I'm puzzled by the collapse of the case against House of Commons researcher Christopher Cash and his buddy Christopher Berry. Most of the media scrum concerns whether the government gave in to bullying from China. While that would be a big story my concern is rather different. The case collapsed because China was not officially categorsed as an enemy. But why does a country have to be classified as an "enemy" for unauthorised passing of information to be a criminal offence?
It also made me wonder how many countries are classified as enemies of the UK and which ones are they?
Having signed the Official Secrets Act myself many years ago I was under the impression that passing official secrets to anyone unauthorised would be in breach of the Act. On the occasions when I was in possession of classified documents it wouldn't have seemed to me to be a defence to say the recipient didn't belong to an enemy country. After all the recipient might pass it on.
The Commons Defence Select Commitee seemed to struggle with this when considering the Integrated Review of Security and Defence, which was carried out in 2021 and updated in 2023. The current government would therefore say it's not their work and out of date, but as they haven't updated it, it is theirs.That report concentrated on Russia and China, noting that that the Integrated Review only categorises Russia as an enemy (or at least "the most acute direct threat"). This left me wondering about Iran and North Korea for starters. But surely it wouldn't be a good idea to pass nuclear secrets to, say, Pakistan? Is that country an enemy?
It seems far too simplistic to categorise countries as enemies or allies. I'm sure there are many countries who are both friendly and antagonistic, depending on the issue. But even without those shades of grey, there's a lot of information we wouldn't want allies to see, especially at particular points in time e.g. in the run up to a trade negotiation. And there could be plenty of embarrassment if frank assessments of our allies and their leaders were leaked, as happened with comments about Trump. Are these sort of documents official secrets? Having worked in the nuclear industry not the Foreign Office, I've no idea but I doubt it.
Did the information Cash and Berry passed to the Chinese contain official secrets? We don't know. One of them was detained at Heathrow returning from China and found to have £4,000 in cash in his briefcase. Suspicious sure, but it can't have been especially valuable information, unless that was a down payment. I could easily imagine that the two prunes had a little side hussle going passing reports of tittle tattle (what's on the menu in the House of Commons tea room maybe, alongside some snippets of overheard gossip perhaps) to what they saw as gullible Chinese contacts.
If they were passing stuff which did not contain material marked as officially secret that doesn't mean it was harmless. If the law doesn't prohibit passing of harmful info even to supposedly friendly countries it should. But a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act might not have been appropriate or the best way to proceed. In the case of the Commons researcher an employment sanction could have been considered though there would be the risk, had he been sacked without prosecution, that would have seemed weak, so politically risky. And it's not clear that avenue was open for the teacher.
The collapsed case has also led to some angst about how to manage our relationship with China. It was remarkable with hindsight that we got into a position where a Chinese company, Huawei, would have been at the heart of our 5G network, all because BT had made major commercial deals with that company in 2005. At the time there seemed no great security concern: going back to before 2012 it seemed commerce and trade were the main aims of China but no-one appeared to ask any "what if?" questions. The "what if" came to pass when Xi Jinping became secretary, chairman and president of everything in China between 2012 and 2013. China's clampdown on Hong Kong and the Uigurs and it's more aggressive military stance in the Pacific followed. Meanwhile the UK seemed on autopilot, with David Cameron quaffing pints with Xi in the Cotswolds and the USA (Trump in particular) having to pressure Boris Johnson about Hauwei, who we seemed to want to stick with purely because of the extra cost and timescale of ditching them. It seems to have taken us a decade to get our mind round the simple fact that China wants to trade but also wants to spy on us.
Josh Glancy argued in the Sunday Times that we should choose how to deal with China pragmatically on the specifics of each issue: buy chairs from Beijing but not your wifi he said. That sounds simple but there are still many awkward areas. For example, clothes ok but what about electric cars? The Chinese company BYD is rapidly expanding its market share in the UK. Many experts think it's a very bad idea to have lots of high tech electric Chinese vehicles on UK roads. I tend to agree. But they're very much cheaper. This is not the only specific area where security and net zero would appear to be in conflict.
However we try to manage our relations with China it seems to me that we've been carelessly slow in trying to develop appropriate policies.
Together with the mess over defining and protecting our "secrets" from states that might not be enemies but might not always have our interests at heart (i.e. every other country) it's all quite a Laurel and Hardy situation really.
P.S. Talking of employment sanctions I once terminated the contract of a project manager who had been passing commercial information to a competitor. We had evidence in the form of emails but the individual went for the modern day playbook, accused his boss (a very careful and measured chap) of bullying and took us to an industrial tribunal. There was some satisfaction when the chair of the tribunal, seeing straight through all of the nonsense, declared there was only one bully in the case and it was the claimant. I still remember the buzz that went around the open plan building after a resource manager and member of the HR team escorted this chap out of the building having arrived at his desk and requested his pass and keys. We could have been more discreet and invited him to a meeting but we wanted to make a visible example. Was that bullying? I don't think so, but it didn't backfire on us. I wonder if someone decided to make an example of Berry and Cash - and found it did backfire?
P.P.S. The China Syndrome was a 1979 film thriller starring Jane Fonda with a storyline about reporters discovering safety cover ups at a nuclear power plant. Just twelve days after the film was released the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania made it seem prescient. The title is based on the figure of speech term for a nuclear reactor core melting down through the various containment structures and underlying earth all the way to China. While the story was fanciful I recall a key part of the plotline was the discovery of major corner cutting: all of the radiographs supposedly veryifying the different welds on a leaking component were identical. The organisation I worked for through the 1980s and 1990s pioneered the development of some non destructive testing techniques for nuclear components and was responsible for qualifying the inspectors of the Sizewell B reactor pressure vessel, basically exam testing the testers. I can't speak for the systems in place in the United States in the 1970s but reassuringly there were too many layers of verification for that particular ruse to have worked on Sizewell B, commissioned in 1995. At Three Mile Island extensive monitoring of 30,000 people for 20 years showed no adverse health effects. I think I recall that, despite an awful lot going wrong leading to a fairly significant release of radioactivity, no member of the public received a radiation dose larger than a dental x ray.
* House of Commons publication Chapter 3: The UK in the world: allies and adversaries https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5803/ldselect/ldintrel/124/12406.htm
