War in Ukraine upends our world again. The iron curtain slams down after the body blows of Brexit and Covid, amid Cop26 climate warnings. With Vladimir Putin’s invasion shaking Nato into life, refilling the war chest will reverse the peace dividend. Rocketing prices for gas, wheat and metals presage prolonged economic pain, as ever, unjustly shared.
These thunderbolts strike when Britain lacks resilience on almost every front. Last week Martin Rees, the astronomer royal and an ex-president of the Royal Society, gave a Cassandra warning in the Financial Times on our vulnerabilities. “The current system dooms Britain to remain perpetually unprepared” against “existential risks” from “the atomic bomb, biological weapons, artificial intelligence and climate change”. A chaotic and short-termist national risk register gives no “proper assessment of the dynamic nature of risks such as floods, cyber-attacks and bio threats”.
