater than it.. the US then took that and as the UK shipping industry faded so to the British empire..the U.S. dominated the world through naval power..again isolating and subjugating the greatest land power to ever exist ( the Soviet Union). China now has over 50% of the world’s ship building capacity, it has 260 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US. It is outbuilding the US navy by a margin and has doubled in size over 15 years..while the U.S. has contracted.. as an example within a few year the US will have 41 SSNs vs chinas likely 75 SSK, AIP and SSN fleet.. China is heading to possibly putting 6-8 SSNs in the water a year that will not be that far off a peer of a Virginia and as foil the US authorised the finances for just 1 new SSN hull to be laid down this year.
So for me this is pointless move in a game that can lead to an everyone dies event. What the west actually needs to do is dialogue and agree the new red lines..or go the other way and be able to enforce its rules and the west deals with the actual issues of:
1) the need for a massive emergency crash shipbuilding campaign as well as creating the capability for rebuilding all its navies very quickly after destruction.
2) show political unity so the west is clear it will go to war together and stay together over years of mutual suffering.
3) social changes that show the wests Economic and industrial systems as well as populations and political systems will not fold like a tower of playing cards under the stress of an existential world war.
I just have an issue with the status quo which is going to drag us to a war we did not choose and are in no way prepared to fight.
They respect a 12 mile limit around the Chinese claimed islands. Problem is China wants archipelago status for the entire region making it a navigation issue. With that they could stop anyone transiting the SCS as territorial water.
This is about standing up to a bully. They’ve tried to exclusively annex islands & create islands & military bases by dumping sand & concrete on delicate atolls, ignoring the far more geographically sound claims of the actual neighbours. They bully & harrass, assault, ram etc any aircraft or vessels navigating what were & still are international waters. They’ve in the past resorted to shooting at long established Phillipine troops based out there.
This matters to us as a huge amount of our trade travels through the SCS, PRCs claims are unfounded, tenuous & have been thrown out by international law. They’re trying to both extend their power & control for greater global control & to try to remove percieved enemy threats further from their shores. We should not be allowing this in our day, just as the PRC invaded & annexed Tibet. The CCP just brazenlyinvents narratives to support & justify whatever agenda it chooses. Unfortunately they have such wealth & power toiday that they can sway an awful lot, but we’ve seen many times since 1949 just how callous they are.
We could send a River to the former Gulf of Mexico to prove right of navigation and also check who’s operating the Panama Canal
Is CSG going to go into any Chinese disputed waters?
That was my thought, haven’t heard anything in regard to that.
The Rivers are the perfect vessels to carry out this sort of thing. An OPV with no offensive capability whatsoever seemingly triggering off WW3 if you believe the hysterical hyperbole coming out of Beijing.
But there’s no arguing with anyone for who 2 plus 2 is 5, is there?
AA
Has HMS Spey been downgraded to a “Navy Ship” from a “Warship” ?
UK Battlecruiser sounds better.
Nobody sailing through the SCS or Taiwan straight is going to start WW3. Doesn’t matter if its a patrol boat, an SSN or the CSG.
This Chinese have canned responses they publish in the media to push their narrative, it’s all media bluster.