In a recent interview on GB News, the United Kingdom’s Business and Trade Secretary, Peter Kyle, outlined efforts to strike trade deals to boost economic growth. In a brief slip, he included the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea before correcting himself to South Korea. That gaffe, however fleeting, exposed a deeper, more damning reality. Despite loud claims of ironclad sanctions, the United Kingdom continues to funnel low-key economic support to one of the world’s most dangerous regimes. Britain quietly bankrolls the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Official British government data released on March 26, 2026, lays the truth bare. Total trade in goods and services between the two countries reached £40 million in the four quarters ending September 2025. United Kingdom exports to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea stood at £28 million. Imports totaled £12 million.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea ranks as the United Kingdom’s 184th largest trading partner, yet it still receives this steady flow of British cash and services. Goods exports, while small, persist. Rubber products and basic machinery form the bulk. Foreign direct investment stock from the United Kingdom in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea stood at £1 million at the end of 2024. Evidently, this data is not zero and they represent real economic oxygen for Pyongyang.
Humanitarian and development assistance, once dismissed as ancient history, established a pattern that lingers today. Between 2011 and 2017, the United Kingdom provided roughly £4 million in official development assistance, focused on English language training, health initiatives, and support for disabled persons. Peak annual spending reached just over £1 million in 2013. Funds flowed through nongovernmental organizations, the United Nations, and the British Council, yet still eased moral international pressure on the regime.
Even after the formal end of bilateral aid in 2017, trace multilateral contributions continued, including around £300,000 in 2020 -supposedly- for coronavirus-related needs. Current international official development assistance to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea hovers at approximately £10.3 million annually across all donors. The United Kingdom’s share may be small, but it forms part of the quiet lifeline that keeps the regime breathing.
This low-key support operates within a web of diplomatic and commercial channels that the United Kingdom refuses to sever. The British embassy in Pyongyang, one of the few Western missions that still operate there, serves as more than a listening post. It facilitates the very services trade and limited contacts that deliver hard currency to Kim Jong-un’s coffers. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office issues sanctions guidance, yet £28 million in British exports continue to flow.
Recent measures targeting the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s defense minister and other senior officials for supplying Russia in Ukraine only underscore the hypocrisy. Intelligence assessments confirm Pyongyang has shipped over 33,000 containers of artillery shells and ballistic missiles, along with thousands of troops, generating billions in revenue. Nevertheless, British services and residual trade help sustain the very economy fueling this axis.
The geostrategic damage strikes at the heart of British interests. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea anchors an axis of aggression linking Pyongyang, Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing. North Korean munitions now kill Ukrainians and stretch the United Kingdom’s defense resources across Europe, while London’s small but persistent economic ties send the opposite signal.
In the Indo-Pacific, where the United Kingdom stations aircraft carriers, deploys littoral response groups, and conducts joint naval patrols with the Republic of Korea and Japan under a 2023 defense accord, any economic opening to Pyongyang undercuts deterrence.
The regime’s economy survives through illicit networks and trade with the People’s Republic of China, which supplies over 90% of its external commerce. Yet the United Kingdom’s 40 million pounds in trade and services adds unnecessary legitimacy and marginal revenue.
Patently, past experiments in limited engagement were never truly abandoned. English language programs and small health projects sought to expose elites to outside ideas, yet achieved the opposite: normalizing contact while providing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea with tools and currency as it raced toward nuclear weapons and deepened its lethal partnership with Russia.
The United Kingdom pivoted publicly to sanctions enforcement, but the data shows the quiet flows never stopped. Critics who defend these ties as harmless overlook the obvious. Every pound of services trade, every diplomatic channel kept open, every residual export weakens the containment policy Britain claims to champion.
The Peter Kyle gaffe, innocuous on its face, serves as a perfect reminder. Public discourse must confront the cold reality. United Kingdom policy contains a dangerous contradiction: loud sanctions paired with low-key economic support that keeps cash trickling toward Pyongyang.
The regime’s problems stem from its own choices— isolation, repression, and the weaponization of its people. Yet Britain’s chequebook has never fully closed. The sanctions wall has cracks, and through those cracks flows support that strengthens an enemy.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea threat grows more serious by the month. Until London ends every form of economic engagement, no matter how small, it will continue to undermine its own security, its alliances, and the very containment strategy it professes to uphold.
Numbers do not lie. Britain still quietly bankrolls North Korea.
Jose Lev Alvarez is an American-Israeli scholar specializing in Middle Eastern security policy.
A multilingual veteran of both the IDF Special Forces and the U.S. Army, he holds a B.S. in Neuroscience with a Minor in Israel Studies from American University, three master’s degrees (international geostrategy, applied economics, and intelligence studies), and a medical degree. He is currently completing a Ph.D. in Intelligence and Global Security in the Washington, D.C. area.
In addition to blogging for the Times of Israel, he contributes to the Washington Examiner, is a writing fellow at the Middle East Forum, and regularly provides geopolitical analysis on Latin American television networks.