UK resilience in uncertain times

[Class 317]

Given we are in increasingly uncertain times with increasing geopolitical threats from Russia, Iran and elsewhere coupled with increasingly unpredictable weather what do people think the UK should do to build better resilience.

To start the conversation I suggest the following:
- Increase homegrown food supplies.
- Stockpile key materials including metal ores, rare earths.
- Require the utilities to stockpile spare parts and equipment you to and including things like transformers.
- Survey buildings and other structures for emergency use.

 

[xdbjacx]

Decouple our military and intelligence operations as quickly as possible from states whose actions systematically undermine our resilience, e.g. by needlessly sparking conflict in the Middle East, deliberately disrupting global supply chains, or by openly supporting the sinister machinations of the Russian regime.

 

[AlterEgo]

Encourage young people to join some form of uniformed youth organisation. The Scouts and cadet forces are great for building more resilient young people for example by exposing them to responsibility and unique experiences.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Plan to build more nuclear power stations and build domestic skills regarding them, as well as renewals, and accelerate moves away from fossil fuels in all forms, be that home heating, rail or road towards electricity.

 

[sor]

And loosen planning news in pursuit of the same. Sorry, that power station / mobile phone mast / reservoir is part of our resilience plan, so it's going ahead anyway and we'll pass new laws so you can't tie it up in legal challenges for 30 years

 

[The exile]

How about “there is such a thing as society - and what’s more, it comes first”.

 

[Class 317]

The suggestions that people should be more resilient and a sense of society are good but they only go so far in creating a resilient country.

Infrastructure and key facilities need to be resilient too.

 

[The exile]

The suggestions that people should be more resilient and a sense of society are good but they only go so far in creating a resilient country.

Infrastructure and key facilities need to be resilient too.

Absolutely, but that’s outside the (immediate) control of any one individual and takes a bit longer to achieve. And, tbh, is going to be very hard to achieve while people are only thinking of their own short term comfort.

 

[cb a1]

In broad terms, resilience is a trade-off with efficiency / convenience.
I saw a good idiom about convenience on Bluesky the other day. "Convenience is like a ratchet. Easily accepted in one direction, huge resistance in the other."
How far do we need to go? At the extreme end, you have preppers. Once you get past the guns, their aim is for no supply chain dependency.
Next tier could be to look at remote communities where it is very expensive to connect them to grid and supply networks. For energy, they are bypassing expensive grid infra with distributed community solar, wind and battery solutions for energy independence. Power stations, be it nuclear, fossil fuel, hydro dams, etc. are highly vulnerable nodes (depending on the nature of the threat). A distributed system reduces node dependency, but requires effort by many more individuals to fund and maintain their system. We also need to have a discussion about household occupancy. 10 people in 10 houses needs a lot more energy than 10 people in 1 house.
Food can allow a low level of specialism if coordinated, within limits of seasonal variation. Are you willing to live without avocado toast for breakfast , but seriously we are now used to having pretty much anything we want want any time of the year. However, with short supply chains, it allows for Joe to specialise in chickens and Maud to specialise in sheep and Angus to specialise in oats.

 

[Class 317]

In broad terms, resilience is a trade-off with efficiency / convenience.
I saw a good idiom about convenience on Bluesky the other day. "Convenience is like a ratchet. Easily accepted in one direction, huge resistance in the other."
How far do we need to go? At the extreme end, you have preppers. Once you get past the guns, their aim is for no supply chain dependency.
Next tier could be to look at remote communities where it is very expensive to connect them to grid and supply networks. For energy, they are bypassing expensive grid infra with distributed community solar, wind and battery solutions for energy independence. Power stations, be it nuclear, fossil fuel, hydro dams, etc. are highly vulnerable nodes (depending on the nature of the threat). A distributed system reduces node dependency, but requires effort by many more individuals to fund and maintain their system. We also need to have a discussion about household occupancy. 10 people in 10 houses needs a lot more energy than 10 people in 1 house.
Food can allow a low level of specialism if coordinated, within limits of seasonal variation. Are you willing to live without avocado toast for breakfast , but seriously we are now used to having pretty much anything we want want any time of the year. However, with short supply chains, it allows for Joe to specialise in chickens and Maud to specialise in sheep and Angus to specialise in oats.

All good points but increasing food self sufficiency does not necessarily mean not importing food just having enough food to feed the nation if imports are difficult by not exporting the surplus of other food stuff.

You are absolutely right on power stations etc. The balance has to be made between cost and resilience. Distribution of renewables over wide areas helps etc

They are also key manufacturing capabilities that need to be taken back to being made locally in the UK for critical industries, defence, medical, agriculture etc.

Ports are another example where we rely on a limited number of larger ports for most trade. What's the back up if they were to become unusable for a period of time considering we rely on so much imported stuff for our economy?

 

[AlterEgo]

What's the plan on making the UK self sufficient on food then? A state of affairs not seen since the Napoleonic Wars.

 

[Class 317]

What's the plan on making the UK self sufficient on food then? A state of affairs not seen since the Napoleonic Wars.

It's a case of making use less reliance on imports. Our food self sufficiency has been dropping steadily over the last couple of decades so reversing this is the key rather than trying to become 100% self sufficient.

Don't forget also it's it just food availability it making sure it's being eaten in the right qtys and not going to waste.

 

[greatkingrat]

Encourage young people to join some form of uniformed youth organisation. The Scouts and cadet forces are great for building more resilient young people for example by exposing them to responsibility and unique experiences.

It's not that young people don't want to join such organisations, more that there is a lack of people willing or able to volunteer to lead.

 

[AndrewE]

It's not that young people don't want to join such organisations, more that there is a lack of people willing or able to volunteer to lead.

Good point.
There was some discussion recently about volunteer groups (working parties) as a way for NEETS to get experience of regular attendance, group achievement and hence "job" satisfaction and it struck me that there is an enormous amount of work needing doing (one example) just to block up drainage channels on the peat moors. I guess rolling out any volunteer thing on a wider scale brings big overheads like admin, accommodation and Safeguarding, especially in remote areas. National Service in the forces wouldn't work as they seem to be unable to get to grips with the Safeguarding bit...
Conservation work would be an easy win, as there is no body of workers who previously did the work but who have been casualised and driven down onto minimum wages. Unlike if you turned the potential forced labour into a "scab" workforce doing stuff that should have been a local authority responsibility with proper paid workers doing it.

 

[Darandio]

It's a case of making use less reliance on imports. Our food self sufficiency has been dropping steadily over the last couple of decades so reversing this is the key rather than trying to become 100% self sufficient.

Well yes but how do we do it. It's already been asked, what's the plan?

 

[cb a1]

Define self-sufficient in food (as well as many other things). Take, for example, meat. There is land in the UK that is frankly only fit for grass and thus meat and dairy products (esp. if we started eating goat and goat products). Conversely, the rough ratio is that you need 10kg of animal feed to create 1kg of meat. Where that animal feed is food that humans can eat, then you get a lot more bang for your kg of food, feeding it to humans rather than animals.

Go back in time and we did all of this pretty damn efficiently, but then we made the transport costs way cheaper.

My great-grandfather had a dairy in Liverpool in Victorian times. The cow(s) lived in the dairy and large volumes of grass and hay were transported to the cow. No-one had refrigeration and so you need the milk to be generated close (in time) to where the consumers were. As transport times (and costs) reduced, the cows were moved to fields and comparatively small volumes of milk were now moved to the cities.
This is an example of how supply chains change over time in response to changing transport costs / times. That's a very simple two-step supply chain which simply moved the intermediary.

I used to live in Dundee, former home of jute, jam and journalism. An elderly lady who lived across from me, was actually born in India when the jute industry moved there due to changes in transport costs.

This is a story from the Guardian 13 years ago, about how many miles are involved in making a tennis ball for Wimbledon - https://www.theguardian.com/environ.../26/wimbledon-tennis-balls-miles-centre-court. It's an illustration of how amazingly efficient (and cheap) we have made the global transport trade but also how fragile our world now is. Take out one major shipping route (e.g. Suez or Panama Canal) and costs rise significantly.

 

[styles]

For some things, I think it's important not to be absolutist about them. Take food as an example. I do think we rely too heavily on imported food. And I do think people could increase their household resilience by growing some of their own food. But realistically a lot of people don't have the garden space for it, people living in high rises may have no garden space at all even. Even with a modest sized garden, you're not going to grow a massive amount of produce. Mass production in food is going to remain necessary to some extent, but it's increasingly difficult for farmers whether it's climate change, Brexit, government tax policies, etc. Moving in the general direction towards greater self-sufficiency when it comes to food is what we should aim for, but it doesn't need to be that we only ever consume UK-made grains and meat. It just needs to be more resilient to potentially losing trading partners through wars or absolutely bonkers heads of state severing long standing trade relationships.

Similar with fuel. The quickest and cheapest electricity generation to create from boots in the ground today is renewables and we should invest heavily in them and at pace. We should bolster this with nuclear in the longer term. We don't need to have zero imports, as we can store energy and limit consumption if needed to weather certain events, but we are really suffering from a combination of relying on imports and also giving contracts for building infrastructure to private companies, typically owned by overseas investors. If it's profitable for EDF, it should be a sound investment for the UK government.

 

[Broucek]

Good point.
There was some discussion recently about volunteer groups (working parties) as a way for NEETS to get experience of regular attendance, group achievement and hence "job" satisfaction and it struck me that there is an enormous amount of work needing doing (one example) just to block up drainage channels on the peat moors. I guess rolling out any volunteer thing on a wider scale brings big overheads like admin, accommodation and Safeguarding, especially in remote areas. National Service in the forces wouldn't work as they seem to be unable to get to grips with the Safeguarding bit...
Conservation work would be an easy win, as there is no body of workers who previously did the work but who have been casualised and driven down onto minimum wages. Unlike if you turned the potential forced labour into a "scab" workforce doing stuff that should have been a local authority responsibility with proper paid workers doing it.

This appeals to me. But a significant proportion of people in the NEED population aren't ever so employable which makes using them quite tricky....

 

[The exile]

For some things, I think it's important not to be absolutist about them. Take food as an example. I do think we rely too heavily on imported food. And I do think people could increase their household resilience by growing some of their own food. But realistically a lot of people don't have the garden space for it, people living in high rises may have no garden space at all even. Even with a modest sized garden, you're not going to grow a massive amount of produce. Mass production in food is going to remain necessary to some extent, but it's increasingly difficult for farmers whether it's climate change, Brexit, government tax policies, etc. Moving in the general direction towards greater self-sufficiency when it comes to food is what we should aim for, but it doesn't need to be that we only ever consume UK-made grains and meat. It just needs to be more resilient to potentially losing trading partners through wars or absolutely bonkers heads of state severing long standing trade relationships.

Similar with fuel. The quickest and cheapest electricity generation to create from boots in the ground today is renewables and we should invest heavily in them and at pace. We should bolster this with nuclear in the longer term. We don't need to have zero imports, as we can store energy and limit consumption if needed to weather certain events, but we are really suffering from a combination of relying on imports and also giving contracts for building infrastructure to private companies, typically owned by overseas investors. If it's profitable for EDF, it should be a sound investment for the UK government.

Exactly - at least in terms of the general population, we’re not talking about surviving for ever (or even six months) but of having sufficient reserves / ability to manage without things to mean that a short term interruption to supplies / services is a nuisance rather than a disaster. Earlier generations either did it without thinking, or didn’t need to (there was coal in the bunker as opposed to suddenly finding no electricity)

 

[adc82140]

Have offline or even pen & paper backups for all critical systems like energy, water etc and test them regularly.

They may not run as efficiently, but it's a better alternative than just throwing in the towel when systems go down

 

[AndrewE]

Have offline or even pen & paper backups for all critical systems like energy, water etc and test them regularly.

er, that might help with your billing (eventually) but I can't see it helping to maintain your supply...

They may not run as efficiently, but it's a better alternative than just throwing in the towel when systems go down

Having a good-size tank in the attic will help out when the water mains supply fails (lucky us who [can] have them) and making sure that your battery can function as a UPS is a sensible precaution, in fact a no-brainer.
(In the main "resilience" line, I think every household should be given a battery, especially if they are in areas where renewables are often curtailed - like most of Scotland.)