UK and Huawei 5G Networks

Huawei is helping develop 5G networks for all four of the UK’s major mobile phone operators – even though the government has yet to confirm whether the controversial Chinese technology company will be permitted to build the next generation of wireless infrastructure.

The revelation threatens to exacerbate tensions between the UK and the US, which has taken a firm line against the company amid claims, strongly denied, that it is controlled by the Chinese government and that its equipment could be used to spy on other countries and companies.

The Observer understands that Huawei is already involved in building 5G networks in six of the seven cities in the UK where Vodafone has gone live. It is also helping build hundreds of 5G sites for EE, and has won 5G contracts to build networks for Three and O2 when they go live.

The decision to use Huawei in the “non-core” parts of their networks – chiefly the radio systems allowing wireless communication – is a gamble for UK telecom operators. They may be left counting the cost if the government bans the Chinese company from any involvement with 5G.

The consultancy Assembly suggests a partial to full restriction on Huawei could result in an 18-to-24-month delay to the widespread availability of 5G in the UK. The UK would then fail to become a world leader in 5G – a key government target – costing the economy between £4.5bn and £6.8bn.

But the US has placed the UK in a difficult position. In May, President Donald Trump ordered the US treasury department to name Huawei as a national security threat, a move that led US firms to distance themselves from the company. Three months earlier, the heads of major intelligence agencies, including the FBI, the CIA and the NSA, had warned US citizens not to use Huawei phones.

The US has also pressured other countries to stop using Huawei equipment in their national infrastructure and has warned close allies such as the UK that to continue the relationship might jeopardise its ability to share classified security information with them.

US concerns are shared by several senior UK government figures. Gavin Williamson was sacked as defence secretary this year after he was suspected of leaking confidential National Security Council discussions that suggested Huawei would be allowed to provide non-core 5G equipment to UK operators. A government review of the UK telecoms supply chain, which would signal whether Huawei should be allowed to build 5G networks, was due to be published in the spring but has yet to materialise as officials and ministers clash over the extent to which the Chinese company should be restricted.

Whitehall officials are concerned that excluding Huawei, one of the very few companies that can provide next-generation wireless technology, would have damaging implications for the future of the UK’s infrastructure. They have taken note of what happened last December when the O2 4G network went down for 24 hours due to problems with technology provided by the Swedish telecoms firm Ericsson.

“If we had banned Huawei and everyone was just using Ericsson, we would have had a day without any mobile coverage on any network – not a good position to be in,” said Matthew Howett at Assembly.

The quiet rollout of 5G telecoms infrastructure supplied by Huawei has been tracked by an enthusiast, Peter Clarke, who has earned a cult following posting pictures of the new masts on his Twitter feed.

Globally, the company has signed contracts to help build 50 5G networks, totalling around 150,000 base stations.

In recent weeks Trump has softened his position, agreeing that US firms should be able to sell some components to Huawei, a climbdown described by the Republican senator Marco Rubio as a “catastrophic mistake”.

One key issue to be resolved is what constitutes core and non-core equipment. In contrast to previous mobile phone technologies, 5G will have more sensitive information accessed closer to the edge – or the non-core – of the network, which Huawei’s critics could flag as a concern.

“There is the whole debate about where the core and access network are delineated,” said Howett. “But the reality is that the operators are all using Huawei to an extent – they are quite happy with it. The government has huge ambitions for what 5G can deliver to the economy, and a bad decision based on politics could seriously stop that from being a reality.”

ACTU – Unfair Morrison tax plan will cost all of us

5 July 2019

Scott Morrison’s plan to put cleaners, farm workers and shop assistants in the same tax bracket as senior executives will see him slash government spending on infrastructure, aged care, pensions, hospitals, schools, scientific research, industry development, skills training and universities to make up for the lost revenue.

The peak body for working people has slammed the cuts, demanding Mr Morrison explain which services he will cut to pay for stage three of his tax plan.

The Morrison Government refused to pass modest tax cuts for working people on low and middle incomes without also attaching much larger handouts for those earning more than half a million dollars a year.

The third stage of the tax plan mainly benefits very high income earners.

The result is a flat tax for people paid between $45,000 and $200,000 a year – a regressive move that abolishes the progressive nature of Australia’s taxation system.

Mr Morrison’s assertion that the budget will not need to be cut relies on optimistic wage growth targets that the Coalition has repeatedly failed to reach in the past.

It will require substantial cuts to government services that working people depend on, will see people who do public service work funded by the commonwealth sacked, and will make our country less fair.

The cuts come at a time of sustained record low wages growth, meaning working people will have less capacity to pay the out-of-pocket costs incurred by looming federal government cuts.

Quotes attributable to ACTU Secretary Sally McManus:

• “It is telling of this government’s priorities that they refused to pass a tax cut for people on low and middle incomes without also attaching much larger cuts for people on half a million dollars a year.
• “The third stage of the tax cuts fundamentally changes the progressive nature of our tax system. It puts people on barely more than the minimum wage in the same tax bracket as people who are paid five times as much.
• “Why should the office cleaner and the CEO be in the same tax bracket?
• “Scott Morrison has set a time bomb ticking. They have no plan to reach their wage growth targets, and when they fail to meet those targets the result will be cuts to services and job losses in schools, hospitals, universities, aged care and the community sector.
• “Scott Morrison needs to explain which services that working people rely on he is going to cut to pay for the third stage of these cuts. Will we have fewer nurses? Fewer hospital beds? Fewer teachers, or fewer schools? Will we have longer wait times? Lower Medicare rebates?
• “Tax cuts are not a substitute for real wage increases. Scott Morrison and his Government’s plan will deliberately keep wages low.
• “They’ve cut penalty rates. They’ve capped public service wages to produce real wage cuts. And they’ve admitted it’s a ‘design feature’ of their economic plan.                                                                   
• “I invite Scott Morrison to take the sensible actions on wages that we have proposed – reverse penalty rate cuts, remove public service caps and support a living wage.”

UK – Jeremy Corbyn Birthday Greetings to Tax dodging Amazon Boss

Jeremy Corbyn has wished “many happy tax returns” to tax-dodging multinational Amazon on the company’s 25th “birthday” today.

The Labour leader told Amazon boss Jeff Bezos to respect his staff and pay his company’s fair share of tax.

In a birthday card, Mr Corbyn said: “Dear Jeff. Happy Birthday.
“You owe the British people millions in taxes that pay for the public services that we all rely on.
“This year, pay your fair share of taxes, give your hard-working staff a pay rise, and respect workers’ rights.

“Many Happy Tax Returns, Jeremy.”

Amazon UK has paid only £1.7 million in tax since 2017, despite its pre-tax profits having tripled to £72 million in that time.

The turnover at its British branch, which deals with the packaging and deliveries of goods to British addresses, has risen from 35 per cent from £1.46 billion in 2017 to £1.98 billion in 2018.

The company says that it operates legally and in line with British corporation tax law, which is revenue-based rather than profit-based.

However, the GMB union has consistently criticised the company for allegedly clamping down on the workplace conditions of the 27,500 workers it employs in 27 warehouses across the country.

At Amazon’s packing warehouse in Rugeley, West Midlands, over 600 ambulance calls have been made since 2015 due to workers suffering injuries ranging from major trauma to skeletal issues.

Employees have also alleged that management have dismissed concerns and allegations about sexual harassment in the workplace and have allowed dangerous working conditions to continue.

An Amazon spokesperson said that criticisms of the company are “false and unsubstantiated,” adding: “We offer a safe, modern working environment.”

GMB national officer for the online retailer Mick Rix welcomed Mr Corbyn’s warning to Amazon, telling the Star: “We hope Jeff Bezos heeds Jeremy’s message and marks Amazon’s 25th birthday by paying its fair share of tax and giving workers the rights they're entitled to — health and safety protections, respect at work and a union voice.

“If that doesn’t happen then we hope next year’s birthday card contains a letter from the government ordering Amazon to pay its fair share and treat its workers with respect.”

UK – They Are Concentration Camps

‘They are concentration camps,’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said of the immigration detention centres on the southern border of the US. Right-wingers angrily replied that she was either simply wrong, or making trivialising comparisons between mere brutal, dehumanising detention and the Nazi project of mass extermination. Not so, Ocasio-Cortez argued: concentration camps existed long before the death camps, and it’s an accurate term for the border facilities, which are characterised by the deliberate combination of extrajudicial internment, bureaucratised neglect and institutional cruelty.

She was right, though the camps’ defenders may have been relieved to be embroiled in an argument over terminology and historical propriety. It’s easier for the hairsprayed Lord Haw-Haws of Fox News to lambast a young socialist politician than to justify the cramped and freezing facilities where children sleep on concrete and are denied basic sanitary provisions, vulnerable to lice and infection. Carlos Hernandez Vásquez, a Guatemalan asylum seeker, died in a Texas holding facility in May, having been diagnosed with flu. He was 16 years old, and the fifth Guatemalan child to die in six months. The McAllen processing centre, where he had been held, is designed for 1500 people. In the week he died it held 2500, with sick detainees sleeping on floormats in an overflow tent.

The overcrowding is not unusual: Border Patrol facilities now operate at four times capacity, holding around 15,000 people; another 52,000 are detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Lawyers who visit the camps return with stories of suicidal, self-injuring and traumatised children; older children are being used by the guards as substitute parents for toddlers. Last month, Senator Lindsey Graham proposed raising the detention period for minors – already often flouted in practice – from 20 to 100 days. Proposals for expanded detention facilities are careful to site them on federal land, inaccessible to state welfare checks, or look to the legal grey zone in Guantánamo, where Haitian migrants were detained in the 1990s.

However accurate AOC’s description, much of the moral weight behind the phrase ‘concentration camps’ comes from the collapse of its prehistory into the Holocaust; it’s hard not to flinch from any implied comparison. The policy of concentration or arbitrary detention, however barbaric, is different from the pursuit of mass extermination. The implied question is whether one can slide into the other. In two lectures collected in her last work, Mourning Becomes the Law (1996), derived in part from her experiences teaching and consulting for the Polish Commission on the Future of Auschwitz, Gillian Rose grapples with similar questions, arguing that this moral flinch comes from a desire to find a total break between our own political environment, our own habits of thought, and those of fascist Europe. ‘Never again’ may not be a historical imperative so much as an a priori claim about historical possibility. ‘We dare not understand,’ Rose writes, ‘because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are – human, all too human.’

Defenders of the Trump presidency have pointed to the camps’ antecedents under Obama, and ICE’s higher rate of deportation during his administration. Trump’s innovations have been in the realm of publicly displayed cruelty, from family separation to eruptions on Twitter, dangling threats of huge ICE raids to cow Democratic opponents. It is certainly possible to see this public cruelty as a qualitative break, but it also inherent in the border system itself.

The most striking recent precedent for Trump’s camps is the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office under Joe Arpaio. An early Trump supporter and ardent believer in ‘birther’ conspiracy theories, ‘Sheriff Joe’ ran a jail he called ‘Tent City’ where inmates were exposed to Arizona’s baking daytime heat and freezing nights. He specialised in humiliation, and delighted in showing off his petty cruelties to the international media, giving inmates mouldy food or insufficient water in the desert heat. In private, among supporters, he boasted that he ran a concentration camp. Amnesty International condemned him; he doubled the press tours for his expanded facility. A DOJ investigation found him responsible for the most flagrant example of racial profiling in US history; a court eventually found him guilty of criminal contempt over related proceedings. Trump pardoned him.

The centrality of anti-migrant policy to Trump’s presidency, and the cruelty with which it is carried out, can tempt transatlantic observers into believing it is a uniquely American form of barbarism. But its continuity with policy elsewhere is striking: the third-party concentration camps run by Australia in Manus and Nauru, the miles of razor-wire along Hungary’s borders, the torture centres and slave markets of Libya to which desperate migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean are returned. Where Europe does not equal America, it exceeds it: Frontex and the vast Eurosur surveillance system, which would be the envy of US agencies, are politely overlooked by most Europeans.

Europe’s unwillingness to accept migrants increases the stress at its borders: Italy’s repugnant interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has built his career on anti-migrant populism, declaring war on ‘illegals’ and drafting a new law to fine NGOs thousands of euros for rescuing drowning migrants. But Salvini’s sense of grievance is also directed at, and enabled by, the EU’s Dublin Regulation, which requires people to apply for asylum in the country through which they enter the union. The closest the EU has come to dealing with the problem is a proposal to build detention centres in North Africa; the walled Spanish exclave cities of Ceuta and Melilla, where migrants risk injury and death to cross the border and claim asylum, offer a preview of their operation. The US is distinguished, if at all, only by the honesty of its cruelty, and the efficiency of the wolf-eyed Stephen Miller in extirpating all political objection from migration agencies.

Any movement to defend the rights of migrants and refugees faces three significant problems. The first is that the architecture of international obligation governing refugees’ rights and states’ obligations to them (the 1951 convention, drawn up in the wake of mass wartime displacement, and its 1967 protocol, which recognised its universal application) has had its foundations undermined by powerful states, which routinely flout its restrictions on refoulement.

The second is a perceived mismatch between ethical obligation and political calculation: it is assumed that voters will punish politicians who are seen to prioritise the needs of those outside the political community; individual states are disincentivised to take unilateral action by others’ unwillingness to co-operate, and only the strongest politicians (as Merkel did in 2015) can risk it.

The third, which grows out of the second, is the genuflection of social democratic parties before the claim that ethnic homogeneity and hostility to migration are immutable characteristics of the working class, and a tendency to ground defences of migration in contingent economic advantage for the receiving country. Lurking behind these is an intuition, rarely expressed, that prosperous welfare polities are fragile things, in terms of both domestic consent and global inequality – and they will face serious challenges in responding to the waves of climate refugees the 21st century will produce.

The late Michael Dummett, with rigorous philosophical radicalism, took seriously the rhetorical premise of human equality and rights to freedom as foundations for a defence of migration. He also argued that the duty of a state to aid refugees must entail a duty to allow people to claim that aid. Everything from ‘carrier liability’ – a US invention placing visa duties on airlines rather than the state – to government press releases emphasising anti-migrant policy can be understood as attempts to forestall those duties. It is this derogation in practice from the universal rhetoric of human rights that led the UN’s special rapporteur, Philip Alston, to warn that the coming century will see ‘climate apartheid’ and the disappearance of any shared sense of human obligation.

These are serious political problems that cannot be solved by slogan or willpower: the quiescence of the most pro-migrant Labour leadership in history suggests how intractable it is in the sphere of formal politics. The UK’s border regime has its own notorious, parochial cruelties – the ‘go home’ vans, the ‘hostile environment’, a network of detention centres and unlimited detention periods – but campaigns against them have been led by grassroots activists, NGOs and investigative journalists; Labour’s political commitments, though a vast improvement on the promises for migration controls that the previous leadership had carved into a rock, are only promises to tackle the worst excesses of an unjust system.

There are rays of hope: a jury wouldn’t convict an Arizona man who left water in the desert for migrants; Wayfair staff have walked out over the company’s agreement to supply the US border camps; there are protests in the UK against Yarl’s Wood; and an All Party Parliamentary Group on unlimited detention has been established. Writers on migration sometimes end their pieces by suggesting that the camps and detention centres prefigure a dangerous and authoritarian future; the truth is, with at least 18,000 drowned in the Mediterranean since 2014 and children dying in cages in America, that future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. The question is whether a different future is possible.

MEAA – Parliamentary CommitteeTrack Record Fails on Press Freedom

The Government’s press freedom inquiry will only delay urgent changes needed to protect the role of journalists and whistleblowers.

After the Australian Federal Police raids of journalists last month, there is now ample evidence available that a raft of national security laws over the past decade have diminished press freedom in Australia, and these problems should be fixed immediately without going through the process of a long inquiry.

The terms of reference for the inquiry to be conducted by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) are seriously flawed because they manifestly fail to address the need for whistleblower protection – the issue which has sparked the current concerns about press freedom in Australia. MEAA says an inquiry should be conducted in public with broad terms of reference to include all press freedom issues, including whistleblower protection and freedom of information.

The Opposition had also proposed a joint parliamentary inquiry but this failed to pass the Senate. At least this inquiry, while flawed, would have canvassed these critical issues.

MEAA chief executive Paul Murphy says: “The need for urgent amendments to existing laws is clear and well-known. Media organisations and other civil society groups have repeatedly pointed out the flaws in legislation that fail to adequately protect whistleblowers who seek to expose misconduct, fraud, corruption and threats to public health and safety. For years now, these flaws in national security laws have been told to politicians again and again. Holding yet another inquiry merely delays the necessary amendments that are required now.”

MEAA says it is particularly inappropriate having the PJCIS conduct a press freedom inquiry. “This committee has been informed repeatedly about the threats to whistleblowers and press freedom contained in some of the 75 national security laws passed by the Parliament since 2001. And almost without exception the committee has ignored these concerns or, at best, provided the merest band aid to deeply flawed laws. All the while, governments are classifying an increasing array of documents as secret when there is no justification for hiding that information from the community.

“The proof is in the current court actions directed at whistleblowers for telling the truth, coupled with the Australian Federal Police Force raids on a journalist’s home and the offices of the ABC in pursuit of whistleblowers. These issues that have been exposed by investigative journalists are clearly in the national interest and go to the heart of the public’s right to know what our governments are doing in our name. These actions against whistleblowers and the journalists they seek out to tell their stories demonstrate that there is a real crisis. Australia has gone down the path of pursuing and punishing truth-tellers,” he says.

Murphy adds: “The PJCIS inquiry cannot have credibility unless it recommends legislative changes to provide comprehensive protections for whistleblowers, an ongoing commitment to the public’s right to know through genuinely open and transparent government, and the decriminalisation of acts of journalism. Journalists should not go to prison for simply doing their job.

“If the government insists on such an inquiry, MEAA will participate and seek to appear as a witness. But it’s our firm belief that the issues and remedies are already well-known and it is urgent action by the Parliament that is needed now. This issue has sent shockwaves around the world - any delay to fixing the problem only continues to damage Australia’s reputation. It’s time that believing in press freedom is matched by action,” Murphy says.