Consciousness of Sheep
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Between 1945 and 1991, “emergency preparedness” was almost entirely concerned with something called “survivability” – an Orwellian term used in part to suggest that the authorities were concerned with people surviving a nuclear war. The impression was bolstered by the regular deployment of the military in response to civil emergencies, if only as a back-up to overwhelmed civilian authorities. But survivability had an altogether darker meaning. None of the people inside the British state’s Cold War apparatus believed that anyone was going to survive a nuclear exchange with the Soviet bloc… although, in the short-term, the living would likely envy the dead. And among those living would be various state actors, selected for the positions they held… their sole purpose being to maintain enough of a military system to be able to fire at least some of Britain’s nuclear arsenal in retaliation. That was it. Survivability meant only the survival of some of the western powers’ nuclear strike capacity.
One negative consequence of this was that few people thought seriously about responses to civilian emergencies… something that continues to plague unfortunate victims to this day. Here in the UK, there were often as many victims of the response than there were to disasters from floods to football stadium fires and from aeroplane crashes to crowd crushes. So that, when the Berlin wall finally fell, and the Soviet Union disintegrated before our eyes, the old Cold War functionaries were scrambling to justify their continued existence.
One stumbling block was that few disasters in the developed western states had big – by international standards – death tolls. In 1989, for example, two earthquakes of similar magnitude produced very different results. The Loma Prieta earthquake in California killed just 63 people, while a series of undersea quakes near Tonga killed thousands – each killing several hundreds at a time. Nobody died – at least directly – when the sea broke over the defences along the North Wales coast in 1990, nor in the sudden, massive downpour that inundated Boscastle in 2004. Compare that with the 3,800 deaths in the 1989 Sichuan flood in China, or the 3,000 deaths in the 2004 floods in Bangladesh. The key difference being in design standards for infrastructure. Californian structures may sway during earthquakes, but they seldom fall, while third world flood defences are often fragile where they exist at all. And part of the anticipated “peace dividend” might have been to divert the former Cold War funds into upgrading the infrastructure of less fortunate nations.
Obviously not… the section of the professional-managerial class concerned with fighting nuclear wars against the Soviet bloc was not about to declare itself redundant. Instead, it began to turn emergency preparedness on its head. Instead of the response to civil emergencies being a minor side benefit of war planning, in 2005 under Home Secretary Michael Howard, the old Cold War machine would be repurposed to primarily respond to civil emergencies, with war preparedness being the minor side effect.
There was though, still a problem of legitimacy. Most civil emergencies were small enough that local authorities could deal with them without external support. Meanwhile, those that ultimately spiralled into “major incidents” were difficult to identify in advance. Although, therein lay the justification for the existence of a new state-level emergency preparedness apparatus.
At a 1996 conference in Amsterdam, Chairman and disaster management guru Uri Rosenthal from Lieden University, set out what he referred to as “complex urban disasters” in contrast to the relatively simple rural disasters that continued to plague the third world. The danger in the developed states – and the reason why preparedness matters – is one of contagion… what begins as an emergency in one critical system can quickly spread to others, risking overwhelming the state itself. A crash at a key transport interchange might quickly overwhelm police resources while preventing paramedic services from operating. Key people and equipment may be unable to get through once traffic jams have grown sufficiently. And ultimately, the key transport routes across the country may be taken out. Similarly, what begins as a local electricity outage may result in systems tripping across the grid, resulting in a widespread blackout. And if this continues for more than a few hours, most of the water and sewage system (which relies on electric pumps) will fail too. Fuel will be unavailable to motorists because filling stations use electric pumps… as do some emergency services fuel systems. Shopping would be near impossible, since ATMs would fail along with electronic tills… and eventually, shops would have to throw away chilled and frozen foods.
Post-Cold War emergency preparedness – at least in theory – would plan responses to precisely this kind of cascading failure across critical infrastructure. But two competing versions of this emerged. The first involved the development of resilient communities whose skills and resources could be mobilised in the event of disaster striking. The second, and more acceptable to the professional-managerial class, involved fragile communities falling under the direction of military and police command… with the wrong assumption that the state could commandeer and deploy any resources that might be needed. And so, the British media learned the new acronym “Cobra” – the central command for emergencies affecting the UK (it should have been “Bra” – Briefing Room A – but that sounded too effeminate for the military types, so the “CO” – Cabinet Office was added).
The biggest problem with the centralised, top-down approach was that planning involved what military theorists refer to as “situating the appreciation.” That is, that people would behave in the manner allocated to them in the plans, and that events would unfold as predicted. In a complex system though, events and behaviours simply cannot be predicted in that way. And, as we have seen in emergencies from the 2008 banking crash to the mishandling of the Covid-19 world tour, state actors all too often appear as buffoons to a wider public which is often left to work out its own response (cue runs on toilet paper).
Operation Hopkinson (named after the civil servant who ran it) was a 2015 attempt to map out the likely chain of events that would result from a major power outage in the southwest of England. The report of the exercise was never published (it was leaked to the Telegraph newspaper) and for good reason. After five years of austerity cuts and the underlying slow-motion collapse that had begun in the 1970s, a cascade of failures overwhelmed the authorities before they could respond:
“Populations are far less resilient now than they once were… There is likely to be a very rapid descent into public disorder unless Government can maintain [the] perception of security… Any central Government response to the crisis may be too slow, arriving after the local emergency resources and critical utility contingency measures had already been consumed.”
This is undoubtedly correct in 2025, as most local services have been hollowed out and most people lack the resources to survive more than a few days of a cascading failure. Indeed, when it comes to the electricity grid, there is concern that the growing loss of “black-start “ capacity could result in outages lasting weeks or even months… during which most critical infrastructure and services would also fail.
Even this though, is not the biggest issue. Of greater concern is the unacknowledged assumption that both emergencies and emergency responses occur at the national or regional level. The Covid 19 world tour gave a hint of the chaos and mismanagement that would have added to a global disaster if the pathogen had been as deadly and as contagious as originally thought. Nor is it only pandemics that are global in impact. Beyond the show-stoppers – solar flares, asteroid impacts, etc. – the early stages of the 2008 crash threatened a different kind of cascade in which the sudden loss of money could take out global supply chains as there is no viable alternative to the fiat Eurodollar system for settling accounts internationally. And at a regional level, the recent power outage in Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France hinted at the potential chaos that may result from the stealth construction of a pan-European electricity grid… the government can hold as many Cobra meetings as it likes, but if the UK is shivering in the dark because of failures in the Belgian, Danish, Dutch, or French grids – which supply a fifth of our electricity these days – then those meetings are going to be largely powerless (if you’ll pardon the pun).
The biggest failure of all, however, is the misdiagnosis of the underlying collapse of western industrial civilisation. Because economics developed as a study of transactions rather than a science of human behaviour in a material world, economists and the political leaders they advised were entirely clueless when the western economies went into reverse in the early-1970s. From a material, energy-based perspective, it is obvious enough that by the 1970s, the abundant energy and resources that had absorbed the unprecedented currency creation of the post-war period had been used up. What remained was more difficult (i.e., requiring more energy) than previously… including energy itself. So that, as the energy cost of energy rose, the cost of the energy and resources underpinning the wider economy began to rise. This, in and of itself, caused supply-side price increases. But the crisis was exacerbated by governments creating new currency in the expectation that this would kick-start growth in the way it had done in the 1950s. Instead, of course, it created stagnation… one side effect of which was a growing trade union militancy as organised workers sought to defend their jobs and maintain their living standards.
It was politically expedient for the emerging neoliberal ideologues to mistake side effect for cause… paving the way for the economic vandalism of the early-1980s, from which whole swathes of the western nations have never recovered. The UK’s original “north-south divide” – which marked a rough geographical boundary between the coal-powered industry of the north and the oil/electric-powered industries of the south – was gradually replaced by today’s archipelago of pockets of prosperity adjacent to government, finance and the top-tier universities, surrounded by increasingly impoverished ex-industrial, rundown seaside and smalltown Britain.
This matters because in large part it means that most of the UK lacks the resources to respond to any cascade-threatening event that may occur. We are a decade on from Operation Hopkinson and even without the toxic combination of Brexit, lockdowns, and self-harming sanctions, things have not got any better. Moreover, on the other side of this self-inflicted decline, is a growing loss of legitimacy as people doubt the ability of the ruling classes to turn things around. Indeed, a growing part of the population is openly hostile (although not yet violently) to the authorities… which doesn’t auger well for an emergency preparedness architecture built on the assumption of trust and compliance.
In the absence of any energy-dense and versatile energy source to replace already depleting fossil fuels, collapse is a certainty. But what many people mistake for collapse is the periodic cascades and near cascades that punctuate it. The rising cost of energy and the inability of households and businesses to pay for it, points to an energy-based cascade sooner or later. The failure to address the root causes of the 2008 crash makes an even bigger financial meltdown inevitable too… which is a particularly bad problem for the UK because of its high dependence upon imports that it will soon be unable to pay for.
Nevertheless, it would be fanciful to imagine that even the UK would be reduced to something akin to the economy of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy as a consequence of a cascade of this magnitude. Rather – and despite the inevitable hardship and bloodshed – some new, and far less complex economy will emerge as people repurpose today’s physical wealth (just think of the volume of metal waiting to be repurposed) to more localised and self-contained economies… collapse, of course, will continue relentlessly.
Centralised planning – particularly via supranational organisations – serves only to exacerbate the negative outcomes at this point. Indeed, supranational government structures are already breaking down, even as bloated national governments are fast losing legitimacy. The command-and-control emergency preparedness technocrats may have won the battle in the 1990s. But it will be the community resilience people who will ultimately win the argument, because in future, action will only be possible at the community level.
As you made it to the end…
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