Former Brexit Secretary and Tory leadership candidate David Davis has branded Boris Johnson’s decision to involve China in Britain’s 5G network the government’s “worst intelligence decision since MI6’s recruitment of Kim Philby.”
Philby [pictured, above] was one of Britain’s most notorious modern traitors, thought to be the most useful of the so-called “Cambridge Five” group of British academics turned communist assets who acted as Soviet double agents during the Second World War and the Cold War.
He defected to the Soviet Union after he was unmasked in the 1960s and died in Moscow in 1988, shortly before the “evil empire” finally collapsed — but not before rising to the rank Britain’s chief liaison to the American intelligence services and passing huge reams of information to the Soviets.
In fact, Davis believes the decision to get into bed with Huawei is a “failure [which] is worse than [hiring] Philby and his fellow spies, Burgess, Maclean, Cairncross and Blunt, all rolled into one,” given the tech firm’s potential as a back door for the Chinese Communist Party to undermine Britain’s most important intelligence alliances.
“[5G] will be essential to our electricity and water supplies, our credit systems, our GP surgeries and hospitals, traffic lights, cars and even our access to emergency services,” Davis explained in an article for the Mail on Sunday.
“It goes without saying that anybody who can interfere in our 5G networks can cause mayhem, seizing control of, say, dams, air traffic control and electricity generators. Or they could paralyse the internet, bringing the nation to a halt,” Davis warned.
“The damage could range from traffic jams to mass fatalities – and that is quite aside from the capacity for espionage.”
Davis was at pains to stress that concerns over Huawei are not just confined to the Trump administration, which is locked in something of a geopolitical struggle with the one-party dictatorship.
“[Other] allies including Canada, Australia and New Zealand are concerned, too… The Australians depend more than any other developed country on Chinese markets for their exports, yet in 2018 they took the brave decision to exclude Huawei from their 5G system because they view China as a threat to their future security,” he pointed out.
“They understand their Chinese neighbours rather better than we do. China has spied aggressively on Western states for decades, stealing military and technological secrets on an industrial scale,” he said.
“Do we really want to expose more British citizens to this sort of intrusion and criminality?”
The British government insists the pending arrangement with Huawei is safe, and that it will only be involved in the “periphery” of Britain’s 5G infrastructure, not its “core”.
Critics such as Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, however, believe that the British establishment has been compromised by its increasing ties to Chinese business interests.