We’ll never know whether Huawei is still listening

This column has been banging on about the peculiar nature of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, ever since its expanded presence in the UK won what I described as ‘grateful applause from David Cameron’ back in 2012. I have deployed everything from serious intelligence sources to laborious knock-knock jokes (‘Huawei who?’ ‘Who are we kidding, prime minister? We don’t need to knock on your front door when we’ve already got a backdoor device in the Downing Street switchboard’) to make my point that the proliferation of Huawei kit in UK telecoms networks represented an obvious but unquantifiable security risk. Which means I can’t disagree with the government’s belated decision to exclude Huawei from the UK roll-out of 5G, though the ban does not extend to 70,000 roadside boxes of switching equipment for domestic lines, so we’ll never really know whether they’re still listening.

The change of policy comes in response to pressure from Washington and from Tory backbenchers, itself fuelled by China’s harsh new security regime in Hong Kong and increasingly jingoistic tone. We’re told it will delay 5G by two years and as BT boss Philip Jansen has said, the more extensive the replacement programme, the more likely there are to be technical glitches — and the greater the impact on UK competitiveness as a whole. Combine substandard broadband and mobile service with billions of extra business costs for post-Brexit border controls, the withdrawal of Chinese investment from other infrastructure projects and recessionary pressure to create more jobs rather than automate, and we’re looking at five more years in which UK productivity gets worse rather than better.

Like so many important policy choices, the Huawei decision would have been better made much earlier, when allies such as Australia and New Zealand as well as the US were already looking askance — while London’s great and good queued to be recruited as Huawei ‘advisers’ (‘Huawei who?’ ‘Who are we going to buy this week in the House of Lords?’).