The Government Isn’t Coming to Save You: Britons to be Told to Stockpile Food, Water, Over Russian ‘Hybrid Threat’

( Breitbart )

The British government will revitalise decades-old war plans, nudge the public to stockpile food and water, and host a wargame exercise to test its home defence strategy, it has been announced.

Britons will be advised to keep a home stockpile of long-life food, bottled water, and essential medicines when the government launches a new resilience drive later this year. Coming as part of a broader series of updates to homeland defence — which has been all but ignored in many respects since the end of the Cold War — the push was justified in part by Westminster as a response to what they identified as a threat from Russian “hybrid attacks”.

Darren Jones, whose office of Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister is a position inside the Cabinet Office, the central nervous system of government, which also acts as a clearing house for Britain’s intelligence and security agencies and which has national security responsibilities, said some responsibility would fall on the shoulders of the public. He said in a statement accompanying a press release announcing the plans:

The government will do all it can and we are well prepared – but we can all play our part to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. This campaign will help the public to take small but important steps to be prepared in case of emergencies and disruption – be that severe weather or a cyber-attack, which can impact access to power, water, or phone signal.

The Cabinet Office said it would be launching a national awareness campaign later this year to “encourage the public to take simple steps to improve their household’s resilience”.

What these steps would be and what threats the government is particularly sensitive to weren’t made explicit, but some example scenarios were outlined. It cited:

… risk of cyber attacks on data infrastructure, water infrastructure and police systems, amid a rapid increase in the sophistication and proliferation of artificial intelligence. ’Digital resilience failure’ is another new addition, building on lessons learnt from the Crowdstrike IT outage in July 2024.

Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces at the Ministry of Defence, Louise Sandher-Jones, made clear that Russia is seen by London as a significant threat. She said part of the drive to make these changes was not just to improve resilience, but also to boost deterrence by making Britain a less vulnerable, and ergo appealing, target.

She said this was a joint initiative between “the military, government departments, agencies, and the whole of society” and stated:

Russia is not only a threat to NATO’s eastern flank. It is a direct threat to the UK homeland and these exercises, together with important measures like updating our ‘War Books’, will help prepare us to meet that threat, as well as showing the British public how seriously we are taking it.

As well as reducing the government’s burden of providing for the public in an emergency by making households more responsible for their own resilience, the Cabinet Office also said it would update the old Government War Book and test its planning assumptions with a Home Defence exercise in 2027.

Christened Operation Albiston Shadow, this multi-day exercise will simulate a national crisis and will allow top civil servants, government departments, the military, and civilian organisations to role-play their response. Jones stated in an article that the exercise would be the largest home defence exercise ever and would test “current assumptions and planned response to hybrid attacks (such as a cyber attack or sabotage) on the UK, to ensure that should the worst ever happen, we will be ready.”

Despite the strident language, the British government is due to be replaced on Monday with a new administration. It is doubtful that many ministers — such as Jones — will survive in their current roles, and it is unclear how many of the government’s current plans will survive the change. Defence is a particularly controversial area and may face a greater shake-up than most.

The bid to strengthen the nation and reassure the public follows longstanding, pointed criticism that the state is not prepared to respond to crises. The United Kingdom is one of the only developed nations on earth that does not have a Civil Defence establishment — it was stood down in the 1960s to save money — and has already been revealed as having failed to heed its own advice on disaster preparation.

An earlier promise by this government to stand up a Home Defence Force of retired soldiers volunteering to protect critical national infrastructure against surprise attack seems to have been quietly dropped as defence is starved of funding.

In January, the Chief of the Defence Staff told a Parliamentary committee the country is under-prepared for emergencies. As reported:

He told the committee that it is a “statement of the obvious” that the British armed forces is constrained by “the budget that is set” and this leads to “difficult trade-offs” in choosing capabilities. This meant deciding whether to fund “health, education, defence” and, evidently, often defence does not win. He said in a terse session of the committee: “we have taken a peace dividend and we are not as ready as we need to be for the kind of full-scale conflict that we might face. And that’s how we ultimately deter our principle adversaries, by being ready to fight and win” … it was also teased out of the CDS that despite now-years of belligerent rhetoric from Britain’s political leadership, there is still no Government War Book. A detailed plan of the precise steps the government would rapidly take to transition the country to war in the case of a sneak attack, the old war book covered everything from the survival of government in a nuclear strike and retaliating with high-level military capabilities down to wider mobilisation of society, including mobilising national industries into a war economy, stockpiling food, and using the health service to deal with mass casualties. The old War Book persisted from the First World War until the end of the Cold War, when it was wound up and no longer updated, and many of the emergency reserves maintained sold off or destroyed to save money. CDS Knighton said a new War Book is being worked on, but it being ready for use could be a year, or years away.