John Oxley is a consultant, writer, and broadcaster. His SubStack is Joxley Writes.
The government, we are told, are preparing to tell us to stock up on provisions and water.
The communications plan will be part of the Cabinet’s new resilience campaign, which will also bolster civil defences and infrastructure. It is an idea that has rattled around for a few years, with Tory ministers making similar moves when we were in power.
Such announcements are easy to mock as alarmist – but they are probably prudent. COVID should have taught us that high-impact, low-probability events can quickly sweep the world we know asunder. Our daily existence relies on extraordinarily complex systems for the delivery of essentials, from food to energy, that offer lots of points of disruption.
Equally, we know of several prominent threats.
Headlines this week have been captured by Putin’s threats. While they should not sway our foreign policy, we should understand the risks are real. The Russian state has been linked to dozens of acts of sabotage across Europe in recent years, including attacks on Keir Starmer’s former home when he was PM, and attacks on warehouses in London storing humanitarian aid for Ukraine.
This summer has also shown us the reality of other threats. The hot, dry summer has produced multiple major fires. Those in the Midlands were the most devastating, with homes rapidly destroyed. While home stockpiling wouldn’t have been much help to the victims, the broader resilience infrastructure would be essential; getting them safely housed and supported as soon as possible.
Yet there is an aspect of these crises that easily gets overlooked by state planners – the importance of community. There is always a gap between our individual responsibilities and what the state can do. As Conservatives, we should understand the importance of stepping up to fill that gap. Mrs Thatcher was right but misunderstood when she said: “there’s no such thing as society”. Like many political quotations, the more important half, a call for individuals and families to fill that gap, gets cut off.
We saw this in action in Stourbridge. Locals rallied around to provide what help they could. The council appealed for emergency bedding and was so inundated they turned people away. Money flowed in to help people set themselves up before insurance companies could kick into gear. People also rallied to provide the sorts of incidentals that big organisations forget – things like make-up, which may seem silly, but can make a huge difference to someone who has just lost everything.
This great reserve of mutual support is often overlooked.
It is easy to lament the decline of community, and to point to signs of atomisation and isolation. Yet given the moment, people yearn to help. In COVID, appeals for volunteers were often overwhelmed. Finding enough things for people to do was more of a problem than finding people to do them. The combination of a crisis and lockdown boredom may have been a catalyst for the enthusiasm, but the surge also reflected a broader desire to pitch in.
After all, we are a nation of voluntary pursuits. About a quarter of people routinely volunteer. Big organisations like the RNLI or Samaritans provide a major societal service through volunteer support. Up and down the country, countless smaller organisations, from children’s sports to activities for older people, rely on a legion of volunteers who give up their time for their communities.
Yet this group is not as healthy as it should be.
Rates of volunteering have declined over the last decade. It has perhaps halved in a decade. Many organisations are reliant on older, richer volunteers. Retirees with enough time on their hands. This is obviously a fragile place to be – as these people get older, it is harder to replace them. A host of things seem to make it harder to get involved. The cost of living, later family formation, and the demands of caring for older relatives all put pressure on potential volunteers. Volunteering itself has also become more laborious, with necessary steps like greater safeguarding adding to the barriers to getting involved.
In times of great crisis, these gaps will be noted. COVID showed how state planning can fall short during an emergency. Planning for remote, but terrible, possibilities often comes second for governments that focus on the problems of the day. Contingency planning is under-resourced or predicated around the wrong type of problem. In any case, as Mike Tyson once said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face – reality often collides with expectations. Adaptability and resources work better than plotting out every possible scenario.
This is often why grassroots organisations can perform critical functions in a crisis.
They are not beholden to existing structures or ways of doing things. Instead, they can meet problems as they occur, improvising and responding to the needs of a community they understand. On my recent visit to Ukraine, it was evident how such organisations had met the challenges of the war, both locally and internationally. They used their enthusiasm and agility to fill gaps the government couldn’t. Much of this was done by voluntary organisations, as well as by private companies, such as arms manufacturers that have moved from start-up to major supplier in just a year or two.
When it comes to emergency planning, it is easy to think about what individuals can do, and where the power of the state needs to be brought to bear. There is, however, a big gap between the two, and we should not neglect the role of communities in filling it. The surge of volunteers during COVID shows that goodwill is there, but the decline in regular volunteering suggests we are managing it badly. Part of our resilience planning should reckon with this and with how we both have the capacity to manage it in place before a crisis comes.
In the last election, our party promoted a policy of national service with this sort of gap in mind.
Even at the time, it seemed a hurried answer to an important question, and one which sat poorly with younger voters who see it as an appeal to nostalgia. But thinking about how we can more readily build on people’s community spirit should be part of the planning. Registering which organisations exist and where they can help and lowering some of the regulatory barriers that impede volunteering could help achieve this. So could working to develop that community spirit in places where it has declined.
One of the watchwords of recent years has been “whole society resilience”. The idea is that defence operates on many levels. The government takes care of the biggest threats and logistics; individuals take responsibility for themselves; but together we can fill the gap between them. As Conservatives, we should not be cynical about this. It ought to tap into the core of our beliefs about duty and our relationships to each other. If we are serious about not relying on the state for everything, we must be innovative in how we rely on one another. After all, society just means individuals and families.
Increased preparation is the reality of today’s world, and none of this is an argument against the government’s own plans. The military threats should not be exaggerated, but they are more severe than many of us have experienced before, and natural disasters and long-tail risks of disruption are only likely to grow more common. It is right that the state prepares. But Stourbridge’s council had to turn volunteers away, and the NHS Volunteer Responders scheme had to pause its recruitment because, in both cases, the goodwill arrived faster than anyone had planned.
As governments rush to ready us for the next crisis, they should spend at least as much effort readying themselves for us.