At 2pm: tell citizens to stockpile batteries and bottled water. At 5pm: call general election. Who drew up that timetable? What a juxtaposition: 14 years of Conservative rule; a nation cramming its cupboards with emergency baked beans.
But then you listen to Oliver Dowden’s “resilience” speech, given on Wednesday to the London Defence Conference: “biosecurity hazards… catastrophic risks… geopolitical tensions… malign online actors… cyber-attacks”. And you listen to Rishi Sunak’s, three hours later: “darkest of days… the Cold War… Putin’s Russia… Islamist extremism… migration weaponised by hostile states”. You realise there’s a theme.
Dowden’s boy scout advice – stock up on batteries, a radio, three days of food, 10 litres of water – is part of a wider message that fits the party’s election campaign: dark days are coming, fear the worst. What if Britain could be suddenly transformed into a nation of American-style preppers: anxious, distrustful, individualistic – and, crucially, rightwing? Deep in the party’s subconscious, does it still hope for some miraculous shift in group psychology?
It’s a shame about the politics, the context and the timing, because this sort of policy is the kind of thing disaster experts, such as Prof Lucy Easthope, have long been campaigning for. Any effort to increase resilience is welcome, she tells me, as we lag behind that of many other countries in this respect: Finland has a “72 hours” campaign in which people are encouraged to be self-sufficient in the first stages of a crisis. Not enough of us know first aid, or where best to donate in a disaster, and this new campaign spreads some useful information, she says. But still, there are big pieces missing.
Here’s the first: money. Not everyone can afford three days of spare food. Survivalists talk of necessities and essentials, but they are indulging in a luxury hobby: in the US, preppers are solidly middle class and supporting a billion-dollar industry. (At the high end, “bug out” packs can be bought for $5,000 (£3,900).) The fact that large parts of the UK are deep in a food security crisis makes Dowden look particularly cack-handed with his talk of some future disaster that might call for spare food. What about the disaster we’re already in? The Food Standards Agency recently classified around 25% of British consumers as “food insecure”. Mention tins in 2024 and you instantly think of food banks on which thousands of families rely. Where is the funding for this “resilience” policy?
And here’s the second. State-level preparedness. A detailed to-do list for citizens (three days of food, 10 litres of water) suddenly becomes vague when it comes to what the government might do. There’s only so much that bottled water can help in the face of the various “geopolitical tensions” mentioned in Dowden’s speech. A focus on individual responsibility distracts from the fact that it is government-level preparation that really matters – coordination in a disaster and staving it off in the first place.
It’s strange, for example, to talk of water security when a big supplier, Thames Water, is in such disarray. Is Thames Water ready for a crisis? If so, why can’t it deal with the present crisis it has helped to cause? It is strange, too, to talk of food supplies without mentioning the fragility of our supply chains. Brexit border delays now create regular hiccups in the route from Europe. How resilient, exactly, are we when it comes to food and water?
Disaster response has to start at the top – but we aren’t ready for most disasters. This week, for example, we heard that firefighters lack basic equipment for tackling wildfires and terror events. According to the Fire Brigades Union, “specialist hardware” first introduced after the 9/11 attacks in the US is now more than 20 years old and in need of urgent replacement.
In January, we learned that the UK is even less prepared for a pandemic than it was before the Covid crisis. Dr Clive Dix, who chaired the UK’s vaccine taskforce, told a select committee that we treated vaccine manufacturers so badly at the tail end of the Covid taskforce that they have walked away, and that we have also failed to invest in a broad enough range of vaccine technologies. The coronavirus vaccine was built on years of research, but work on other pathogens lags far behind.
In December, meanwhile, the National Audit Office warned that the government is not ready for extreme weather events that will increase with climate change. It’s perhaps no surprise. Each year, around November, there is a “national emergency” when part of the country floods. We could invest in proper river and coastal defences, but we don’t. Forget future climate events: we aren’t ready for the climate we have now.
A focus on “individual resilience” puts you in the wrong mindset for a crisis. The prepper instinct, after all, is to compete for survival: gather supplies, defend them with your life, emerge from the apocalypse as one of the chosen few.
But survival in a real emergency involves just the opposite approach: cooperation, whether at government level or between neighbours. Remember the fights over loo paper in supermarket aisles during the pandemic, the last time the idea of stocking up gripped public consciousness? It marked a rare breakdown in community spirit – a spirit responsible, when it came down to it, for keeping us all alive: neighbours fed vulnerable people, we stayed in our homes so as not to spread infection.
“To emphasise individual responsibility is to completely miss the point of collective responsibility,” says Timothy Lang, a professor of food policy at City, University of London. A survivalist Britain – busy filling cupboards – might overlook the ways in which it has been failed. But would it survive?
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
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