Dame Chi Onwurah
MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West · Labour · United Kingdom
“An extraordinary debate is going on right now inside and outside AI companies about whether the possibility of AI destroying humanity is more or less than 10%. The European Union is moving ahead with a comprehensive AI regulatory framework, but the UK continues to rely on existing regulation.”
“The Pope also highlighted how the billions of online digital twins constitute an unprecedented concentration of power in the hands of a small number of men. Among the many consequences of the 40 years of neoliberalism repeatedly called out by the Prime Minister is a libertarian attitude to technology.”
“But this stealth digital twinning violates the integrity, uniqueness and very personhood of our constituents and of all of us. Digital twins can take many forms, from content creation algorithms and deepfakes to chatbots that reflect aspects of our personalities back at us. It is particularly worrying when children are the target.”
“The automated version of our kids will grow with them, using the power of AI to target advertising and products at them, and worse. The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee has heard about some of the tragic consequences of online grooming by algorithms and chatbots—a vulnerable boy persuaded to kill himself; a vulnerable girl fed…”
“In the arts, entertainment and tech industries, many performers are agreeing to the creation and use of digital replicas as part of their work—think of ABBA Voyage. But performers increasingly encounter unauthorised digital replicas of themselves, which pose a threat to their career, livelihood and reputation.”
“Since then, deepfakes have proliferated. The hon. Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) was shown crossing the Floor in Parliament to join Reform, to his constituents’ consternation and his own—it was a fake. Then there were the horrendous photos of naked women and girls that Elon Musk’s AI created on demand.”
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“I think there would be an incentive for them to be able to say to potential investors, “We are not going to be considered as an asset that is important to national security”. The definitions are quite broad and many organisations will have technologies that right now appear relatively benign and are used for purely civilian purposes but are cutting-edge and on a trajectory whereby in two years’ time they may have military applications or other things that could be a threat to national security.”
“Q Specifically on whether they meet the definition of an overseas acquirer, I was also interested in this. I think one of the assumptions has been that there will be a large number of self-notifications in order to get guidance early on, but you seem to be implying that that might be considered to be declaring yourself as a threat to national security, and that might be a barrier. Will Jackson-Moore: No. The way traditional fundraising for a start-up or a transaction takes place is that a business is either put up for sale or seeks investment from a number of parties; the entrepreneur wants to raise finance and have a competitive situation in which the providers of capital are making the most attractive offers possible to reduce the cost of capital for the organisation.”
“Q What that says to me is that, while the impact assessment looks at the cost to the acquirer, there will actually be a cost to the acquired party in terms of clearing themselves in advance or clarifying what their situation is, and I do not think that is covered in the impact assessment as it stands. Will Jackson-Moore: Yes, in many cases it is a raising of finance for a partial stake. It is an entrepreneur looking to attract capital to expand their business, seeking to bring in an investor to provide maybe 25% of additional equity capital. They want to have a competitive situation where people are offering the most beneficial terms possible. Many of those investors will be overseas investors.”
“I would appreciate it if the Minister told us how he plans to ensure that agreements with other nations do not provide a back-door way to undermine GDPR. We will not oppose the instrument as it is necessary, but we have concerns about the specifics, and we think assurances must be given to businesses and others about our data privacy and control.”
“Will the Minister commit to ensuring that data protections and treatment are not traded away and that our data protection regulations remain in line with European Union minimum standards, to ensure validity for third-nation adequacy benefits? That is already an issue, as the privacy shield adequacy agreement with the US has been invalidated, and the European Union adequacy agreement with Japan, as I understand it, has no practical effect in the UK. How, then, will adequacy be reflected in our ability to negotiate future trade agreements? Are further decisions of this type likely and how will they be reflected in UK law? Finally, the Labour party is passionate about ensuring that our citizens have control of their own data. We have proposed a digital charter to put people’s real selves back in control of their digital selves.”
“I recognise that the statutory instrument is limited, but it would be helpful if the Minister said something about the extent to which he sees our GDPR evolving, addressing in particular the issue of data rights. That would help us to understand its impact. The SI does nothing to address long-term alignment and divergence decisions. The explanatory memorandum mentions “UK GDPR”. Does that language indicate that the Government intend to diverge from European Union GDPR? As the UK begins to sign trade deals across the world, UK GDPR may be altered. The recent Japan trade deal made reference to facilitating data transfers and could allow them to go via third countries such as the US, which might have different data regulations.”
“10 in July—as I understand it, at the behest of Dominic Cummings, no longer of this parish—raised many questions as to the direction of the Government’s handling and use of public data. The national data strategy, which is undergoing a consultation that closes next week, talks a lot about the role that data can play in driving economic growth, but there is nothing about data rights, duties and obligations on the huge tech platforms that use and misuse so much of our data, or discussion of a regulatory framework for data. Content created by the tech platforms uses people’s data to promote disinformation, fake news, extremism, hatred and other harmful material, while data-driven business models place ever more extreme content in front of our eyeballs.”
“It will be vulnerable to being overturned by the European Court of Justice, so can the Minister promise us that the UK’s handling of personal data will remain in line with our legal obligations that arise from any agreement with the European Union, and can he set out what impact he envisages—I know that he is well versed in these areas—European Court of Justice rulings might then have on UK GDPR law? Will they, as it were, remain supreme following the end of the transition period? Those are the things that the SI does, but there are some things that it does not do. The Government have not been clear or forthcoming about their data management strategy. The shift of public sector data management from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to No.”
“However, despite the UK’s application of the GDPR and implementation of the law enforcement directive under the Data Protection Act 2018, there is no guarantee that we will be awarded an adequacy decision. The European Court of Justice, which can strike down any adequacy decision approved by the Commission, has already twice ruled that the UK’s handling of personal data is not in line with European Union law, so can the Minister tell me what discussions he has had with the European Union about the likelihood of the UK receiving data adequacy recognition? I am sure that he recognises that many businesses are very concerned to have some reassurance and some certainty in this regard. Even if the UK does manage to secure an adequacy agreement before the end of the transition period, there is no guarantee that we will keep it.”
“On 16 July 2020, in case C-311/18, commonly referred to as Schrems II, the Court of Justice of the European Union declared one such decision, the Privacy Shield agreement with the USA, to be invalid. Therefore, the transitional mechanism will not apply for that decision, and this SI removes Privacy Shield from the list of transitional adequacy provisions that the UK will roll over. The SI incorporates European Union decisions on the adequacy of third party countries in UK domestic law. Data adequacy is a status granted by the European Commission to countries outside the European economic area that provide a level of personal data protection comparable to that provided by European law. When a country has been awarded the status, information can pass freely between it and the EEA without further safeguards being required.”
“It is then immediately corrected by today’s SI. As the Minister set out, the SI seeks to ensure that the legal framework for data protection within the UK continues to function correctly after the transition period. The changes in the SI update the date on which the DPPEC come into force from the start—exit day—to the end of the transition period, IP completion day, in effect applying EU case law during the past nine months, ensuring that personal data can continue to be transferred to third countries as it could immediately before exit day. And they set out revised transfer provisions for law enforcement data to include the addition of EEA countries. The current transitional mechanism does not apply for any EU adequacy decisions that are repealed or suspended immediately before IP completion day, as amended by this instrument.”
“Cross- border data flows are now an absolute requisite of trade, with businesses reliant on their ability to transfer personal data about their customers or workforce to offer goods or services and run even basic internal processes such as cloud-based email or file storage. Those all involve data flows, but that is especially true of digitally intensive sectors—telecommunications and financial services, which account for 16% of UK economic output and a quarter of total exports, according to techUK. As the Minister set out, the SI amends and revokes areas of legislation to ensure that the European Union’s GDPR law is translated into UK GDPR law in time for the end of the transition period, as agreed under the withdrawal agreement. The EU GDPR will become UK legislation on IP completion day and, as such, will become the UK’s GDPR.”
“We want to make sure that the impact of data is more constructive in the short and long term. It is certain that there is an impact. As more and more aspects of our lives move online—and the pandemic has accelerated that migration—we all excrete a trail of data and create a data doppelgänger, which can be used to empower and inform us or to control, sell to and disempower us. Data privacy, data rights and data flows are therefore of critical importance to all of us. Depending on any deal, which may or may not be signed —we still do not know—by the Government when the UK leaves the transition period, our data and data protection will no longer be subject to the European Union’s GDPR law. Instead, we will have transposed EU GDPR into UK GDPR. The direction in which the UK takes GDPR will have a wide-ranging impact.”
“It is a pleasure, Mr McCabe, to serve under your chairship for this important statutory instrument. I thank the Minister for his opening remarks. I also state for the record that although I was as dismayed as most people by all the emails that invaded our inboxes from organisations explaining their data privacy policies when the general data protection regulation took effect in 2018, I was pleased that data protection was finally beginning to be taken seriously and coming to the attention of the vast majority of people—even in that most irritating way. Data is the business model of the internet age. It is often referred to as “the new oil”. I do not like that because we have seen what oil extraction has done, both to the environment in countries such as Nigeria and to the planet with carbon emissions.”
“I thank the Minister for his responses and his genuinely seeking to answer my questions, which is something of an experience for me. We have an agreement with Japan, which means data will be allowed to go to Japan. Japan has an agreement with the US, so data is allowed to go to the US. That undermines our conditions on data flowing from the UK to the US if they do not meet the European Union adequacy rules. That is what I meant by a back door.”
“The first step for that is to do the research. I am not aware of a really good assessment of just how much technology has been bought, the targets and so on. Maybe the Government have one—I don’t know—but I do not think that they do.”
“This is not a cold war, because China is very important to us for trade, investment and many global goods, and it is a science and technology power, but we should not underestimate the degree to which Xi Jinping and the Communist party intend, as Xi said to the first politburo meeting, to get the upper hand against western democracies. He talks about us being hostile forces and about a big struggle all the time. When you add that to his policy of civil-military fusion—using civil in the military context—and the fact that he has set up a party organisation specifically to push that forward, and the change in investment policy away from things such as property, football clubs and other things, very much towards benefitting China and its technology, we have to be a lot more careful than we have been in the past.”
“From the point of view of the threat—if you will excuse me, as this is the first question, for putting a little bit of context to it in terms of the China thing—it is undoubted that there is nothing wrong with investment. In fact, that is extremely good. We want as much investment and good relations with China as with everyone else, but we need to recognise that there is a values war going on. I have written an article about that, which came out in the Conservatives’ China Research Group report a week or so ago.”
“I would urge the Government, first, to research the question, which is the one you asked, of to what degree in the past have the Chinese in particular bought up technology companies, the acquisition of which was greatly against our interests? That work could and should be done. I am an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, which has a team that has been looking through technology at a number of questions, but it could quite easily divert that team to look at this question, which needs China expertise and the ability to search through a lot of open data, which it has. I am not a member of the Government, but I am not aware that the Government have done that sort of research to establish the full degree of the problem.”
“The first point to make is that the Government have not really been attending to the problem with the attention that they should, given the nature of the threat, particularly from the Chinese, although others may be relevant too. I do not think that there is the structure for actually assessing the degree of the threats; I think that 12 cases since 2002 is very few indeed, when you look worldwide at the Chinese programme for technology acquisition, both under and over the table. That in itself shows that there has been insufficient attention paid to the issue. The delay in the Bill is also regrettable, because the threat has been fairly clear for some time.”
“Q It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship in this Committee, Mr Twigg. Thank you very much for joining us, with your extensive background, Mr Parton. As you know, we have an investment screening regime under the Enterprise Act 2002 that has led to 12 interventions on national security grounds since the Act came in. Which security threats do you feel are not covered by those existing public interest powers? While we have been waiting for the Government to act on this front, are there specific instances where you think the Government should have acted but did not exercise their powers, or did not have the relevant powers to exercise? Charles Parton: I would not profess to be an expert on individual cases, but I would like to make some general response to your excellent question.”
“Perhaps you could just push the tiller a bit and put but me back to the centre of it again.”
“If you look at what is going on in Xinjiang, for instance, with the concentration camps there—activities that quite definitely meet the definition of crimes against humanity under article 7 of the International Criminal Court’s Rome statute, or article 2 of the UN genocide convention—should our companies and universities be helping with technologies that can be used to strengthen that surveillance and that repressive regime? What is the difference between that and South African apartheid or some of the other things that we have seen in the past? Increasingly, the excuse of, “Well, we didn’t really know what was going on,” has gone, and companies and academia will have to be much more careful of their reputation. I have slightly moved away from the nub of your question.”
“He is an absolutely top mathematician and does the most abstruse things in cryptography. Should one of our top mathematicians be helping the Chinese in cryptography? Well, there are perfectly good and innocent uses of cryptography, I presume, for things such as banking and e-commerce, and there are perfectly not good uses of it, in military and surveillance and other things. I have no idea whether that is something we should be concerned about. On the face of it, it strikes me that we should be. I think we need to broaden the scope—forgive me if this is outside the Committee’s scope; you are only looking at the Bill—because the whole question of defence of technology needs to be looked at, in terms of whether we are strengthening a hostile foreign power, but also let us not forget the reputation of British companies and universities.”
“I looked at those, and I am not a technologist by any means, but some of them rang certain alarm bells. If you are researching, on behalf of the Chinese, drone technology, cryptography, gaits— Gait is very important for gait recognition. We have facial recognition and voice recognition, but in circumstances where people are wearing masks or there is bad weather, gait is an absolute identifier. Again, are these bad technologies? Well, there are perfectly good civilian uses for them, no doubt, but there also military and surveillance uses. I think we need to be very clear on what our academics, as well as our companies, are doing. To give you another example, if you go on the website of one of the top Oxford mathematician professors, he has now retired and set up a company with a base in Shenzhen.”
“Do we need to address some elements of our industrial capability when we consider national security? Charles Parton: We should widen this not only to companies, but to academia, if I could come back to your question from this angle. We have the phenomenon at the moment of Chinese companies, one might say, hiring our academics, in one way or other, to do scientific research on their behalf. Some of that is probably something that our defence establishment and security establishment would be pretty upset about if they were aware of it. It is quite difficult to distinguish some of these and to know about them all, but a few weeks ago The Daily Telegraph did a story on, I think, Oxford University and Huawei’s commissioning of research. I think there were 17 projects.”
“Q Thank you very much for that response. I certainly agree with you on the delay in addressing this critical issue. I appreciate your experience, particularly with China, which obviously, as you say, has made a number of technology acquisitions. I was particularly interested in the civil-military fusion, if you like, of China’s technology ambitions. Could you say a little more about how the Chinese see nascent technologies that are indirectly critical to downstream industries that supply our national security? I am trying to understand how, if you like, we differentiate between industrial strategy and technology to ensure that we have leading defence and national security capabilities. Is there a distinction that we can make there? Do we need to do further research, as you suggest? Do the Chinese make that kind of distinction?”
“On occasion, I am sure that questions would be put up to the National Security Council and the Prime Minister for decision if they were really important. However, the issue is often about very small companies with some very interesting technologies that have not been established. The Chinese are extremely efficient at hoovering around, finding them and buying them up early. I am not convinced that the structure and decision making of the whole process are right.”
“We might therefore go back to this sort of business with Huawei, where there is a fight back and another fight back and so on. What we actually need is an organisation that is made up of people on all sides of the debate and that has some real experts who actually understand what the technology means. One specific example I came across a year or so ago was a very interesting computer game. Fine. What is wrong with that? Well, I understand that it was then bought up by the Chinese and used to train fighter pilots. You cannot defend against everything, but you at least need some unbiased experts—a sort of, if I can use the words, Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies—who would be there to advise, and then decisions would actually be accepted by all sides, not questioned.”
“Let us take Huawei and the debate we had over the last couple of years, as well as the various flip-flops that have gone on. One might add flaps, as well as flip-flops, actually. There has been a big a division between the so-called economic and security Ministries. It is right that both have a say in the decision. Economic interests are very much at stake, but so are security interests. If you put everything into the hands of BEIS, which probably does not have the expertise on China—certainly not in the defence, security and surveillance realms, although not unnaturally, since its job is to encourage investment—you will perhaps find that the security and repression elements are not given sufficient weight, and more to the point, the perception will be that they are not given sufficient weight.”
“Q I think you addressed the core of my question. I really like your phrase “defence of technology”, rather than the technology of defence, because the question was around how you distinguish in the industrial strategy between specific security concerns and the development of technologies that give us capability in those sectors. Can we identify at what point that becomes a national security concern? Charles Parton: That is sort of way outside my technical expertise, but I would certainly say that one major criticism I have of the Bill is that you have to set up the right structure to be able to do that. I am not sure that the Bill’s putting everything in the hands of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and its Secretary of State is the right answer.”
“In terms of this debate, I do not think we should be under any illusion that if a party says to a company about its technology or whatever, “Well okay, it’s all very well that you’ve got that, but we want it fed into our People’s Liberation Army organisations and science and technology system,” no company is going to say, “Oh no, that’s not right. We won’t do that.” For instance, when Huawei says, “If we were asked to do something against our commitments, in terms of what we do abroad, that would threaten security, we would not do that,” it is rubbish. They know that.”
“The party is now pushing committees into all private enterprises—foreign and local—and it would be a very unwise head of a private company who said, “No, Mr Xi Jinping. I don’t think so.” If nothing else has been shown by what has happened with Jack Ma, China’s second-richest person, and the Ant Group finance company in the last few weeks—there are, of course, financial risk reasons they might want to control Jack Ma’s Ant Group—it is, “Sorry, you are beholden to the Communist party.” That was a very fierce reminder of it.”
“Let us not forget that most foreign investment by the Chinese is state owned, so it is not just a fair bet but a fair certainty that any state-owned enterprise investing is fully politically controlled. When it comes to the private sector, Huawei has spent a large amount of its time insisting that it is a private company—I really do not care. And I do not really care that the national security law says that any individual or organisation must help the party or security organs when called upon. The brute fact is that, in the way the system is run in China, if the party tells you to do something, the only response from private business to an order is to say, “Certainly, Sir. How high do you want me to jump?” so this debate is entirely irrelevant.”
“Could I just add to that? That is an excellent point, but could you also say a little bit on how China responds to proposed takeovers that might implicate its national security, if those takeovers are allowed? How does it respond to that investment into its companies? Charles Parton: Those are both good points. First of all, divide it into the state-owned sector and the private sector. In terms of the state-owned sector, the top executives of the big state-owned companies are appointed by the central organisation department of the party. That is the organisation that is, as Mr Kinnock has said, in charge of the nomenklatura: the top 3,000 to 4,000 party officials. Of course, a lot of state-owned companies are also owned at the provincial and lower levels, and there, too, the top executives are party members and beholden to the party.”
“It was completely ridiculous that we should even have been considering Huawei to build our 5G. That is probably why you called me. I was heavily involved in lobbying MPs through these various structures. I am delighted that the Government have now taken a grip on this issue.”
“You have people such as Charlie Parton and many wonderful Chinese scholars who understand intimately, in particular, the workings of the Chinese state, but they are rare individuals who are now massively in demand in trying to educate people about the problem that we have on our hands. I am not one who is saying that we have to hold China at arm’s length. It is impossible to do that because they are so intimately involved in our economy, but we have to understand where we restrict their access, where we control their access and where we do not allow them to build strategic positions at our expense and literally take us for a ride. If you go back a little way, we were incredibly naive about this, which accounts for the position we got into with Huawei.”
“For example, some of the thousands of Chinese students who are being educated in Western universities, particularly in the UK and the United States, are unquestionably organised and targeted in terms of subjects––I am thinking more about graduates, PhDs and post-docs––looking at areas of strategic interest to the Chinese economy, and they are organised by Chinese intelligence. We need to conduct our relationship with China with much more wisdom and care. The Chinese understand us incredibly well. They have put their leadership through our universities for 20 or 30 years. We in comparison hardly know anything about China because we just do not have that depth of knowledge and experience.”
“I remember very well on one of my visits to the far east, when I was coming out of China through Hong Kong, talking to a British lawyer who had been head of a legal office in Shanghai for a long time. He said, “Richard, you have got to understand one thing about the Chinese attitude to us: they don’t understand win-win. All they understand is ‘We win, you lose.’” However intimate and successful your relations with China may be economically, if you are too successful, you can absolutely guarantee that the Chinese will transfer that success to themselves in their own economic structures, having allowed you to run successfully for a period of time. What we now know and understand is that the Chinese are highly organised and strategic in their attitude towards the West and towards us.”
“I understand—and this is the complexity that lies at the heart of this legislation—that our economies in the West are tied to China’s. They are intertwined in a manner that did not exist during the cold war between the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. Of course there were economic links with the Soviets but essentially the relationship was one of separation. But that is not the case any longer. We are intimately engaged with the Chinese economy. Our enthusiasm––I am using “our” in the broadest sense of the West’s enthusiasm––to trade with China and to have a close relationship and to build that relationship is thoroughly understandable, but in the process we have let down our guard and we have been extremely laissez-faire, as it were, in our attitude towards the commercial threat from China.”
“There is a famous passage in Kissinger’s book on China in which he is talking to Mao and Mao says to him, “We’re not interested in your politics because we have our own ideological view of the world, and I don’t really care what our intelligence service reports about what’s going on in the west.” What he did not say, but what was quite clear because it became evident subsequently, particularly under Deng Xiaoping, was that the primary purpose of the Chinese intelligence machine outside China was to contribute to the economic rebuilding of China. We in the West have been, over a longish period of time, pretty naive and had forgotten the fundamental dangers of having a close relationship with China. I am not anti-Chinese or a cold warrior.”
“If you look back at the emergence of China as a regional power, from the very start—when Mao was still alive and was then succeeded by Deng Xiaoping—its intelligence community focused on China’s economic growth. It was not particularly interested in what we would see as strategic or political intelligence.”
“There was a much more laissez-faire situation and, as countries broke away from the Soviet empire, an enthusiasm to trade with them without the same degree of control. During that period, you had the emergence of China, which was still very much a regional power but with aspirations to become a global power. To short cut, we have now transferred to China the concerns we had about the Soviet Union and its allies, but the problem with China in some respects is much more serious than the problem with the Soviet Union, although that was bad enough. Charlie Parton, who was talking to you before, is an expert on China specifically. I am not, and my view is maybe more strategic, although I had a lot to do with China when I was head of MI6.”
“This is now in the public domain: in the mid-1980s, there was a major intelligence success, which, interestingly, was conducted by the French, but in which the UK had an important role. We completely dismantled, or learned, exactly what the Soviet Union and its allies were up to on a global basis. We knew before, but we did not know the detail to that extent, and what we learned was pretty shocking. That case has not been greatly publicised, but it was probably one of the most important intelligence cases of the cold war. With the break-up of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the Soviet empire, particularly the economic structures that bound the Warsaw pact countries together, in the West our attitudes towards those issues changed very significantly.”
“It was characteristic of that period that there were heavy controls, mainly exercised through NATO structures, to prevent strategic material from leaching, as it were, into the economies of the Warsaw pact. I will not go into all the mechanisms. Historically, one does not need to worry about those now, but it was very much an issue that was at the forefront of people’s minds during that period of the cold war. Bear in mind also—I think this is important in looking at the broader context of what you are interested in—that the Soviet Union had hugely sophisticated what’s called S and T operations: science and technology. A whole line of Soviet intelligence of the KGB was devoted to obtaining strategic material that would help the Soviet economy, particularly in the military industrial complex.”
“Q Thank you very much, Sir Richard, for bringing your expertise to the Committee. The existing powers for intervening in transactions on national security grounds came in when you were chief of MI6. How have security threats evolved since then? Specifically, which security threats do you consider are not covered by existing public interest powers? It would be helpful to hear whether you think the Government have missed specific threats, or types of threat, by relying only on historical powers, and by not bringing in new legislation until now? Sir Richard Dearlove: Wow. That is a massive question. Bear in mind that a large part of my career related to the cold war. In that period, our main concern was the Soviet Union and the members of the Warsaw Pact.”
“China certainly has a strategy, and at the moment we do not really have a strategy. We are beginning to realise that we have to have one, and maybe this Bill is a healthy first step in that direction. You will need sub-committees of some sort, with flexible thinking and experts to advise on where these problems lie. The difficulty is also that we do not want to ruin our economic relationship completely with China. We still need to partner with it in areas that are advantageous to us and our economy as well.”
“When it has generated enough wealth and success in its economy, it is going to jump from carbon energy straight to nuclear and hydrogen. It will have the wealth and the means to do that. Renewables for the Chinese are going to be rather peripheral, because they will not generate the energy intensity that the Chinese economy requires. China has a road map in its head that is really rather different from ours and there is no question but that, competitively, our green agenda is going to put us at an even greater disadvantage to China, if you take a 30-year view of that. There are some very worrying aspects of this. That means that if we are gaily allowing the Chinese to walk off with all sorts of bits of our economy, we are going to pay possibly a pretty high price for that over a long period. We need to take a strategic view of this.”
“They are very serious competitors who are beginning to edge along the path of enmity in the way they treat us on some issues—witness Hong Kong at the moment—so you have to have some sort of flexible scrutiny arrangement. The reason this is so difficult to comprehend is that areas like climate change and energy policy, which are national security issues but not right on the frontline, are so big that, I think, China has a pretty disturbing agenda for us. They will encourage us to follow policies that they think are disadvantageous to our economy. If you take their statements on things like climate change, which is relevant to what we are talking about, China is going to go on increasing its carbon emissions up until 2030, if we look at the figures and understand its policies. China is going to completely miss out renewables.”
“Do we need structures within BEIS, or outside BEIS, to identify and reflect the overlap between economic and national security? Sir Richard Dearlove: This is a really difficult question. I am expressing the problem, not the solutions. You have to bear in mind that I spent my life as a poacher, not a gamekeeper, so my view of these problems is mirror imaging. I was an offensive intelligence officer, not a defensive one. I spent my life trying to penetrate Chinese intelligence, if you see what I mean. The problem is much bigger than just national security; that is one of the difficulties. It leaches into the whole future of our economic competition with China. I do not like to talk about it, but some people use the phrase “a new cold war”. I do not subscribe to that. We have to find some other way of talking about this.”