Look up. You might imagine that, under a British sky in January, a good old umbrella will keep you safe from the worst that the clouds above can throw at you.
But the stormclouds forming over the UK are more dangerous than anything we’ve seen in our lifetime. And if bombs, drones, missiles or rockets begin to fall out of the sky, we have very little to protect us.
The same is true of attack by sea, on the land, and by modern electronic methods. We have allowed our defences to drop to perilous levels.
Despite what most people think, for instance, London has no Iron Dome to fend off aerial attack. Britain is living with a false sense of security, fostered by the efficiency with which Israel – aided by its British and US allies – has been able to swat away Iranian missile salvoes.
Such anti-missile defences as we possess rely on the skill and rapid reactions of a small cadre of RAF Typhoon fighter pilots and the exceptional Sea Viper ordnance mounted on Royal Navy Type 45 destroyers such as HMS Daring.
Our few jets and nimble ships cannot be everywhere at once, and the ammunition each one carries is limited.
It would be physically impossible for them to fend off a sustained bombardment. Our skies are not safe, and nor is any of us in Britain today.
I know you don’t want to believe me. The prospect of war is too awful to contemplate. It can’t possibly happen, can it? Not in a country where we can walk into any supermarket and buy blueberries in January.
A grab taken from footage released by the Russian Defence Ministry on March 1, 2024 purporting to show the test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile
Prime Minister Keir Starmer holds a press conference, following his first cabinet meeting at Downing Street on July 6
HMS Diamond, a Type 45 destroyer, currently on operations in the Mediterranean sea, tests its defence systems
Life in Britain, for the most part, is safe and civilised. By the standards of many other parts of the world, we are blessed, privileged, even pampered. We look at the horrors in Ukraine and the Middle East, and thank God that has not been our fate.
But the appalling truth is that we are already embroiled in a one-sided war, under constant threat and sometimes open attack from the demented regime of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. We think we are not yet at war with Russia, but Russia is at war with us and the whole of Western Europe.
And it is not only Russia. China, North Korea and Iran also wish harm on us, and though they are unlikely to embark on a naked attack against Britain, they can use any number of terrorist proxy groups in North Africa and the Middle East to strike at us.
Yet making the public aware of the pressing dangers is proving almost impossible, because quite understandably no one wants to hear it. The blueberries are still on the shelves, after all.
It is imperative for the government to take action and force Britain to see the threats. It’s not enough for security experts to issue warnings on television, or even for newspapers to publish urgent editorials. We need to permeate the public consciousness. I believe the most effective way is to establish a Ministry for Civil Defence, charged with training millions of people in how to respond to an attack.
The first priority is information – right now, for instance, most people have no idea of what to do in the event of a cyber-attack that knocks out the internet or the mobile phone network.
Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets launched from the Gaza Strip in January
The next step is to build up national resilience. We saw during Covid how quick people were to panic, with supermarkets emptied of lavatory paper and other supplies. Every home ought to have a back-up supply of food and toiletries as standard.
Britain has much to be proud of, in the way communities responded to the pandemic. Streets and tower blocks set up support groups, sharing skills and looking after each other. We need that mindset now.
During Covid, and also following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the British stepped up. People donated their time to make sure neighbours were safe, and their spare rooms to ensure refugees had a warm bed.
If people understood how grave the threat is today, I have no doubt they would step up again. Everyone has a role to play. We need volunteer medics, drivers, artisans, nurses, carers – all sorts of skills to see us through an emergency.
And we need soldiers. Britain’s military reserves have been chronically underfunded and allowed to ebb for decades, though as a former Honorary Colonel of a squadron of the Kent and Sharpshooters Yeomanry, I know better than most how dedicated and well-trained these units are.
Every part of the British Army has been hollowed out. Recruitment to take it back to full strength, even with all the funding required, would be a slow job.
A Ministry of Civil Defence could restore our reserves with schemes to train armies of the willing.
There’s nothing outlandish about that – Sweden and Finland, which are far more awake to the threat of war than we are, have the capability to mobilise tens of thousands of part-time soldiers within 24 hours.
The Left will sneer at the very idea. But our enemies look at us now, and see we are soft. We’re not just unwilling to fight: we’re not capable.
Pictured: A battery of Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system deployed near Jerusalem on April 15, 2024
Houthis-made mock missiles and drones are displayed at a square in Sana’a, Yemen, on December 21
Even if we could recruit 20,000 young men and women as volunteer soldiers, they’d have no weapons or ammunition. They’d have no place to go, no barracks, no command structure – nothing.
Meanwhile, our communications networks are being hacked. Our social media is flooded with disinformation and poison, stirring up savage division. Our free elections are targeted. Our undersea cables are cut, our military bases buzzed by drones, our infrastructure sabotaged.
Assassinations have been carried out on British soil. Financial and media companies are regularly blacked out. Bombs have been placed on cargo flights.
How long can this go on before people recognise the crisis that is coming to the boil? The answer is – not much longer, because every expert I talk to warns the undeclared war of sabotage and intimidation will soon erupt into overwhelming violence.
And Britain is completely unprepared. My admiration for the men and women of Britain’s armed forces is boundless – but they are pitifully ill-equipped.
Successive governments have allowed our defence spending to dwindle to less than half of what it was at the end of the Cold War.
We gratefully accepted the ‘peace dividend’ with the fall of the Berlin Wall and ploughed the savings into public services and welfare. But that sense of relief quickly turned to complacency.
I have seen the atrophy of our defences both as a soldier and as a politician.
In 1967, aged 19, I was commissioned into the British Army on the Rhine, stationed with the 11th Hussars in northern Germany. Like many thousands of Daily Mail readers who have also served, I was charged with defending Western Europe from attack across the Iron Curtain.
That army numbered more than 50,000 soldiers. Back then, we were spending 5 per cent of GDP on defence.
A boy rides a donkey near one of the batteries of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system
I fought my first election in 1979 and served as Minister of State for the Armed Forces under John Major from 1994 to 1997, and then as Shadow Defence Secretary from 2003-2005. Never during my time in the Commons and later the House of Lords have I seen the world as dangerous as it is now.
Yet we now spend approximately 2.33 per cent of GDP on defence, a figure that falls to around 1.5 per cent when the cost of our nuclear deterrent is set to one side.
Our Trident warheads and nuclear submarines are a crucial element of Britain’s defences. We dare not do without them.
But we must also recognise that their purpose is wholly as a deterrent, to prevent Russia or some other nuclear power from holding us to ransom.
Nukes are of little use in deflecting other kinds of attack, even an outrage such as the sinking of a ship or the downing of a jet. To protect against that, we need more ships and more jets.
The parallels with the 1930s, when my grandfather Winston Churchill was a lone voice sounding the alarm, are too vivid to be ignored. I hasten to emphasise that I am not my grandfather – I don’t have his vision, his eloquence, his charisma or his energy.
That’s part of Britain’s problem today, because there are no leaders remotely comparable to Winston. Our Parliament is crammed with political pygmies, obsessed with infighting and Net Zero.
As long as our leaders fail to take the international threat seriously, the general public never will. I worry that it is going to take a major catastrophe before Parliament and the public wake up to the dangers we face.
If we continue to ignore the darkening skies, the thunderstorm will break. When it does, it will be ordinary people who bear the brunt of an attack. In the worst-case scenario, that could be a barrage of hypersonic medium-range Oreshnik missiles, launched from the Kapustin Yar testing range in the Astrakhan region, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, and travelling at 11 times the speed of sound.
Conservative Lord Nicholas Soames departs following a memorial service for the former Commons Speaker Betty Boothroyd, on January 16 last year
Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) with his grandson Nicholas Soames in 1954
Unlike cruise missiles, these follow a trajectory that takes them to the edge of space. Some types then release a glider that skims the edge of the atmosphere, making twists and turns to evade interception as it plunges towards its target.
Loaded with thermobaric warheads, each equivalent to more than 40 tons of TNT, these detonate in mid-air, sending a shockwave of furnace-like heat that obliterates everything in a wide radius.
One hitting the centre of Manchester, Glasgow or Birmingham would kill tens of thousands of people. The consequences of a direct hit on a nuclear power station are incalculable.
Without a comprehensive anti-missile system – not only the Iron Dome, which blocks short-range rockets and mortar shells, but defences such as the Israeli Arrow, which takes out ballistic missiles – we are essentially helpless.
You might believe that even Putin is not insane enough to unleash such an attack, and I hope you’re right. But without doubt he and other dictators, such as the Ayatollah in Tehran, are intent on using other subtler forms of warfare that will wreak havoc.
The most obvious of these is to disrupt our food supply chains. This can be done from thousands of miles away, by blocking waterways such as the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal. It can also be done by piracy, attacking container ships on the high seas.
Defending against all these threats at once is beyond any nation. We must prioritise our defence spending according to the greatest threats – and the wolf nearest the sleigh is clearly Russia.
By that, I mean it is to the European front and Nato that we need to make our greatest contribution. Sending our aircraft carrier around the Far East is of course a formidable signal to friend and foe, but the Pacific is not our immediate theatre of war. The most dangerous waters are closer to home.
Those seas make us vulnerable, but for a thousand years Britain has relied on them to repel attack. We are an island, and this has saved us many times, from Napoleon, from Hitler and from the Armada.
But it won’t save us this time. Our island status can’t protect us against missiles, terrorism or cyber-attacks.
We need to do much more. A Ministry of Civil Defence is the quickest and surest means to organise it. The Prime Minister must act now to make it happen.
– Lord (Nicholas) Soames was Minister of State for the Armed Forces, 1994-1997
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