Most European countries have a version of this, but what is driving Britain’s “be prepared” campaign seems to be:

• Seeing what happened during COVID.
• Russia et all doing shit.
• Several rounds of cyber attacks.
• America making noises about Greenland and getting concerning and less reliable over all.
• Effects of climate change (Heatwaves and Storms).

Basically a load of civil servants have been asked to figure out how we can be prepared for emergencies and they’ve come back with “people should be ready for a disaster so we have some wiggle room during our response”.

A lot of it in reality is just general advice to save the government some energy if something does happen and a lot of other countries have more extraordinary things (The Netherlands have disaster sirens, Poland has bomb shelters).

Do I think it’s preparation for a war? No. I’m not getting Protect And Survive vibes, but things are getting rather concerning in terms of things like methods of attack (cyber attacks) and climate change (we just had some horrible Heatwaves). Basically the government is asking people to prepare for disasters in case something happens that they don’t expect (like what happened with COVID).