Sir Iain Duncan Smith
MP for Chingford and Woodford Green · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I raise the cases of Ryan Cornelius and Jimmy Lai—both United Kingdom citizens—to the attention of the Foreign Secretary, who I welcome to his position. Ryan Cornelius has been incarcerated for 19 years—trumped-up charges by a corrupt regime that is supporting a war in Sudan at the moment.”
“Has the Secretary of State been made aware of the case of Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong resident who is being prosecuted by the Administration in Hong Kong using the national security law?”
“A particular memory is that during the Maastricht debates, when, I have to confess, I and one or two others here were deeply rebellious, Ann lectured me from the Dispatch Box—she was in government—about how I should support the Maastricht treaty and the European Union, which rather worried me.”
“It was phenomenal, because she was so certain about the way that she was. Ann embodied something else: the passion that is necessary for us in this Chamber to make our arguments without the fear of any other person doing something to us.”
“We need to reiterate, and the Government and the Home Secretary need to specify, to all the social media companies that they must do something to close down the visceral, violent language that some people use in attacking others personally, as they did over Ann’s murder, which shocked me.”
“Friday was a funny day. I heard the news very early in the morning that Ann had died, and I was utterly surprised about that because she had seemed perfectly fit the last time I saw her, so I gave my condolences and spoke about it on the radio.”
The complete record
Every one of 4,453 lines we hold for Sir Iain Duncan Smith, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 42 of 90.
“An example of a public organisation would be the Communist Youth League.”
“There is an overwhelming body of evidence indicating that Huawei is an untrusted vendor, which should not be given any further opportunity of access to our most vital communication networks. The decision of the UK Government leaves us, at the moment, utterly friendless among our allies. After all, Huawei is effectively a state-owned corporation in the People’s Republic of China under the Communist party. Huawei Technologies is 99%-owned by Huawei Investment & Holding, which in turn is completely owned by Huawei Investment & Holding’s trade union committee. According to Chinese law, trade union committees are classified as public or mass organisations, which do not have shareholders, as they are recognised under Chinese law as legal persons or entities in their own right.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered the security implications of including Huawei in 5G. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I am pleased to see so that many right hon. and hon. Members want to speak, so I will be as brief as possible. The Government’s decision to go ahead with Huawei in the 5G network in the UK—it is clear from the evidence—has angered our allies and perplexed many of us who see this as an avoidable risk. In the rush—I believe it is a rush—to go ahead with the 5G system for the UK using Huawei’s products extensively, the UK Government have brushed aside the concerns of all our most important allies and the people we generally rely on.”
“It is either absurd or I will have to review my purchase from John Lewis. My socks might even be bugged! My right hon. Friend is exactly right. I want to make this point, which often goes missing in this debate. Huawei is also seen as a national security threat. It continues to deal extensively with Iran without full public knowledge of how; it built a mobile network for North Korea; and it is providing security surveillance and censoring systems to authoritarian regimes, not least the Chinese Government. It has long been documented that Huawei has a long and intimate history with the Chinese security services, and there are issues around the security systems that have been provided for them, which are now being used, I think, to supress the Uyghur people. I have real concerns about that.”
“That is a very serious charge, which was made a matter of weeks ago, yet the UK Government announced that although they recognise Huawei as an untrusted provider, we would not stop network providers using Huawei equipment in the new 5G system. Instead of banning them, as our allies have done, we would place limits on the locations and the extent to which Huawei products may be deployed in our 5G network, to reduce Huawei’s involvement over time to the figure of 35%.”
“That is shocking. If true, it is an absolute indictment. The British Government and other western Governments must speak up more about this and say that what is going on there is simply intolerable. If that were any other Government, it would be shocking. It is time that we call it what it is. If all that is not enough to make one concerned—it should be—I hope that the UK Government, my Government, have noticed the following: “A superseding indictment was returned yesterday in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, charging Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. (Huawei), the world’s largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer, and two U.S. subsidiaries with conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act”.”
“I completely agree. I think the figure of 35% has been plucked from thin air. I will come on to the reasons why it does not work. Imagine that in 1939 we had been developing our radar systems and decided to have one of the Nazi companies in Germany directly involved. Oh, but we reduced their involvement to 35%, so they only controlled 35%. I wonder how ridiculous that would have seemed.”
“Indeed, there is some evidence that such attacks have already taken place on a limited scale elsewhere. For example, a hostile adversary might disable our 5G network by simply shutting down our antennas and/or routers at the edge by remotely activating the malware already buried inside many of those processors. Those embedded in the edge will have kill switches, which are currently nigh on impossible to detect and, therefore, to mitigate.”
“That is the point. Each time, we are told that they will reduce, but, in fact, we get more and more addicted to them and are unable to change. When the Government announced the figure of 35%, they made the point that the plan to exclude Huawei products from the core of the 5G infrastructure meant that we would solve the problem by restricting them only to the edge, as it was described. This position critically rests on the assumption that the core cannot be compromised from the edge. Most cyber experts whom I have spoken to know that this is an unsafe assumption, because they know that the whole 5G network can be attacked starting from the compromised edge, given the nature of change to the technological capability of the edge. The edge components can be compromised.”
“Completing the roll-out of superfast fibre broadband, which my Government have constantly promised to complete to the level it should be at, is the No. 1 priority. Further, that will affect the ability of 5G to operate.”
“I agree with my right hon. Friend and he will see that in the course of my remarks I will point out that we—alone, it appears—are taking an enormous gamble. The second reason the Government prayed in aid of their decision on 5G was the fact that it offered three main benefits: faster data transmission rates, shorter delays and increased network capacity. While faster data transmission rates can improve user experience—there is no doubt about that—for most people, 5G will not significantly impact their experience. Tasks such as viewing a movie will not be perceptibly different from 4G. In any case, the data speeds offered by 5G—100 megabits per second to 1000 megabits per second—are in the range offered by more conventional superfast fibre broadband. In many cases, the desired performance can and should be achieved by other means.”
“I am really grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. He is absolutely right; at the end of it all, our point is that defence of the realm comes first.”
“This pressure that we can do things tomorrow, or within a few years, will somehow be another one of those gains that are used to leverage the idea that we have to make this development.”
“The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and I will come back to that point in a short while. Although the Government claim that 5G will increase network capacity, there are concerns about the proliferation of the connected internet of things—the IOT devices—and a dramatic increase in self-driving cars with next-generation telematics. That is the key point. There may be response-time critical benefits—in fact, there certainly are—in future with 5G, such as how self-driving cars share safety-critical information with one another. However, these applications overwhelmingly lie in the future and importantly will rely on a wider set of technological changes and significant changes in social attitudes; we must bear that in mind.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right and prompts the question: who has been asleep on their watch? That goes right back to the time when the Labour party was in government and was not even told by civil servants that they had made the decision to approve the involvement of 5G. Saying that is not to blame Ministers; it was the fault originally of civil servants. Even if the Government disagree about the urgent need for such developments or disagree with my argument about this issue, surely, as my hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) said, security is a greater priority. Government policy must consider the wisdom of proceeding to deploy vast numbers of IOT sensors in our environment, offices and homes, unless and until current legitimate security concerns about this issue have been laid to rest.”
“I am grateful, as ever, to the right hon. Gentleman, who is in danger of making my speech before I do, because I am coming on to those points. He will find that we not do not just have cross-party support; we are absolutely linked in our concern about Huawei. I will come back to this point later, but I am afraid that a lot of this issue is about the way in which the establishment at the moment in the UK has somehow found itself locked into this Huawei process, and we need to break it free; it is like getting somebody free of an addiction to heroin. We need to put it into rehabilitation, which is the point of my speech at the moment.”
“I find it difficult to comprehend their position, given that a growing number of leading western nations, many of them our competitors in many fields, intend not to use Huawei—in fact, they will depart completely from Huawei, even if that means a delay—or any other untrusted vendors. Surely, therefore, it is inevitable that the worldwide roll-out of 5G must slow down. Given that so many nations are saying no to Huawei, this should be an opportunity for us to prioritise national security over the breakneck speed with which the deployment of 5G is being pressed on us.”
“The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. This relates to my earlier comment about the linkage with the Government. I will come back to Huawei’s ability to draw on support finance—which we might call Government support. I am aware that you want me to make progress, Mr Paisely, so I shall. I will also ask others to restrain themselves slightly, although I will not refuse interventions. That will not win me points from you, Mr Paisley, but I will not defy my colleagues. Perhaps most bizarrely, I think that the rush by the Government is being driven by the fear that we will be left behind by others. It is worth tackling that point.”
“Then I discovered that MI5 uses a systems provider that is heavily dependent on Huawei equipment. These decisions are barking mad.”
“I understand that Huawei is now taking over the managed services for another operator, Three, which opens up yet another huge area to gather information from. If someone has a map of a radio network, they will also have a map of everything connected to that radio network. They will know what each piece is, what it does and how to attack it. Yet our dependence on Huawei goes even deeper—much deeper than many people realise. I have just noticed that Huawei is present in the emergency services network, which is often referred to as the blue lamp or blue light service. The service is part of our critical national infrastructure, but the issue did not come out in the statements. I am astonished that that would be allowed. We can imagine how dangerous any form of disruption would be to that service. It beggars belief.”
“After all, there is a long history of the China Development Bank providing low-cost financing for Huawei customers, and that approach is updated every few years. A recent report estimates that, when one takes in tax breaks, grants and low-cost land acquisitions, the subsidy comes to more than $75 billion. No western company in this sector will be able to compete on those grounds. Despite all that, it is not common knowledge that at least one very significant UK service provider has contacted me to say that it has already made clear that it will not use Huawei in its 5G network. O2 suggests that the idea that these systems cannot be created without Huawei—my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) mentioned this earlier—is complete and utter nonsense. The NCSC’s guidance does not even mention services.”
“We need to take stock of this nonsense propaganda that Huawei is light years ahead as an organisation. Yes, it has a lot of people in research and development, but the reality is that its development has been about money. The Government say that telecommunications companies are all reliant on Huawei. It was said earlier in the debate that telcos are absolutely reliant on Huawei, so delay would leave them significantly out of pocket. According to that line of argument, however, I would argue that reducing Huawei’s involvement to even 35% would leave telcos out of pocket, so we are already halfway there, as it were. It seems daft to try to make that argument. Of course, the reliance on Huawei comes as a result of it having constantly bid well below other market competitors for UK and other business.”
“Yes, I agree. My hon. Friend makes a very good point. In fact, I have read a note from Samsung declaring that it is completely feasible to do this work without any involvement from Huawei. Indeed, Samsung made very clear its belief that Huawei is a direct threat to our national security because its system is not a trusted one. Far from Huawei having some insurmountable technological lead, it seems, when one starts to investigate, that the quality of its work is no better than anybody else’s, and in some cases somewhat worse. I recall even Dr Ian Levy, the technical director of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, saying about a year ago that Huawei’s security was “very, very shoddy”. He also said that “it’s engineering like it’s back in the year 2000”.”
“Will they ensure that when that contract is let, the supplier will not have any input from untrusted providers such as Huawei? The Minister needs to answer that question.”
“The point I am making is that the systems and everything else that is being used are making things very vulnerable. The right hon. Gentleman makes my point exactly. I am worried about the Government mobile system, which I understand the Government are working on. As usual for the civil service, it has some ghastly acronym. It is called gomo for short, which rather describes the process that we have been going through so far with Huawei. The Government have decreed that it will be one supplier only. It stands to reason that unless the Government block untrusted providers from the system, we will likely be handing over control of yet another vital and sensitive system to the organisation under discussion. That is a big question for the Government.”
“I do not think John Lewis is in the market, but we can check that. I have not been there for any telecommunications. I say to my colleagues and to you, Mr Paisley, that the situation is an utter mess at the moment.”
“My right hon. Friend is right. He also comes to a point that I will make shortly. My concern is that there are other logical reasons in play, which I want to talk about in a second.”
“There is no question that the US Administration are very exercised by the UK’s decision to go ahead with 5G and Huawei. In fact, I cannot think of any other time when we have been so separated from most of our allies that we respect. The thing I cannot get is that even Vietnam, for God’s sake—a communist country next door to China—will not have Huawei in their systems.”
“If defence of the realm is our first priority, what the Government are proposing today is not defence of the realm, but semi-defence of the realm, and that simply will not do.”
“By the way, no other country does a level of business proportionate to its population as much as Australia does with China. Australia is not frightened of saying no to the procedure, and I do not see anybody trying to beat it up on trade. Sometimes I wonder if we do not project the sense of power or force that we should. As the UK leaves the EU, we should avoid kowtowing, as my right hon. Friend so rightly said—that wonderful Chinese act of placing one’s forehead on the ground in front of one’s respected superior—to China or anyone else. The British Government should commit to reducing and eradicating our dependence on Huawei, in line with our allies. That is really important. After all, defence of the realm is surely our first priority, and that goes for cyber-space as well.”
“Successive British Governments—this is the point that my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) made—have tried to get close to China in the hope that we can take advantage of their markets. I recognise that that is not unreasonable, but in so doing, we seem to be playing a dangerous game. After all, this totalitarian regime is not an ally of ours, and we get confused about that at times, even if the Foreign Office is reluctant to admit that China poses a threat to us, for fear of upsetting the Chinese Government. That threat is not just in its cyber-attacks on our systems, but also in the way in which it does not obey the international rules-based order in trade. That point has been made today.”
“Understanding what is inside the chips and processors is critical. Any malware needs to be detected. Surely, after all these years, we could have worked to ensure as much as possible that products deployed into secure or critical national infrastructure are auditable, so that we understand what is in them. What better way to do that than by collaboration with our Five Eyes allies, to ensure that we drive security much deeper? Nothing has happened, however. We are in a mess, and the only way to get out of it, as my right hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) said, is to ensure that Huawei’s involvement is reduced from the Government’s present position of 35% down to 0%. I recognise that may take a little time, but that should be the purpose of the Government over the next two years.”
“Indeed. We are all neighbours in the global environment, as the dreadful coronavirus shows us. The problem is compounded—this is not really spoken of in these debates, and the Government never make any mention of this—is a deeper and further problem. It exposes the degree to which western Governments, including our Government, to a degree—I am talking about successive Governments; this is not a shot at my Government, as the issue goes back further than that—have taken their eye off the ball. Much of the available equipment, including electronic sub-assemblies, is of unknown security provenance. At present, beyond existing contracted functions, we have little to no idea what else lies in our installed systems. UK Governments and others—I particularly want to focus on my Government—have done little to tackle the problem.”
“This is a very important point. I want to know, and I think the rest of the House would like to know, whether it is now Government policy to drive to 0% involvement by Huawei and other non-secure vendors. Is that now the policy—not just to 35%?”
“I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his clear statement, and on his view that since the standards we set are higher than those in the EU, he will therefore not be demanding that the EU aligns with our standards as we go forward. That is refreshing. The settlement on Northern Ireland in the withdrawal agreement included provision on state aid, and since then, the EU has interpreted that as bringing the whole UK under state aid provisions. Will he confirm that in any future agreement with the EU, we will not accept that the UK leaves itself under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice when it comes to state aid provision?”
“I am enormously pleased that my right hon. Friend is here in this job. She is doing brilliantly, and all of us here believe that for certain. On the migration policy that she has announced over the past week, will she confirm that the reality is that many of our constituents are concerned about the scale of migration? They are not anti-migrant. With net migration at over 1 million over three years and now responsible for about 80% of all population growth, the scale is unprecedented. Given all that and the costs and benefits, will she now confirm that the purpose of the policy is ultimately to bring the scale of that migration down to manageable levels?”
“I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his statement and the Prime Minister on his. Looking at the service sector, given that the EU has made next to no effort in most of the trade deal arrangements that they have negotiated to put any special pressure for a regulatory position for the UK in financial services, does my right hon. Friend now think that the EU will reference enhanced equivalence, as in the paper written by the lawyer Barnabas Reynolds, which the Treasury accepted? Will my right hon. Friend be proposing that to the EU as the way forward when it comes to regulation?”
“May I urge my right hon. Friend to recall the cross-party concern about the misbehaviour of many online betting companies and the growing drive towards addiction as a result of that misbehaviour? Given that, will he encourage the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to call in the Gambling Commission, which now refuses to release the name of the individual who owns Betway? Nobody knows where its money comes from, and it seems absurd that in this circumstance we cannot now find out. It is time we got to the bottom of this.”
“I say to my right hon. Friend that I am deeply disappointed by this decision. I have spoken at length to security officials, who will always say that defending in cyber-security is a game of catch-up—always catching up with the next algorithm change, and we can never guarantee that we spot it sometimes until too late. The reality of the 5G network is that it is fundamentally different. There will be less and less centralised function with more and more going to the periphery, which is exactly where Huawei will be. Given that he did not mention China as a threat to us in cyber-security—he mentioned only Russia—does he now believe that China is a threat to us in cyber-security; as he takes on those threats to us, does he think that he will now drive Huawei out of our future systems progressively, as quickly as he can?”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) on his urgent question. Given that we are, in a sense, at war—there is a cyber-war going on in which China is arguably the biggest participant; maybe Russia as well—the idea that we should think of giving a company that is heavily subsidised by China, a country that has set out to steal data and technology non-stop, the right to be in what is essentially a very delicate area of our technology seems utterly bizarre. I was led to believe that the Government would not make that decision. I hope that they will now reject Huawei immediately.”
“Will the Secretary of State consider whether insurance companies, and others, should have been charging leaseholders those extra costs until it had been confirmed that there was a real threat?”
“May I slightly extend that point, as these issues reach across the Floor? Since the terrible Grenfell disaster, people in a privately owned block of flats in my constituency have faced massively increased insurance costs. They have been unable to get anyone to give them a confirmed view about the cladding, or to receive information from the fire brigade about the real nature of the threat and danger. Everybody has run for cover, and as result those people have already spent a vast amount of money—they are not wealthy people. They have now been told that the cladding does not pose a threat, but they have a backwash of costs and are still affected by this issue.”
“Friend is this: at which point do we really get the idea that this regime is not displaying a peaceful nature and is not going to give up on any of its opportunities and that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, like many others, is being held as a hostage? When do we decide that, actually, the people of Iran do not want this organisation any more and that we want to support them?”
“Sorry, I did not hear you, Mr Speaker. I will not give up that opportunity. First, may I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) on securing this urgent question, and my right hon. Friend at the Dispatch Box on his calm and reassuring manner throughout this period? Notwithstanding that, I would like to ask a question. From the moment that we negotiated that deal and the west offered an olive branch to Iran, our expectations have never really been met. Iran shows the face that it wishes to show to the west, but underneath it, it has gone on not de-escalating, but escalating the violence. Whether it is in Syria, all the way down to the Houthis, it has done nothing else but use its money to provoke violence and escalate trouble and war. My question to my right hon.”
“It is not good enough for the FA to say, “Well, we didn’t really mean this and we’ll review it.” The Government give the FA financial assistance. I urge my hon. Friend, as Minister for Sport, to tell the FA that unless it moves on the matter pretty damn quickly, we will review its financial support.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) on obtaining the urgent question. In a sense, it does not really matter what the FA says to explain. The evidence is clear. The all-party parliamentary group on gambling-related harm conducted a series of inquiries with the chief executives of several gambling companies. The biggest area of risk is their drive to get more and more people into VIP rooms, where they give them incentives, such as tickets for football matches. What we are discussing is all part of that. The biggest abuse takes place in that process, whereby companies drive people who gamble a lot into higher levels of gambling because that is where their profits lie.”
“The hon. Lady has made two points that I think are incorrect. First, the British people voted to join something where we had a full veto over anything that we did not agree could be imposed on the UK. Secondly, on judicial activism and the mission creep of the European Court of Justice, perhaps the hon. Lady would like to comment on the way in which power was grabbed through two court cases—namely, those of Van Gend en Loos and of Costa v. ENEL.”
“My hon. Friend is making absolutely the right case about sovereignty. I mentioned Van Gend en Loos and Costa v. ENEL. The point about those two cases is that they were judicial statements. One was about direct effect and the other was about the whole idea that European law had supremacy. They were never voted on in this House. Nobody agreed to them. Nobody said, “This is what we wanted.” That led to something quite interesting—the imposition of the extension of welfare payments to EU migrants who came here was the result of a judicial review of something that we had never voted for, and it cost us a lot of money.”
“May I just pick up on one point? My right hon. Friend talks about, “should we wish to give them benefits”. The reality now is that the British Government have to pay benefits even to families of people working over here when their families are not with them. That is roundly disliked across Europe, but those countries all accept there is nothing they can do about it because the European Court of Justice imposed that as part of freedom of movement. It was never debated as part of freedom of movement and it was never supposed that it would happen. It is an end to sovereignty when one can no longer make a decision to change something like that.”
“I really do not understand what the hon. Gentleman and his Front Bench are up to. It is as if they are trying to rewrite the whole concept of the world order in trade. The EU has to abide by WTO rules just as we will when we leave—and we already do. There is no issue here that is going to change. WTO rules apply to the EU as stringently as they apply to us, and when we leave and become a voting member, they will still apply to us. The difference is that if there is a debate for change, we will have a vote which we do not have now because we are subsidiary, underneath the EU. The hon. Gentleman’s argument is specious, and it is total nonsense.”