What are the British thinking? Do they think they'll get a better deal from China than the US? Or is their intention to use this as a bargaining chip against the US?
If the UK goes all in with the USA we will end up looking like Mexico. If we go all in on Europe we will end up looking like Italy, or Greece (as was made clear in the aftermath of the 2011 veto). Many people who are not from the UK seem really keen that the UK is smashed up and humbled, we are supposed to be poor, sardonic and to provide cutting edge humor. This is not a great direction of travel for everyone who lives here though. Fundamentally the UK is alone in the world and needs to grow up and act like it - so we need to make some sort of bargain with the Chinese, and the Russians (which is much harder as they are acting as the perfect irrational player in the game of international relations right now).
Telcos want to deploy 5G, customers aren't willing to pay more for it.
So they want to do it as cheaply as possible.
They've said nothing safety critical or necessary to critical national infrastructure can run over Huawei base stations. It will be a brave (i.e. foolish) mobile operator that turns away large connected vehicle contracts (clearly there will be significant safety implications there), or large scale industrial IoT users.
If the rules are applied as it seems they are designed to, it looks like the intention is to let the operators make that choice, rather than dictating who they will use, while putting in sufficient restrictions to heavily influence it.
Prior to the government's (long overdue) decision on this topic, which came after 5G non-standalone networks were deployed in the field in some cities, the operators all came out to say how much it would cost them to remove all their Huawei equipment and replace it. They lobbied hard to be allowed to keep using it! But it seems that perhaps they have been given a decision that they themselves haven't quite realised will feel an awful lot like a ban...
The UK has traded limited political power as a member of the EU for no political power at all. And in return it has gotten a much worse economic position, where it will be stuck between pleasing the US, EU and China in turn for the foreseeable future, while losing the economic benefits it got from being the default English speaking gateway to Europe.
But - I think you are referring to the state of the UK when it joined the EEC in 1973. The UK was in fact in a big mess at that point - which promptly got a lot bigger. This led to IMF intervention in 1976 [1]. This was not a big win for the EEC at that point in my book. The UK was in a big hole because it had spent all its money on unwinding its empire and failed to either properly retool its industries or pay down its second world war debt. The EEC and Europe in general did not help or bail out the UK - in fact they continued to expect payments from the UK in the midst of all this, a pattern that I fear Italy and Spain are about to encounter in the way that sentances encounter full stops.
What turned this round - the discovery of North Sea Oil. This enabled Thatcher to restructure the UK economy, recapitalize the City of London and hey presto off the UK went to the races. The big buggeration was the collapse of the Soviet Union which meant a restructuring of Europe in order to prevent the East from falling into anarchy and exposing the German state to abject collapse. Thus we all got swept up into the EU.
Anyway, if you want to argue about "prospered inside the EU sad much as the UK has" I ask you to look at the economic performance of Germany.
They did not remove the Italian government.
The Greeks shafted themselves.