Ian Parker-Joseph remarks on counter-insurgency preparations in Germany and the UK. He asks:
Are they really expecting the population to begin rioting?
Answer: yes. Since the start of the First World War all British emergency planning (I can’t speak for the Germans) has been based upon the principle of the population as the government’s most serious problem and potentially its worst enemy.
This, while consistently played down, is hardly a state secret. Any ‘Easingwold man’ will tell you.
What does the Government know and have in store for us that they need to prepare so many big brother laws, databases, cameras and now make provisions for riot police?
Don’t know, exactly. During the Cold War I was involved with a number of civil-defence exercises (including a couple of the notorious ones). All of these featured the use of food stocks as a bargaining counter between the embattled government and the starving population. Hitherto food supplies (of a sort) were kept in semi-secret MAFF Buffer Depots (when at school, I used to row on a canal past one such), but these have now been closed.
I can’t find any hard information on the current UK food reserve, but contacts in the nuclear bunker community once told me that it was formerly about six weeks’ worth, but is now no more than two. This is probably because of the obsession in the business world, including food retail, with ‘just-on-time delivery’ and other modern efficiency measures, which presumably result in there being less food in transit within the country at any given time than there would otherwise have been.
The general public, several generations of whom have been bribed with creature-comforts of a more or less contrived kind to tolerate the excesses of increasingly totalitarian government, are no longer accustomed to the idea of eating Woolton pie, and might be expected to react somewhat critically to any shortage of the usual branded and massively advertised foods.
As indeed they might to such a shortage of aviation fuel as to prejudice their annual descent upon the hapless descendants of the once-proud Dons. Or to such economic strictures as might compromise their regular purchase of new cars, enormous television sets, computer games, sportswear, etc.
Given that it would take the diversion or fuel exhaustion of only one huge container ship to turn the nation’s children into millions of Christmas gremlins, that the slightest hiccup in the food supply system will result in immediate shortages, reinforced by hoarding, and that the lights will shortly go out, I’m a little surprised to see the government still above ground at all.
The title, BTW, is from Threads, a TV film about the consequences of a nuclear attack, which was shown at the same time as the then recently unbanned, and greatly superior, The War Game (which I remember seeing as an ‘underground film’ in the 1970s).
