‘Be Ready’: prepping goes mainstream

“What dystopian hellscape have we arrived in?” said Sophie de Rosée in the Financial Times. For years, “prepping” was a niche interest – associated with tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists kitting out their bunkers with supplies for the impending apocalypse. But now it has gone mainstream: Google searches for “prepping” have surged 2,300% year on year; at the school gate, all the talk is of water-purification tablets and camping stoves.

And now the government has launched its new “Be Ready” campaign, urging the public to keep enough supplies to survive three days in an emergency. Its checklist includes bottled water, non-perishable food, medicine, a wind-up torch and radio, and a portable power bank. Within days of the launch, several retailers had reported a surge in demand for beans, soup and radios.

Serious business

“It’s tempting to scoff”, said Jeevan Vasagar in The Observer, but preppers “have a point”. The world is more volatile than ever, leaving us vulnerable to all sorts of shocks. Climate change-related droughts and flooding threaten our food and water supplies. This year’s El Niño weather pattern could cause multiple crop failures. And cyberattacks have the ability to cripple critical systems such as our energy and banking services.

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In theory, the government’s advice is sound, said Tom Peck in The Times. The problem is that its own ministers don’t seem to be taking it seriously. Asked on “BBC Breakfast” what he had stockpiled in his larder, Treasury Minister James Murray laughed and admitted he only had coffee. Andy Burnham recommended Twiglets, while Angela Rayner last month said she would load her own survival kit with “mascara, concealer... I don’t know, a bottle of sauvignon blanc”. All very droll – but it’s “hard to work out if we’re meant to be reassured by how little they care about it all, or plunged into complete despair”.

National resilience

The government has a “cheek”, lecturing the public on preparedness, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail – when it has done almost nothing to improve national resilience. We import most of our food, medicine, gas and oil. Only about 60% of our food is produced in the UK. Unlike, say, Germany or Poland, we have no strategic food stockpiles. More than 90% of our penicillin comes from China; most of our steel and fertiliser is also imported. The war with Iran has shown how easily the supply of fuel can be disrupted, yet we have only eight days’ worth of gas supply in storage. Prepping is all very well, but “in any prolonged disruption to these supply chains we’d quickly be on our knees”.