Preparedness for National Emergencies Debate
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Steve Darling
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Preparedness for National Emergencies
Steve Darling Excerpts(2 weeks ago)
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Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Barker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) on securing this debate. It has been extremely fruitful and I hope that the Minister will be able to answer all the questions that have been asked.
In preparing for the debate, I reflected on Raymond Briggs’s book, “When The Wind Blows”. It is shocking to think that it was published 44 years ago. It is a very useful reflection on how the state failed to prepare the UK for nuclear war and on how we were equally unprepared. I also reflected some of the challenges that we face. Although the number of challenges we face now may have increased, the players out there—Russia, Iran, China or North Korea—are the same.
I will touch on three key areas today. First, there is false information or fake news. I visited Moldova earlier this year, and people there were really alive to it, because Ukraine is acting as their shield. Russia is engaging in lots of nefarious activities in that part of the world and the Moldovan population is used to dealing with false information.
Secondly, I was delighted to support an event at Torquay Library last week, where a librarian called Hazel was helping youngsters to understand which sources of news can be trusted and which cannot. I would like the Minister to reflect on how that approach could be built into our curriculum, because the sooner we make young people, and their parents and grandparents, alive to the importance of such an approach, the better.
Another area of significant challenge is cyber-security. There are real challenges, whether they involve Jaguar Land Rover or people’s personal finances, and the consequences can be devastating. We know that the number of threats to national infrastructure has doubled over the last year, mostly from hostile players elsewhere in the world. Minister, we should develop a sovereign digital approach to such threats, so that we can protect our own infrastructure without having to outsource it to a third party.