Does Wes Streeting Want Us Ready for War?

Like many long-eyelashed men before him, Andy Burnham is sending mixed-messages. On the one hand, the prime ninister is keen to differentiate himself from his predecessor. Where Keir Starmer carried himself like a doctor who could only break bad news, Burnham is keen to stress that there is a role for the state in the improvement of people’s lives (even if it’s just capital punishment for playing reels without earbuds in). 

But how does the PM’s sunny disposition square with this Cabinet urging us to stock up for the apocalypse?

Wes Streeting – defence secretary, and creature hatched under a jar by the Labour Right – has urged Britons to prepare for crisis. The public has been advised to stock up with three days worth of water, food, non-mains light sources and stuff to keep warm, in case of disruption to supply chains caused by cyber-attacks, terrorism, or extreme weather events. You can find the government’s ‘Be Ready Checklist’ here, and books you can burn in lieu of central heating here.

How big of a deal is this? Ordinarily, governments tend to prioritise the prevention of panic-buying. Readers may remember the toilet paper craze in the early days of the Covid pandemic, in which shoppers cleared shelves of loo roll because a rumour had gone round alleging that the Chinese had switched Andrex-production to the manufacturing of paper masks. It doesn’t take huge swings in consumer behaviour to put a dent in just-in-time supply chains – and the sight of depleted aisles can send people scurrying to buy even more. If ministers are advising people to stock up, it’s a sign that they sincerely think something scary is on the horizon.

The government’s resilience programme wasn’t a brainchild of Andy Burnham. It got going during Keir Starmer’s time in office. Some critics say that Burnham hasn’t actually made enough noise about it, pointing to the lack of a big, shiny rollout. But regardless of its prominence in No. 10’s grid, the instructions to the public to stock up in case of crisis is dominating the headlines today – and it’s perhaps meaningful that Wes Streeting’s public comments about the issue were made at the opening of a new weapons manufacturing site in Shropshire.

As FT journalist Gideon Rachman noted on Newsnight last night, the language used by leaders in the West has been markedly hawkish on the prospects of World War III. Keir Starmer warned of a Nato war with Russia as soon as 2030; Mark Rutte, head of Nato, has said that we have to be prepared for wars of the scale that our grandparents fought in (that’s the Second World War, not the 2005 Ikea riots). Rachman has warned that we could be sleepwalking into World War III – I can’t help but wonder if some of our leaders are tapdancing there.

Threats to food supply – not least due to the ‘Godzilla’ El Niño superpowering extreme weather events – are real. But it might be the case that the government’s urging of preparedness is both a prudent message to the public in the face of an increasingly chaotic global order, and part of an effort to normalise the prospect of the UK being pulled into a brutal, meat-grinding war. It’s worth minding some of the lessons of the 20th Century: you can only manufacture so many weapons before they get used.