Monday night’s Commons rebellion over Huawei was on a surprisingly serious scale for a new government with a big mandate. The problem for the government is not just the actual danger of our security being breached by Huawei, real though that is. It is also strategic. The government is not treating the subject this way, but sees it as merely a matter for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. This is a bad mistake. We have achieved Brexit. We are making our own way in the world. Our closest allies in terms of trust, language, cultural links, democratic values and shared interests are our four partner nations in the ‘Five Eyes’ deep intelligence partnership — the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Yet we are refusing this logic, weakening trust with these allies, and making ourselves dependent on a country, China, which is not far short of being our enemy and which pays significant numbers of our elites to advance aims which, though commercial, are inseparable from its politics. Obviously the arrival of the coronavirus is a complete coincidence, but it is a metaphor for the vulnerability of our position.
There cannot be many positive aspects to the coronavirus outbreak, but I wonder if it carries one for stock markets. We had been told repeatedly, before all this, that the markets badly needed a ‘correction’ after their uniquely long bull run. If they were now sliding because of a banking or commercial event, confidence might collapse. If, however, they are falling because of a disease, will it also mean that confidence will recover more quickly once the disease is contained?
At the end of last week, the leader of the Chinese Communist party in the affected city of Wuhan announced at a press conference that Chinese people should ‘learn to say “thank you” to the party’.
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