Roaring Forties or the Doldrums?

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Interesting 'security alert' thrown up in the newspaper today, from a Labour backbencher, of all people; Fabian Hamilton, regarding China harvesting British genomic information by hacking into NHS DNA data via a Covid testing contract given to the BGI Group [a Chinese outfit], in order to '...analyse and predict which diseases may affect the British, or any other population...allowing Beijing to "acquire pharmaceutical patents and technologies that could seriously undermine any UK health initiatives."' Further, this page-eight piece in the weekend's i asserts that the Chinese have '"exerted enormous leverage" over the UK via its dominance of the solar panel industry to "punish strategic competitors" and create "dependancy". Really? And the West's slavish adherence to neoliberalism and macroeconomic free-market theories has nothing whatsoever to do with our turning over most of what we are to the Chinese in the first place?

How many people and organisations in the West have benefited financially from sleepwalking into 'dependancy'? And do they care? Not a bloody jot. I retired from BT/Openreach four years ago, and at that time, the vast majority of kit supplying broadband to UK homes was produced by Huawei, so that every bit [literally] of data that your computer/laptop/tablet/mobile sent and received was being filtered through Chinese kit: possibly still is, although I'm not now party to first hand data on this. Is/was this a problem? I somehow doubt it, and consider the issue not to be so much as one of foreign actors surveilling us for nefarious political aims, but rather, simply, the concomitant result of unregulated corporatism at work, surveilling us for capitalist aims. Personally, I feel the latter to be more pernicious than the former, and that paranoiac sino-bashing seems to be a case of slamming the stable door after the horse has bolted: the Tories have fucked us and our health and social services over already: whatever can the Chinese do to make the situation worse?


Comments

  1. Anonymous7 April 2024 at 09:04

    AS Mr Hamilton said: ...to "acquire pharmaceutical patents and technologies that could seriously undermine any UK health initiatives."'
    AND
    Make us pay throught the nose for them; Oh Big Pharma does that already!!:(
    OR
    Suppressing them via the Patents system!!!
    OR
    They've manufactured "backdoors" into their kit that means although we own it THEY can control it; Like GCHQ said!!!
    ATB
    Joe

    ReplyDelete

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