It started last December with the UK Defence Minister warning that the country was “now on a war footing.” Just one interview in the FT. Nothing dramatic.
That came a few months after a series of interviews from Fiona Hill (the closest we have the UK to Henry Kissinger) stating “Russia is at war with us,” a proposition which was laughed off at the time. Nobody is laughing now.
The way the West supported Ukraine – with just enough weapons to let them survive but not enough to win, has been a hideous slow motion car crush. We have watched the destruction of a democratic society, a burgeoning testing ground for the new AI & drone weapons now being rolled out in the Middle East, and the emboldening of Russia and now Iran by Western disunity and (in the case of the UK and Europe) military incompetence.
Now the PR machine is ramping up. Sir Keir Starmer may have held back from the Iran invasion, but the communications department has been at work. BFBS just issued this video – I watched it so you don’t have to. It incudes the line “Britain may not be at war, but the need to know what we would do if there is one has never been more urgent.”
Lord Toby Harris, Head of the National Preparedness Commission confesses his fears that the UK population are not prepared, and an army veteran says that if the government announced a major mobilisation, a large part of the population would dismiss it as fake news.
What would be the first thing you would do to prepare for the disruption of a drone attack or a cyberattack on the UK mainland?
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