The UK is free to decide about Huawei – but it’ll come at a cost

A huge decision faces the United Kingdom: should it allow Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, to continue to have a role in building the country’s 5G mobile network?

It is in the first instance a decision about technology. But it is also one about national security. And, perhaps most crucially, it is about the UK’s future relationship with the US.

The decision is expected to be announced today and the country seems set to allow Huawei to continue to have a limited role in supplying equipment. It will be a decision that the government will need to defend. Sir Keir Starmer, the front-running candidate for the Labour leadership, has called for the prime minister to justify his decision in parliament.

“There are so many questions that are unanswered,” he said on Sky News. “He’s done a bit of a runner, has Boris Johnson. He’s not around and he’s not leading from the front. He needs to come to parliament, make a statement and face questions about this.”

Indeed. Firstly, questions about technological and financial issues need answering. These include practical ones, such as how quickly other suppliers might be able to provide the equipment, and financial ones such as the extra cost of using alternative firms. At a cost and with some delays, of course, the Huawei equipment already installed could be bypassed and replaced. But for the country to make an informed decision about the rollout of 5G it needs facts.

The second set of questions concern security. Here there is a clash of opinion. The United States believes that there is indeed a profound danger that the UK could lose control of its data to China, seeing Huawei as an effective arm of the Chinese government. This view, articulated vigorously by Mike Pompeo, US secretary of state, is shared by Jeremy Hunt, the former UK foreign minister and the defeated candidate in the Tory leadership election.

In Europe, views are more circumspect. Germany has inclined towards allowing Huawei to have a limited role, though the decision has been postponed. France, on the other hand, has agreed to allow Huawei to continue to supply equipment, in effect defying US pressure.

Here in the UK, an assessment of the dangers comes from the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre. Its most recent report concluded that there were security shortcomings in the Huawei equipment, and though these were technical weaknesses rather than any deliberate effort to infiltrate UK networks, it could not give Huawei a totally clean bill of health. Its key finding was that it could “only provide limited assurance that all risks to UK national security from Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s critical networks can be sufficiently mitigated long-term”.

The question for the government is whether this limited assurance is sufficient.

But this decision is not just about technology or security. It is about trading relationships. The UK is seeking to conclude a trade agreement with the EU this year, one that will define how closely the British economy will be to the continental European economies in the years ahead. It is also seeking to obtain a parallel trade deal with the US, and it wishes to open further its trade relationship with China.

The national self-interest is inevitably to maintain as open relations as possible with all parties. Europe, taken as a whole, is currently the UK’s largest export market, but the US comes next. China seems set to pass the US to become the world’s largest economy within the next 10 years.

The Huawei decision, therefore, is not just about technology or security. It is about power, and in particular the rivalry between the US and China. In an ideal world, the UK would avoid having to make such a choice. In the past, it would have sought to reach a common position with its EU partners – assuming they could agree to one. But now it has the freedom to choose. That the choice should be so uncomfortable is an illustration of the challenges the UK will increasingly face as it leaves the partnership of the European Union.