{"text":[[{"start":4.88,"text":"On September 10, a glowing Wes Streeting emerged from his holidays to ask Britain: do you have any candles? Do you know where you keep your torch? (“It’s on the back of my phone,” a nation presumably yelled back at him.) It was time, he said, for “a national conversation about our resilience as a country”."}],[{"start":28.56,"text":"Streeting mentioned “Russia”, “cold weather” and “wildfires”, vaguely. He speculated about the possibility of a national power outage, vaguely. Defence secretary for a mere 52 days, Streeting did not specify threats to his country beyond those vagaries as he launched the government’s “Prepare” campaign."}],[{"start":42.94,"text":"For centuries, the English, and then the British, have felt themselves to be nothing if not prepared. From the Spanish Armada to the Blitz, the inhabitants of the British Isles have taken near-lunatic pride in their beefy, cussed refusal to be beaten by anyone."}],[{"start":58.24,"text":"British resilience has its own mythical personalities, recurrent symbols and stubborn idioms: Nelson’s Trafalgar coat, with its fatal bullet hole, still hangs modestly in the Maritime Museum in Greenwich; bronze unknown Tommies, downcast but not defeated, peer over towns and villages; Captain Oates’s laconic, death-haunted words continue to echo: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”"}],[{"start":82.92,"text":"If you listen to Britain’s leadership class today, you will hear the sound of gas escaping from these grand old illusions. There is no Churchillian bombast or nationalist chest-beating. When Andy Burnham addresses the Labour Party conference next week, where resilience is a planned “theme”, the prime minister will describe something he believes Britain has lost. Whitehall is reeling, not only from the hybrid war being waged on Europe by Russia, but the compounding effects of wetter winters and extremely hot summers. The official, subterranean conversation about these threats is not around prevention or deterrence, but mitigation and adaptation."}],[{"start":120.42,"text":"Since the British state, in the 2024 judgment of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, “failed its citizens”, resilience has become a Whitehall buzzword. Mandarins define it as “an ability to withstand or quickly recover from a difficult situation, but also to get ahead of those risks and tackle challenges before they manifest”."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":140.92,"text":"New resilience committees and programmes have been set up by the civil service. One aimed at combating Russian disinformation was announced by Burnham this week. But much of this work has, according to one senior official, been ignored by politicians: “This is what you see when the deep state is screaming into the void.”"}],[{"start":159.08,"text":"How resilient is Britain? Is it ready for war? Is it prepared for the threat of interstate conflict against the backdrop of a warming planet?"}],[{"start":167.78,"text":"Looking for an answer to those questions, I spoke with former cabinet ministers and their advisers, senior civil servants and members of the Behavioural Insights Team with direct experience of the Covid-19 pandemic; a former cabinet secretary; two experts who sat on the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage); experts on supply chains, hydrology, food security, risk communication, process engineering, environmental change and the Russian military. I interviewed a retired general who fought in Iraq and a geophysicist who advised the government on the threat posed by inclement space weather. Interviewees in sensitive positions spoke anonymously to protect their identities."}],[{"start":208.36,"text":"There is no escaping bias when it comes to assessing risk. Multiple experts described the government’s flagship National Risk Register, which this year identifies 95 “acute risks” and 26 “chronic risks”, as little more than a “pool of value judgments” rather than an objective standard for risk assessment."}],[{"start":null,"text":"National Risk Register"}],[{"start":226.8,"text":"Those paid to imagine catastrophe are biased towards doom. Or as one chemical engineer put it to me: “I’ve been working in risk for 40 years. I risk-evaluate the things I see on the shelves in supermarkets.”"}],[{"start":238.16,"text":"Nevertheless, the Britain that emerges from these conversations is a country both painfully aware of and somehow still systemically underprepared for the short- and long-term threats it faces. Its leadership class appears hamstrung by the same “obsessive fear of personal error and criticism, a culture of groupthink and risk aversion that stifles initiative” described in 2021 by Kate Bingham, the venture capitalist who led the UK’s vaccine procurement during the Covid pandemic."}],[{"start":269.28,"text":"I wanted to know whether Britain was prepared for the kind of interstate conflicts that have now returned to Europe. “I think we have forgotten how to be resilient,” said Richard Nugee, a retired lieutenant general in the British Army. “I think we were once very resilient, but I don’t think we are any more.”"}],[{"start":287.88,"text":"It was not long before Nugee brought up the cold war and the secret state Britain fashioned from the late 1940s to meet the Soviet threat. Then, Britain’s leadership class embarked on a project their successors would struggle to execute today. Confronted with the pitiless Strangelovian logic of the nuclear age, these leaders built an egalitarian garrison state in the decades after the second world war."}],[{"start":311.48,"text":"During the 1950s, British industry manufactured bombers, missiles and biological weapons. Industrialists and technologists, spies and civil servants were pulled into what John le Carré described in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as “little reading rooms at the Admiralty, little committees popping up with funny names”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":331.92,"text":"By the mid-1950s, “more than half of all the research and development expenditure, public and private, in the United Kingdom was for the warfare state”, according to the historian David Edgerton. A fortified Britain was being laid down by defence planners, military scientists and domestic manufacturers."}],[{"start":350.22,"text":"As a young soldier in West Germany in the 1980s, Nugee experienced the largesse of that cold war state. He recalled all the old warehouses and extra kit: “Having storage, having alternative approaches, if one bit didn’t work, then another would kick in.”"}],[{"start":365.08,"text":"What he saw was a minuscule fragment of the outlay Britain devoted to civil and military defence during the cold war, which was substantially more than every Nato ally except the US."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":374.92,"text":"British defence planners stared into the abyss for over four decades, assuming that it was worth spending billions of pounds to be prepared for the worst outcomes imaginable."}],[{"start":385.08,"text":"“We didn’t have a war. We did win,” Sir Percy Cradock told the Joint Intelligence Committee on August 29 1991, as the USSR collapsed. Cradock, the committee’s chair, raised a champagne toast to “the demise of the Party”."}],[{"start":401.6,"text":"The assumptions of the British state changed. In a globalising, post-cold war world, Britain was fed and heated by increasingly baroque supply chains. “Just in time” replaced “just in case” as the management philosophy of UK plc."}],[{"start":416.24,"text":"“We absolutely went for the globalised economic model optimised for cost-efficiency,” said Lord Mark Sedwill, who served as cabinet secretary from 2018-20. “What we have discovered in recent years is that this pure globalised model has vulnerabilities.”"}],[{"start":433.06,"text":"As prices for consumer goods such as toys and games plummeted in the 1990s and 2000s, and millions were lifted out of poverty in a booming China, the British state ceded its sovereignty in increments to corporations, often owned abroad and accountable to foreign shareholders. Companies, contracted by the state, began to provide more and more essential services to the public."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":456.12,"text":"Britain’s leadership class seemed to be hallucinating a future free from natural limits, predatory adversaries or social constraints. They began to see the world in very broad terms indeed. “I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare, not national welfare,” explained Gus O’Donnell, the then cabinet secretary, in 2011."}],[{"start":476.8,"text":"Fifteen years on, Cradock and O’Donnell’s inheritors face a set of interlocking challenges hauntingly reminiscent of the early cold war. The ills that John Maynard Keynes once called the “serpent” — “the projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion” — have returned, amid institutional and ecological breakdown on a global scale."}],[{"start":501.54,"text":"Early cold war British defence planners and politicians could command an onshore scientific-industrial-military complex and a workforce and larger society calloused into resilience by the experience of two world wars."}],[{"start":514.44,"text":"“The population today as a whole is far less resilient than your granny would have been,” a senior mandarin told me. “Up until Margaret Thatcher, a lot of the politicians who were in charge would have gone through the war, commanded battalions, and had the natural authority that came from operating in difficult circumstances. They just knew what to do.”"}],[{"start":534.16,"text":"“Government today doesn’t feel secure,” said one recent special adviser who worked on national security issues. “Vulnerable politicians fighting for their political lives are not going to care about, say, biosecurity.”"}],[{"start":546.84,"text":"The paralysing effect of political instability and churn was a theme of almost every conversation I had reporting this essay. “You don’t get long-term decisions,” said Sedwill. “The system struggles to advise ministers because civil servants are constantly having to rebrief them and present them with today’s issues rather than tomorrow’s issues.”"}],[{"start":565.96,"text":"Outside Westminster, a consensus has grown that government, regardless of which new prime minister has surfaced this year, is stricken by inconsistent policy agendas and the suspicion that the leaders it does generate will not stay long in their posts."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":580.32,"text":"These leaders have experienced the 2020s as a Job-like ordeal. In a decade defined by a convergence of pathological trends — pandemic, renewed European warfare, the threat of runaway technologies — the tone of Britain’s leadership class has changed. Their ominous public warnings sound with the alarmist register that once belonged to the fringes of security debates and the prepper rabbit holes of the internet."}],[{"start":603.62,"text":"“I think we are absolutely fucked. I think this country is heading for disaster. I think we’re going to kill thousands of people,” said Dominic Cummings, then chief adviser to the prime minister, to Helen MacNamara, then deputy cabinet secretary, as Covid hit in March 2020. “Our lifestyles and our infrastructure are not adapted to what is coming,” Penny Endersby, head of the Met Office, said in July 2022, days after Britain experienced temperatures of over 40C for the first time. “The situation is more dangerous than I have known during my career,” chief of the defence staff Sir Richard Knighton warned in December last year."}],[{"start":640.36,"text":"Is the alarm justified? Several insiders I spoke to interpreted such comments as apocalyptic posturing, designed to fatten up already wasteful defence budgets or eco lobbies. Others questioned why the British defence establishment appeared to be convinced of the threat of a land war with Russia in the Baltic, when the real threat from the east, as they saw it, came from psychological warfare campaigns aimed at undermining Britain’s already strained social cohesion. Nostalgia for the garrison nation of the past was nonsensical, according to one former cabinet minister: “Go back to the Stone Age if you like, maybe you’ll find more resilient people there.”"}],[{"start":680.4,"text":"Experts fear scenarios where climate and conflict shocks converge, exposing Britain’s fragilities. “Most of the risks can be managed if they come at us individually, but we are into a situation now where we could have multiple threats materialising simultaneously,” said Professor Sir Ian Boyd, who was a member of Sage during the pandemic."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":699.52,"text":"Boyd outlined a disquieting scenario for the next six months, following the hottest British summer on record, when the National Farmers’ Union warned of potential food shortages. He fears that summer heat followed by a powerful El Niño could result in “multiple breadbasket failures” set against the background of conflicts in key regions for energy and food production. “Acute stresses are happening within a context of chronic stress. Eventually, this is going to drive a non-linear process involving system breakdown.”"}],[{"start":730,"text":"Most of the climate scientists I spoke to for this piece shared his anxieties about El Niño. This fear, that the coming El Niño could threaten national security, was part of the presentation UK foreign secretary Ed Miliband gave at the UN General Assembly in New York this week."}],[{"start":744.96,"text":"Resilient systems have been allowed to rot away. The lean just-in-time model that replaced them is increasingly vulnerable to what the Government Office for Science calls “more frequent and more consequential” shocks. Britain cannot arm, feed, heat or heal itself without imports of food, iron and steel, pharmaceutical products, crucial chemicals, gas and oil. Imports and exports equalled roughly 63 per cent of GDP in 2024, with the UK being, in the words of the GOS, “among the more trade-reliant, large economies”, above the US, Japan and China. In the event of prolonged disruption to supply chains, Britain, experts told me, would not be able to maintain the industrial basis of its economic and social life."}],[{"start":791.36,"text":"Britain’s openness to trade reduced waste and promoted efficiency, while making it one of the wealthiest countries in the world. But in an age of de-globalisation, what were once strengths can become weaknesses. A failure to plan ahead is making Britain a European laggard when it comes to resilience. Unlike Germany or Poland, Britain does not have deep strategic stockpiles of food. Last year, Sweden began to rebuild its reserves of emergency grain for the first time since the cold war."}],[{"start":820.54,"text":"Medicines are another area of concern. Only 25 per cent of generic drugs are produced domestically, according to a National Preparedness Commission report. Earlier this year, the House of Lords National Resilience Committee heard that 90 per cent of Britain’s penicillin was imported from China, as well as a large proportion of “all other antibiotics”."}],[{"start":839.78,"text":"In the energy sector, Britain is now a net importer of all main fuel types. Industrial energy costs are among the highest in Europe, one of the reasons why Britain no longer produces chemical inputs crucial for fertilisers such as ammonia and sulphuric acid. Supply relies on potentially vulnerable undersea cables and pipelines. Sedwill described this as “running our energy system on the equivalent of a just-in-time basis”."}],[{"start":864.82,"text":"The National Audit Office revealed in September that a 2023 exercise testing “preparedness” found that the government would be unable to maintain “critical services such as food, water and other essential services during a national power outage”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":879.16,"text":"Food security is often framed by climate experts as an area where the government is slow to understand risk. In February, Tim Lang, emeritus professor of food policy at City St George’s, reported that British retail food goes through 131 distribution centres. He believes they are choke points, vulnerable to hostile drone or missile strikes."}],[{"start":899.86,"text":"Lang is right. A 2025 article in Naval Technology reported that the UK cannot engage in “full spectrum ballistic and hypersonic missile defence”. RAF jets can intercept the Russian air force but would struggle with hostile drones and missiles."}],[{"start":914.24,"text":"The skills that make up physical resilience either no longer exist or are in short supply in Britain. As Rod Thornton, a reader in Russian defence and security studies at King’s College London, points out in a paper for The Political Quarterly, unlike many peer nations Britain has no civil defence force, paramilitary police or national guard. There is no British equivalent of FEMA, the US disaster agency. England and Wales have fewer police officers per 100,000 of population than any other major European country. Dramatic labour shortages are reported by the National Fire Chiefs Council and the Ministry of Defence."}],[{"start":949.2,"text":"Britain also has a shortfall of construction workers, plumbers, arc welders and cable jointers. By 2030, the Royal Academy of Engineering predicts a national shortage of up to 1.5mn engineers, with nearly a third of the current engineering workforce expected to retire in the next decade."}],[{"start":966.38,"text":"There is no going back to the past without incurring enormous costs. “The central economic problem of resilience,” said Lang, “is that it asks capitalism to do what it doesn’t want to do at the moment.”"}],[{"start":977.16,"text":"Stockpiles in a fatty civil defence system built to confront the Soviets — what an engineer would call “redundancies” — were stripped away and sold off, argues Thornton. “It’s now hard to go back to spend the money to recreate the kind of agencies and facilities and resources that we had in the cold war.”"}],[{"start":992.6,"text":"What strengths does Britain have left in reserve? One, simply put, is altruistic people. “The government underestimated the population during the pandemic,” said Simon Ruda, a behavioural scientist and one of the founders of the former government Nudge Unit. “People were good at doing the right thing.” A government survey released last month found that the British were overwhelmingly willing to help their neighbours in a disaster and believed that their neighbourhood would “pull together” in a crisis."}],[{"start":1020.46,"text":"The sociologist Ulrich Beck identified three responses to “omnipresent risk”: denial, apathy and transformation. Britain’s leaders and experts are no longer in denial. Nor are they apathetic. Transformation is their task now. It may prove more difficult than telling their citizens to buy a few candles and locate their torch."}],[{"start":1040.44,"text":"Will Lloyd is senior writer, FT Weekend"}],[{"start":1040.94,"text":"Data visualisation by Martin Stabe"}],[{"start":1045.44,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":1055.44,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1790472555_8336.mp3"}