Global Britain — House of Commons, 2020-01-30
Topic: International Affairs
Robert William Henry Seely (Conservative, Centre-right): I very much agree, and I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point. The Foreign Affairs Committee covered China’s role in universities in this country, but we need an understanding of how we use integrated strategy and how people use that strategy against us. For example, I suggested in the "Global Britain" study that we should think about rolling the Department for International Development and the Department for International Trade, as agencies, into the Foreign Office. People who prioritise DFID think that that cannot possibly be done, but we can still have the 0.7% and a significant aim for aid, while having those Departments as agencies within the Foreign Office to have greater integration between the different elements of power that one has at one’s disposal. That is just a suggestion. I am not saying that one should do it, but I think we need to think freely about the options we have. One would not want to copy Russian power, because it is very often used unethically and immorally, but its notion of integration is very important I want to say a few words about Huawei. I know I have, with my role as a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Ministry of Defence, bent the rules slightly. I am very grateful to the Whips for their generosity in allowing me to talk about this issue in the past week or so. It falls under the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, but I have been talking to them extensively to make sure they are not too disappointed in my actions Huawei is probably the major strategic goal of China in the UK and Europe over the next five to 10 years. By that, what I mean is that China’s strategic goal, with its Made in China 2025 and Digital Belt and Road initiatives, is to become dominant in the cyber space. That presents potential opportunities, but also very significant threats. I am concerned that in the past 15 years, Huawei, which is an arm of the Chinese state—let us be under no illusion about that—has built up a potentially dominant position in many countries. That presents significant problems and threats to us, and I would just like to rehearse some of the arguments. I do so in part because this will come back and be a focus of discussion here, certainly for the next month or six weeks as the Government seek to put through secondary, and potentially primary, legislation First, there is a claim that Huawei is a private firm. In no meaningful sense is that correct, as we would understand it. The company is 99% owned by a Chinese trade union, and Chinese trade unions are part of the one-party state. To follow up on what the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald) said, I think we need a better understanding of non-democratic systems. We tend to assume that the rest of the world is a little bit like us in different ways. I lived in a one-party state, the Soviet Union, before its collapse, and I am glad I did. One-party states are functionally different. For us, the rule of law is given the highest rank. In one-party states, the rule of the party is given the highest rank, and the rule of law is ranked somewhat lower. So party comes before law in such countries, in a way that it simply does not in democratic states. That goes to the heart of the question of being a non-trusted vendor and a high-risk vendor. I will develop that argument in a minute, if I may, although I will be conscious and respectful of Members’ time Huawei is not a private firm; it is 99% owned by a trade union, and trade unions are part of the Chinese state. Considering that previous Secretaries of State have described Huawei as a private company, is the UK Government’s position that they believe Huawei to be a private firm, or do they accept that it is part and parcel of the Chinese state? I will probably write a letter to the various Secretaries of State to follow that up, because I think it is important My second point is about the idea that we can limit Huawei to the periphery of the network. That is key to Government plans, and I think it is highly questionable. The Government say that there is a way of managing the risk through network design, but many other countries say that that cannot be done. Mike Burgess, the director general of Australia’s version of GCHQ, said that "the distinction between core and edge collapses in 5G networks. That means that a potential threat anywhere in the network will be a threat to the whole network" I will quote some other experts whom I have talked to. One told me: "Basic cybersecurity principles tell you that one vulnerability or weakness in the system threatens the entirety of the system." I would like to know whether the Government think we can build out threat in our network design As regards the core versus edge arguments, many experts argue that proposed solutions based on segmentation between functions are "yesterday’s perspective on tomorrow’s problem." Such experts argue that it is not possible to segment 5G as we could with 3G and 4G, because some of the core functions will be pushed to the edge. As the architecture moves on, those core functions will be stretched across the network via virtualisation and intensification of active features of radio access network equipment. Another expert said: "Many…core functions have to move close to the edge in order for 5G to offer the benefits it does"— that is, latency and speed I was reading an article in The Strategist, a magazine put together by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The article was written by one of the magazine’s cyber experts who formerly worked at Australia’s version of GCHQ, and who said: "I was part of the team in the Australian Signals Directorate that tried to design a suite of cybersecurity controls that would give the government confidence that hostile intelligence services could not leverage their national vendors"— Huawei— "to gain access to our 5G networks. We developed pages of cybersecurity mitigation measures to see if it was possible to prevent a sophisticated state actor from accessing our networks through a vendor. But we failed."