It’s hard to imagine how the UK could be doing less to prepare for war

Published

9 months ago

April 3, 2024

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The government has no national plan for the defence of the UK or the mobilisation of its people and industry in a war despite renewed threats of conflict, Sky News has learnt.

Officials are now starting to develop a cross-government “national defence plan”, it can be revealed.

Dr Keith Dear, a former RAF intelligence officer and former adviser on national security, science and technology to the prime minister, argues below that it is reasonable for the public to assume there are detailed plans for any anticipated conflicts.

The US secretary of state warns we are “moving from a post-war to a pre-war world” and that “in five years’ time we could be looking at multiple theatres involving Russia, China, Iran and North Korea”.

The chief of the general staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders tell us that we are the “pre-war generation”.

The public might reasonably expect, therefore, that there are detailed plans, regularly refreshed, which would ensure we are prepared in advance for these anticipated conflicts, expected to be dramatically larger and more deadly than anything fought in recent memory – wars we might lose.

Surely, government departments, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office, the intelligence agencies and our armed forces have a plan to know what to do when it starts, are structured according to the requirements, and can respond quickly?

Such plans are essential not only to avoid scrambling disorder and early defeats but also so that our adversaries, awed by our preparedness, are deterred from fighting in the first place.

The problem is, there is no plan.

We used to have one. Maintained by the government until the early 2000s, the central Government War Book sensibly detailed plans for the continuity of government in the event of war and a possible nuclear exchange.

It was needed so those of us who survived didn’t awake to anarchy.

The book also contained essential plans for mobilising the country in response to the imminent threat and outbreak of conventional non-nuclear war.

To this central Government War Book, a whole series of subordinate war books were developed and maintained by all departments – most obviously the Ministry of Defence, Home Office and Foreign Office – but even the BBC had a War Book plan to sustain broadcast communications to an anxious public.

These were not abstract and vague, but planned against the specific, anticipatable wars we might face.

Today, there are no such plans.

The Government War Book was developed by the first modern pre-war generation – those living in the years preceding 1918 – under the leadership of ex-Royal Marine and first cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey.

The War Book was interdepartmental, and detailed what needed to be done, where, and by whom, both in preparing for war should we reach the “precautionary stage”, and upon its outbreak the “war stage”.

A copy of the Ministry of Defence’s 1963 War Book in the National Archives shows it to be detailed, and comprehensive, referencing multiple tightly coordinated, supporting plans across the government and beyond.

In 1935, the last pre-war generation also worried war might come in five years. Consequently, our government then began to refresh the War Book in earnest.

Concurrently in 1935, the UK began building its military, and military-industrial preparedness.

For example, Lord Weir, the Scottish industrialist, was appointed to oversee a plan he had earlier proposed: building “shadow factories” adjacent to automotive factories, ready to manufacture aircraft at scale when war broke out.

The government thought deeper too, considering the need to be able to manufacture the machine tools on which factories would themselves depend, and those that could automate elements of manufacturing to speed up the rearmament effort and free up people for other tasks in the war effort, investing public funds accordingly.

The preparation was such that, after some dithering, on 23 August 1939, the government began to implement the pre-war “precautionary stage” of the plan.

Within a week, by 31 August, almost all the precautionary stage measures had been actioned. The War stage was actioned with the declaration of war a day later.

Today’s pre-war generation has had two warnings: first from COVID, and then from Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine.

The government’s response to the pandemic, where there was no plan worthy of the name, and mostly chaos for months, allows us to imagine what it would be like if war were to come without a plan to mobilise for it and to fight it.

Similarly, our inability to supply anything like enough munitions or weapons to Ukraine, shows also how hollowed out we have become by buying and building armed forces to no coherent war-fighting plan. Weapons without ammunition are useless. And we can’t know if we have the right weapons, either.

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If the secretary of state’s warnings of war sound alarmist, consider this: the director of the CIA suggests China seeks to be ready for an invasion of Taiwan from 2027.

The chair of the US House Select Committee says that 2027 may be the end, not the beginning of the window for when an attack on Taiwan is most likely.

A leaked internal memo suggests at least one four-star general in the US Air Force expects a war with China in 2025. In Europe, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas believes that Russia may threaten NATO‘s borders within three years.

Sweden’s civil defence minister and commander-in-chief warns Sweden must prepare for war now.

Even in what was until recently a deeply pacifist Japan, over 86% of citizens polled believe their country may have to go to war, while their government has doubled its defence budget.

The government would say there is a plan. Whitehall lists resilience frameworks, alert systems, risk registers and regular meetings.

What these things have in common is none of them amount to anything Hankey, or any reasonable observer, would regard as a plan – explaining what we think could happen, and specifically who needs to do what, when, to respond effectively.

The long disaggregated, disconnected nature of the various government artefacts speak of their own weakness, with commitments to what we will have done by 2030 and beyond. Not a plan for how to respond if X or Y happened tomorrow.

If we are five years from war, it is worth contemplating Lord Weir’s question, posed to the last pre-war generation in 1935: “Are we doing all we ought to anticipate by proper planning and arrangement the grave delays which were the feature of our almost fatal unpreparedness in 1914?”

Today, there is no plan. It is hard to imagine how we could be doing less.

UK

UK weather: Warning over flight delays as fog forces ‘air traffic restrictions’

Published

2 hours ago

December 28, 2024

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UK weather: Warning over flight delays as fog forces 'air traffic restrictions'

Flight delays are expected as the UK sees more heavy fog.

It comes after 20,000 people were affected by airport disruption on Thursday, according to travel journalist Simon Calder.

“Temporary air traffic restrictions have been put in place due to fog causing poor visibility. Some flights may be delayed throughout the day,” a spokesperson for Gatwick Airport said.

“London Gatwick apologises for any inconvenience. Passengers should contact their airline for further information,” they added.

At Gatwick 35 departures scheduled up to 11am are delayed and 26 flight arrivals are delayed up to the same time. Two flights are cancelled. At Heathrow 20 flight departures scheduled to leave before 11am are delayed. At Manchester airport 16 arrivals are delayed up to 11am.

Speaking to Anna Jones on Sky News Breakfast about the disruption yesterday Mr Calder said: “We had at London City Airport, at London Heathrow, the busiest in Britain, at London Gatwick, the second busiest, more than 40 cancellations in and out from each of those airports.”

The thick fog will continue on Saturday according to the Met Office, with some areas seeing visibility reduced to just 100 metres.

Get the weather forecast where you are

The worst of the fog is forecast to hit the South East and central England, while East Anglia and parts of South Wales will also be affected.

Forecasters have not issued any fog weather warnings yet but the Met Office said it will monitor the situation across the weekend.

Met Office meteorologist Liam Eslick said: “It’s that time of year when people are travelling around the country a lot and there are a lot of people on the roads.

“There is a lot of fog covering much of England, mainly the South East and central England, but the rest of the country is seeing quite a bit of thick fog too.

“It will be pretty murky on Saturday morning and there will still be fog patches that will take a little longer to clear.”

Meanwhile, there is a yellow warning in place for heavy rain in parts of Scotland for Monday and New Year’s Eve on Tuesday, leaving the start of 2025 “distinctly unsettled”.

Edinburgh’s Hogmanay celebrations could face “significant disruption” from rain, with organisers warning audiences to “prepare for all weather, wrap up warm and double-check with your travel operator for the latest updates.”

The yellow warning could see as much as 140mm (5.5in) of rain in places, as other parts of the UK will likely see rain, wind and possibly even snow later on next week.

The Met Office added that “more warnings are likely to be issued”.

At Heathrow, British Airways was forced to cancel a handful of flights due to fog on Friday, while others were delayed.

Flights at both Gatwick and Manchester Airport were disrupted, with delays of up to three hours at Gatwick, and some passengers were diverted to other airports.

“The diversions were absolutely extreme,” said Mr Calder. At Teesside Airport, flights were diverted to Newcastle, Aberdeen and even Dublin.

This could continue into the weekend if the misty weather persists.

A spokesperson for the UK’s main air traffic control provider Nats said it had implemented “temporary air traffic restrictions” at several airports on Friday due to the fog.

Can I get compensation if my flight is delayed?

If your flight is affected by the disruption, you won’t be able to get any cash back, according to Mr Calder, as “bad weather is beyond the airline’s control”.

“However, every airline that cancels a flight is obliged to find for its passengers an alternative flight as soon as possible,” he said.

While the fog likely won’t remain past the weekend, people should not hold out hope for sustained sunshine with wet and windy conditions expected for much of the country, the Met Office said.

UK

Kemi Badenoch needs to pick her battles – and decide how dirty she wants to get

Published

19 hours ago

December 27, 2024

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Kemi Badenoch needs to pick her battles - and decide how dirty she wants to get

Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty. And besides, the pig likes it.

Looking at the festive ding-dong that’s broken out between Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, you do wonder if the Tory leader should take on board this famous quote – because there was only ever going to be one winner from this spat.

The Reform UK leader has spent the thick end of three decades dragging his political opponents into fights that ultimately benefit his cause. This is no different.

What would have been a relatively low-key Christmas stunt has been elevated into literal front page news.

Reform UK insiders say that, in turn, is driving more people to the party and pushing up their member count further.

Part of this is down to news editors grabbing on to any bit of politics that’s around during the quiet period between Christmas and New Year.

Why Badenoch and her team didn’t clock this and hold back will likely bewilder some in her party.

An argument the Tories should have swerved

What’s more, the Tory leader is also currently on the back foot regarding her central accusation that the Reform membership number is fake.

Reform agreed to show Sky News details of their account on NationBuilder – a platform that manages memberships and donations for many political parties.

The number of active memberships in the account portal matched the figure on the ticker – with their website count growing in size shortly after the NationBuilder tally increased.

Sky News also conducted its own analysis on the ticker and found nothing suspicious as it stands (read the full analysis here).

Kemi Badenoch has said Reform changed the coding when people began to point out the alleged discrepancy, but has yet to provide any evidence to back this up.

Either way, this is still an argument the Tories should probably have swerved.

All politicians need to pick their battles

Yes, signed-up members mean more income for a party, but they don’t necessarily translate into wider electoral success. After all, Labour’s membership surged under Jeremy Corbyn, but he still lost two elections.

But that’s not to say both main parties shouldn’t be looking very closely in their rearview mirror at Reform.

The party’s reaction to this row shows a far more professional behind-the-scenes operation than the previous, more ramshackle incarnations of the Farage-led political machine.

Talk to long time allies of the Reform leader, and even they sound somewhat surprised by how slick their project has got.

They also point to electoral milestones on the horizon where the party’s results at the ballot box can be objectively tracked – beginning with May’s local elections next year and running through the Welsh Assembly vote in 2026.

There’ll be many more attempts by Nigel Farage to wrestle with his political opponents before then.

The task for the Tory and indeed Labour leaders is to pick their fights and judge how dirty they are prepared to get.

UK

Nigel Farage threatens legal action if Kemi Badenoch doesn’t apologise for saying membership ticker was ‘fake’

Published

20 hours ago

December 27, 2024

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Nigel Farage threatens legal action if Kemi Badenoch doesn't apologise for saying membership ticker was 'fake'

Nigel Farage has threatened to take legal action against Tory leader Kemi Badenoch if she does not apologise for accusing him of publishing a “fake” ticker showing Reform UK’s membership increasing to overtake the Conservatives.

The Reform UK leader has reacted furiously to Ms Badenoch’s assertion that he was “manipulating [his] own supporters” with a ticker that is “coded to tick up automatically” after it showed the insurgent right-wing party had gone past 131,680 members – the number of eligible Conservative Party members in its leadership election in the autumn.

He is demanding an apology from Ms Badenoch for the “accusations of fraud and dishonesty” that he labelled “disgraceful”, and said he is “not going to take it lying down”.

Asked by Sky News in a call with journalists if he is going to sue the Tory leader for libel, Mr Farage said: “I’m going to take some action in the next couple of days. I’ve got to decide exactly what it is, but I’m certainly not going to take it lying down.”

“I think it’s an absolutely outrageous thing for her to have said,” he continued. “I know she’s got a very bad temper. I know she’s well known for lashing out at people, but I am not at all happy, and I’m going to take some action.”

He added that he will confirm within two days exactly what this action will be if she does not apologise for the “intemperate outburst”.

Analysis: Badenoch needs to pick her battles

Reform showed Sky News the coding used to link the ticker to the member count within their account on the platform NationBuilder. The demonstration provided strong evidence that the ticker was not automated. Scroll down for the full analysis.

A Tory source told Sky News: “Fake Farage is clearly rattled that his Boxing Day Publicity Stunt is facing serious questions over a fake clock and hundreds of ‘members’ seemingly joining in the middle of the night.

“Like most normal people around the UK, Kemi is enjoying Christmas with her family and looking forward to taking on the challenges of renewing the Conservative Party in the New Year.”

‘It’s a fake’

The row started after Reform UK said on Boxing Day that it officially had more members than the Conservative Party, which Mr Farage, party leader and MP for Clacton-on-Sea, hailed as a “historic moment”, describing his party as “the real opposition”.

Reform UK also shared a video of the membership tracker being projected on to the Conservative Party headquarters in London.

But Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused the party of issuing misleading figures: “Manipulating your own supporters at Xmas eh, Nigel?. It’s not real. It’s a fake… [the website has been] coded to tick up automatically.”

Posting on X, she added that the Tories had “gained thousands of new members since the leadership election”.

Reform UK hit back at Ms Badenoch, publishing a screenshot of an online register claiming to show “active memberships”.

Do Reform’s claims stack up?

Ben van der Merwe

Data journalist

@_bvdm

Some tickers are indeed “coded to tick up automatically”. This is often done when the data isn’t updated regularly and so, in the meantime, the counter is made to increase at realistic intervals.

Any ticker showing government debt, unemployment or global temperatures, for instance, is almost certainly going up at a regular, pre-programmed rate.

Sky News analysed Reform UK’s ticker to see if this was the case for their membership ticker.

Specifically, we looked at a video posted by Nigel Farage on X, which shows an uninterrupted view of the counter from 4pm on Christmas Day to 2pm on Boxing Day.

The chart above shows the number of new members added every 30 minutes during that 22-hour stretch.

What we can see is that it varies a lot – very few people join overnight, and there is a big surge from around 11am on Boxing Day.

This was around the time that it was first reported Reform UK had acquired more members than the Conservatives, which provided a burst of publicity to the party.

If the ticker was simply increasing automatically, we would expect a much flatter line.

Political parties in the UK aren’t required to reveal their membership numbers, much less provide data that can be independently verified.

However, Reform UK did show Sky News its account on Nation Builder, an independent platform widely used by political parties and campaigns to track and manage their memberships.

Sky News was able to verify that the number of memberships in Reform’s NationBuilder account matched the number presented on their on-site ticker.

The Conservative Party had 131,680 members as of the November leadership contest, while Labour had 366,604 members as of March 2024.

Reform UK chair Zia Yusuf also waded into the row, claiming that people whose memberships of the Tory party had lapsed voted in the autumn leadership election that saw Ms Badenoch elected to the role.

In a call with journalists earlier, he repeated the assertion, and after putting out a call on social media for people to contact him if they had voted in the leadership election but are no longer party members, he said he has received “just so many” that he has not yet been able to verify their claims.

Ms Badenoch and the Conservative Party have been contacted for comment.

Reform UK has said it will submit to an audit of its membership numbers by one of the “big four” accountancy firms if the Tories do the same.

Farage gets personal

Speaking to journalists earlier, Mr Farage was very critical of Ms Badenoch personally, saying her claim that their membership number ticker had been faked “reflects her personality”.

He labelled her “aggressive” and “liable to lashing out”, and said he thinks she wrote her tweet out of a “slight sense of anger”.

“She’s got to fully disprove this, and she’s going to find life a lot more difficult and bitterly regret putting this out on Boxing Day afternoon,” he added.