Civil Preparedness for War

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Monday 20th April 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I too am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, for securing this vital and timely debate, and it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Harris, who is such an expert on resilience.

I am on this House’s National Resilience Committee, which is looking inter alia at how to take the whole-of-society approach essential for civil preparedness for war. As we have heard, the Nordic ambassadors’ already publicly available evidence to our committee describes their countries’ decades-long approach to civil preparedness, given their proximity to Russia. It is too soon to know what the committee will recommend, but I personally admire the ambassadors’ Governments’ highly informative booklets, which are available in every single household and which we have already heard about from the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, and the noble Lord, Lord Harris. These describe not only the importance of storing water but things such as how to dispose of human and pet waste. I suggest to the Minister that this would be a low-cost implementation to start with immediately.

The Swedish ambassador defined resilience as “public support through awareness of risk, readiness to act and trust in institutions”. We must be healthily sceptical about how well the UK measures up to that. Currently, despite heightened awareness of the risks facing us, the UK population is very divided. The idea that people need to be good citizens and act in a concerted way is treated with suspicion, and trust in institutions is low. Culturally, we are not in a promising place for public support to grow.

Anthropologists say that culture is shared, deep-rooted assumptions that are powerful resistors to change. Our assumptions include that patriotism is naive and politically or culturally loaded, efforts to encourage citizenship are suspect and potentially exploitative, and hyper-individualism is the priority. An effective whole-of-society approach needs to challenge these. We talk blithely about cultural change, but people fear changing their deep-rooted assumptions, so they resist—unless they realise that their survival depends on it.

Such survival anxiety must exceed fear for cultural change to take place. Survival anxiety is currently amplified by national and international threats, but any project fear leads to panic, blame and resistance. Leaders should unashamedly draw attention to other aspects of our national culture, particularly our dogged resistance to tyranny in the 1939-45 war. Constantly criticising our past, judging its actions by today’s mores, does not illuminate a path forward—it simply denies our roots and makes concerted action virtually impossible. A whole-of-society approach must emphasise strong relationships, which, in the new infrastructure, family hubs are helping people to build. In crisis, people primarily lean not on the state but on their relationships with families, communities and, dare I say, with God. It is not sensible to think otherwise.