Farage: Huawei Decision Threatens Five Eyes, Trade, Even Future of NATO

MAIDSTONE, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 26: Leader of the Brexit Party Nigel Farage speaks during t
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Victoria Friedman

Nigel Farage warned that Boris Johnson’s decision to allow Chinese firm Huawei to build part of the UK’s 5G data network threatens Five Eyes security cooperation, a future trade deal with the United States, and perhaps even the future of NATO.

“Whilst I am pleased with much that the Boris government is doing, the decision to involve Huawei in the 5G network is the worst decision any British government has made in years,” Farage told The Sydney Morning Herald.

Mr Farage continued: “It threatens the Five Eyes partnership, our prospects of a new trade agreement with the US and Australia, and perhaps even the future of NATO.”

“It must be reversed,” he added.

Both the United States and Australia — members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network along with New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom — have warned against the UK allowing the Chinese firm access to British telecommunication networks as it would present a security risk.

Amidst reports from the United States that show Huawei has a backdoor to its clients’ information that could be exploited by the Communist superpower and Mr Johnson’s decision to continue engaging Huawei, American politicians have become increasingly concerned.

Mr Farage told his LBC listeners on Monday night that he had come back from a trip to Washington D.C. having met congressmen and senators from both sides of the political divide who were “really, really worried about this decision”.

“[Huawei] is not a private company, it is effectively run by the Chinese Communist Party and they have a record of wanting to try and steal information and try to spy on everybody,” he said, continuing that Johnson’s decision poses “risks to us getting a trade deal through congress and that trade deal is very important in our negotiation in terms of our leverage on Brussels”.

The American ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell had tweeted on Sunday night that President Donald Trump had “called me from Air Force One and instructed me to make clear that any nation who choose to use an untrustworthy 5G vendor will jeopardise our ability to share intelligence and information at the highest level”.

The warning was to Germany — which is mulling likewise Huawei involvement in its 5G infrastructure  — but likewise could be directed at the UK which still has a chance to reverse its decision.

While publicly the President has told the UK that its decision to engage Huawei is its own, President Trump reportedly slammed the phone on Prime Minister Johnson after a conversation in which the U.S. leader was “apoplectic” over Boris’s decision to agree to the Chinese company’s involvement.

There is a great amount of concern over Huawei within Johnson’s own government. Bob Seely, the MP for the Isle of Wight who sits on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, told Nigel Farage on his LBC radio programme he feels “very strongly” about Huawei “because I think it is going to be one of the significant issues of the 21st century”.

“There has been precious little debate in the 15 years since Huawei’s been in this country. There’s not been one single parliamentary debate,” Mr Seely said.

The MP continued: “China is a one-party state that is using artificial intelligence and big data [to build] an Orwellian monitoring system, the kind which the world has never seen before. Do we really want to give that state — via a front organisation called Huawei, which is not in any meaningful way a private company — do we want to give China a significant stake in our critical national infrastructure, our 5G, through which everything will function in the next few years?”

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