𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

China could use “weapons of mass disruption” to cripple the National Grid and bring the country to a standstill, a former head of MI6 has warned. Sir Richard Dearlove declared that the growing industrial reliance on tech from the Communist state could lead to a doomsday scenario in an international crisis.

Beijing, Sir Richard said, might plunge the country into darkness by tampering with the National Grid. And they could immobilise public transport networks which are now using parts from China. This is because the UK has lost capacity to replace failing equipment in water, sewage, gas networks, rail, underground transport, traffic lights and communications.

In a glum assessment for MPs, the former spy chief said: “Such peacetime dependencies give China strategic leverage and in a crisis it gives them weapons of mass disruption which could literally bring this country to a complete standstill.”

Sir Richard’s warning came at a reception for MPs and peers hosted by the Coalition on Secure Technology.

He said: “Our foreign policy is therefore fettered and could even be held to ransom.

“In complacently de-industrialising we have not merely lost an industry, we have actually lost the ability to rebuild the energy system ourselves.

“Large scale transformers today take two years to arrive, generators up to three.

“And the grain oriented industrial steel for which there is no substitute comes from China, whose production capacity now dwarfs that of any other state.

“Europe has just two producers of that steel remaining, both plagued by reductions and closures as China undercuts the market.

“Britain and its allies do retain the capacity to design and assemble the apparatus on which the grid depends.

“But the material without which none of this can be built is now concentrated in the hands of the very country which the director general of MI5 has identified as the most serious threat to Britain’s national security.”

Sir Richard warned that relationships between allies could become strained if China turned on the West.

He stressed that the Chinese Communist Party “thinks long term and it does not have to worry about re-election, only about its political survival.”

The former spy chief added: “One of its policies, pursued with great success, has been to build dependencies not just in its own regional sphere of influence but globally.

“We have seen the leverage that its domination of the production of rare earths has secured and we have watched how Huawei, a company very closely associated with the People’s Liberation Army, has knocked out its foreign competitors and spread its communications technology around the world.

“London Transport has recently started to purchase Chinese electric buses made with the benefit of large state subsidies, all of them subject to software control by the manufacturer.

“The idea that ‘your number 22 is not running today because it’s just been immobilised by the manufacturer’ is fairly comic.

“But the weakening of the electricity grid is altogether of another order.”

Claimning that China’s leader Xi Jinping’s hoped for his country to achieve global dominance by 2049, Sir Richard added: “We should take the threat seriously because the methodology for doing it is being put in place under our very noses.”