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LONDON — Britain will not follow the U.S. and Brussels in banning government officials from using Chinese-owned TikTok, Rishi Sunak’s new tech champion said Monday.
“I think that’s a personal choice,” Michelle Donelan, the minister at the helm of the U.K.’s new Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, told POLITICO in an interview. “As a Conservative, I strongly believe in personal choice.”
Weeks after the U.S. announced it would prohibit TikTok for all federal government devices, the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, and the Council of the EU, representing member state governments, last week followed suit — banning staff from using the social media app on work phones.
But in the U.K., Donelan is dubious that such a “forthright move” is justified. That’s despite growing calls from hawkish MPs in her own party to act, amid evidence that some Chinese companies collect data from overseas customers on behalf of Beijing’s intelligence agencies.
TikTok, which called the Commission’s decision “misguided,” says it protects user data in data centers in the U.S. and Singapore.
“We have no evidence to suggest that there is a necessity to ban people from using TikTok,” Donelan told POLITICO.
“That would be a very, very forthright move … that would require a significant evidence base to be able to do that.
“We constantly review these things. National security always must come first, and if there was evidence presented to me that was contrary to that view, I would address it. But certainly there hasn’t been,” she said.
Follow the evidence
After SNP leadership candidate Kate Forbes was attacked for her conservative Christian views, Donelan, a Christian herself, was keen to emphasize she will follow the facts.
“I am a Christian. I think it’s an integral part of who I am, just as it would be for anybody else who has a religion or a set of values or beliefs,” Donelan said.
“But at the end of the day I view myself as somebody that always takes decisions based on integrity, and looking at what’s in the best interests for the nation in the areas that I’m representing, and somebody that also works off the evidence and talking to people,” she said.
She highlights her plans to “collaborate very closely” with people in the sectors she represents.
“This is not going to be the same old Whitehall,” she said. “This is going to be very much working hand-in-hand with the innovators, with the technologists, with the scientists of today and tomorrow,” she added.
She said she expected a “real drumbeat” of announcements and laws coming out of the department with the government’s flagship data protection and digital markets bills, a white paper on proposals for regulating artificial intelligence, and the long-awaited semiconductor strategy all coming down the track.
But with the next U.K. general election expected next year, Donelan does not have long to produce results.
Sunak has faced criticism for using precious time and political capital on a radical restructure of government departments at a time when the Conservatives are trailing the Labour Party by more than 20 points in the opinion polls.
But Donelan insists that her department will make a difference to people’s lives as the “department of the future,” and will produce the jobs Sunak is hoping will propel him to victory when he goes to the voters.
“What people really care about … is jobs at the end of the day. This is the department that is going to be driving that economic growth and driving those jobs forward,” she said.
