The instructions are modest enough on their face: keep some cash in a drawer, store a few litres of bottled water, make room in the cupboard for tinned food. Yet when those words come from a Defence Secretary on the eve of a governing party’s annual conference, the mundane becomes a signal worth examining closely.
Wes Streeting, the Secretary of State for Health — now speaking with an unusual reach into national security discourse — delivered precisely that message to The Sun on Sunday last weekend, urging British citizens to maintain basic emergency stockpiles at home. The stated rationale spans a wide and deliberately imprecise threat horizon: hostile state actors, terrorist groups, cyber warfare capable of disabling financial infrastructure, and the accelerating frequency of climate-driven disasters including wildfires and floods.
“It’s not a big ask, it’s just a simple ask of people,” Streeting said. “Do they have what they need indoors, should they lose access to their online banking for a period? Should they have a power cut?”
The framing is careful, calibrated to avoid panic while still carrying an unmistakable urgency. Streeting explicitly invoked the phrase “alert not alarmed” — a formulation that has become something of a governmental tic in recent years, deployed whenever authorities need to communicate genuine risk without triggering the public anxiety that tends to complicate governance. The tension embedded in that phrase is real: you cannot simultaneously tell citizens that threats are serious enough to warrant household preparation and expect them not to ask why, and why now.
A Shifting Architecture of Risk
Britain’s threat environment has demonstrably changed. The UK’s National Risk Register, updated periodically by the Cabinet Office, has in recent editions placed cyberattacks on critical national infrastructure — power grids, water systems, financial networks — among the highest-probability, highest-impact scenarios the country faces. Russia’s sustained campaign of hybrid warfare across Europe, including documented cyberattacks on energy infrastructure in Ukraine and suspected interference operations targeting Western democracies, provides the geopolitical backdrop against which Streeting’s comments land.
The climate dimension is no less concrete. The UK recorded its hottest day ever in July 2022, at 40.3°C, and flooding events have grown more frequent and more destructive across England and Wales over the past decade. The convergence of these pressures — hostile state action, non-state terrorism, and environmental breakdown — is not hypothetical. It is the operational reality that emergency planners have been quietly modelling for years.
What is newer is the public-facing articulation of that reality by a senior cabinet minister, in terms directed explicitly at individual households rather than local authorities or emergency services.
The Privatisation of Resilience
Streeting’s appeal to “individual citizens” to consider how to prepare for “acts of nature, or acts of terrorism, or indeed in extreme acts of war” carries an ideological subtext that deserves scrutiny. The language of personal responsibility in emergency preparedness is not politically neutral. When governments ask citizens to self-provision against systemic failures — power cuts, banking outages, supply chain disruption — they are, at least implicitly, acknowledging that the state cannot guarantee uninterrupted service delivery under stress. That acknowledgement is honest. It is also a transfer of burden.
The government has published a list of recommended emergency supplies for every household: a first aid kit, batteries, a torch, a wind-up radio, bottled water, and non-perishable food. These are sensible recommendations. They are also recommendations that assume a baseline of financial stability — the capacity to stockpile — that is not uniformly distributed across the British population after years of stagnant wages, benefit cuts, and a cost-of-living crisis that has pushed millions into food insecurity.
The instruction to keep cash at home in case online banking becomes unavailable is particularly telling. It presupposes that citizens have discretionary cash to keep. For a substantial portion of the UK population, that presupposition does not hold.
Resilience as Policy, Not Just Rhetoric
Streeting framed the government’s ambition as a “whole society approach” to national resilience — language that echoes NATO doctrine and the civil preparedness frameworks adopted by Nordic states, where Sweden and Finland have in recent years distributed household emergency guidance to every citizen as a matter of course. The comparison is instructive. Those countries pair individual preparedness guidance with robust public investment in infrastructure redundancy, civil defence systems, and social safety nets that reduce baseline vulnerability.
Whether the UK government intends to match its rhetorical appeal to citizen preparedness with equivalent structural investment remains, at this stage, an open question. The Defence Secretary’s comments were made on the eve of a party conference, in an interview format that does not lend itself to policy specificity. What was communicated was a direction of travel, not a programme.
“Resilience is always important for a country,” Streeting said. The statement is unimpeachable in its generality. Its weight depends entirely on what follows it.
For now, the government’s ask is a torch, some tins, and a radio that does not depend on the grid. Whether that ask is the beginning of a serious national resilience strategy or a rhetorical placeholder for one is a question that the months ahead will answer — or fail to.