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![](/i/favi32.png) April 22nd-28th 2023 Ukraine’s game planThe first big test of new voterThe EconomistThe first big test of new voter
ID
rules is imminent
Bring ID or get your collar felt
Resilience
Beep prepared
T
he British
can talk for hours about
mundanities, from the best carjour
ney routes to the weather. Lately pubs and
coffee shops have quivered in anticipation
of a text. At 3pm on April 23rd mobile
phones across Britain will beep and buzz
for up to ten seconds, in a test of the gov
ernment’s new emergencyalerts system.
In a real crisis the alerts will warn citizens
of imminent threats to life in their area,
such as wildfires or floods, and offer prac
tical instructions (like “Prepare for evacua
tion” or “Don’t open the window”).
In countries like America and South Ko
rea, where alerts can go off daily, the idea of
a government text message is not that ex
citing. In Britain the test has become a na
tional event, scheduled carefully between
the London marathon and a semifinal of
the
FA
Cup, a football tournament. It is also
a sign that the country is relearning the
value of preparedness.
The focus on contingency planning has
ebbed and flowed over the decades. In a
new book, “Attack Warning Red! How Brit
ain Prepared for Nuclear War”, Julie McDo
wall writes of how in the 1950s the Wom
en’s Voluntary Services trained house
wives to withstand attack. They whipped
up concoctions of borax and ammonium
sulphate to douse a thatchedcottage roof
during a fire, and encouraged a population
still subject to rationing to stockpile veal
and sausages. Preparations for raising the
alarm were often farcical. One pub land
lord’s plan to alert his fellow villagers was
to pedal through the streets on his bicycle,
yelling “The Russians are coming!”
Nerves calmed with the end of the cold
war, until the September 11th terrorist at
tacks brought a renewed focus on risk as
sessment and contingency planning. But
after the London Olympics “we maybe got a
bit complacent”, suggests Susan Schole
field, a former head of the Civil Contingen
cies Secretariat, the emergencyplanning
arm of the Cabinet Office. The pandemic
provided a huge jolt: a public inquiry is
currently considering the shortcomings of
Britain’s preparedness for covid19. Cli
mate change, the threat of a nodeal Brexit
and the return of war to Europe have also
pushed resilience back up the agenda.
A special “resilience framework” was
published in December. A new resilience
directorate in the Cabinet Office now over
sees the management of risk. National
planning exercises have become more rig
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