Tbh I thought it was pretty sensationalist. The chair of the National Preparedness Commission is a former lobbyist whose previous clients included Lockheed Martin. One of the vice-chairs spent most of his civil service career at MoD. Amongst their funders are representatives of the reinsurance industry. They look like a semi official body, but they are a company involved in lobbying which the BBC basically did an advert for.
Now, I would never argue that folks shouldn't have stuff in the house in case of an emergency (though the obsession with bog roll mystifies me, probably because I am a meff), but it had very low rent Protect and Survive vibes.
They're not wrong in a sense - UK infrastructure is largely privatised and the country is incredibly vulnerable to any number of shocks, but that's something that isn't going to be addressed substantively by stocking up on beans.
Of course, that's not the intent of the current noise in the media. The intent is to create a febrile mood of vague unspecified public panic so Burnham is convinced to kick more money to MoD, who then in turn will kick it to private contractors and firms who have been a nice retirement pathway for senior officers and civil servants since time immemorial.
To that point, the fact that UK kit costs a fortune but delivers very little value for the money spent should be the real focus, though I am no warmonger or apologist for the military.
But the fact is the level of literacy on these issues is so low (particularly amongst journalists) that MoD can get away with press releases about patrol vessels 'shadowing' Russian ships or Type 45s getting hauled out of drydock when the truth is a patrol vessel that tried to do anything to a Russian surface combatant would be so outgunned it would be sunk immediately, and Dragon pootled off to the eastern Med only to immediately break down.
I just thought it was a lot of RP-accented men speaking gravely about doom, which is always good for someone's bottom line as Lobbers says below.
on August 26, 2026, 10:55 pm