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The government has issued new advice urging Britons to prepare for the impact of the climate crisis, technological dependency, and threats from a hostile state.
No, we’re not bracing for another Covid lockdown. But the government’s new Be Ready campaign offers guidance similar to 2020.
The new three-year initiative has instructed Britons to stockpile a three-day emergency kit with cash, water and food amid fears of food shortages and widespread disruption from cyberattacks.
Be Ready hopes to drive household emergency preparedness, as Defence Secretary Wes Streeting unveils updated advice for threats such as flooding and wildfires.
It comes just days after a Google Cloud failure disrupted multiple online banking services, leaving thousands of people without access to their money. For most of us, the idea of a national emergency still belongs to the realm of disaster films, rather than something we should factor into our weekly shop. But as our digital dependency grows, our risk of major national disruption does too.
We have become accustomed to the convenience of a world in which everything is available instantly. The thought of these systems failing, even temporarily, forces us to confront just how little control we have over the infrastructure on which we depend.
Compound that with the extreme weather events shaping our environment, and the risks only mount. Wes Streeting previously called for a ‘whole society approach’ to strengthen national resilience, as El Niño fears hang over the impending winter season. But he insisted people should remain ‘alert, not alarmed’ regarding potential risks.
The government will have to toe the line carefully between guidance and fearmongering. 2020’s pandemic taught us how quickly the prospect of scarcity can become self-fulfilling, and images of empty supermarket shelves prompted people to buy more than they needed. Shortages were consequently often driven as much by panic as by any underlying lack of supply.
The question, too, is who can afford to prepare. For households already struggling with the cost of living, buying extra food, bottled water, batteries and other essentials is not necessarily a straightforward exercise. Nor is there always space to store them.
Will domestic responsibility quietly be transferred from the state to the individual? We’re already expected to navigate increasingly complicated systems for our finances, healthcare and energy. Now we’re being encouraged to make contingency plans for the possibility that some of those systems might stop working altogether.
Sure, governments can’t prevent every emergency, and household preparedness can help communities cope when essential services are disrupted. But the emphasis on individual readiness should sit alongside investment in the resilience of those services.
