It is time MPs levelled with us: Britain is already at war, and we will need to do two things to survive it. Cyber-attacks, disinformation, and blockading of supplies: this is what living in a war zone can look like now. The idea that Britain is already under a form of hybrid attack is commonplace in defence circles, yet politicians still mostly skirt around it. It was jolting to hear Labour MP Calvin Bailey make the case for conflict being our new reality at a conference hosted by the Good Growth Foundation thinktank last week in London. He unpacked his reasoning for why war is no longer what you think it is.
Five Fronts of Modern Warfare
If war can be considered an assault on five fronts—against a country's political leadership, critical infrastructure, essentials such as food or fuel supplies, civilian population, and armed forces—then Britain is arguably now being attacked on the first four without a shot being fired. Think of rampant Russian-generated political disinformation on social media and attempts to bribe British politicians; of Russian submarine surveillance of undersea cables carrying most of our internet traffic; of the four 'nationally significant' cyber-attacks recorded every week; and of the blockading of food and fuel supplies through the Strait of Hormuz. Think too of Keir Starmer's warning in the Sunday Times last week of conflict with Iran coming home to British civilians via 'the use of proxies in this country'. Counter-terrorism police say they are investigating whether a spate of arson attacks on synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses, and Iranians living in Britain may have been sponsored by Tehran—a thugs-for-hire tactic familiar from the Russian playbook.
Shadow Warfare and Deniable Attacks
Whoever may be to blame, such attacks fuel the fear that Britain is not safe for Jews or for Iranians seeking sanctuary, while feeding an insidious far-right narrative that immigrant communities cannot peacefully coexist. Add all this together and you potentially have a highly deniable form of shadow warfare involving weaponising a country's own weaknesses and prejudices back against it, while stopping short of causing casualties. Bailey, who led the RAF evacuation flights from Kabul as it fell to the Taliban in 2021, does not seem the type to panic. But in a recent essay for the Fabian Society, he argues that Britain should be prepared for escalation.
It is 10 months since the strategic defence review, commissioned by former Labour defence secretary George Robertson, similarly argued that Britain must urgently equip itself not for expeditionary foreign wars against non-state actors we are used to fighting alongside the US, but for homeland defence against a well-armed peer country in a sustained conflict. To strip away the jargon: if when you imagine Britain at war, you think of Iraq and Afghanistan, you are out of date. The next big war may come uncomfortably closer to home, be fought from necessity not choice—and be less about serving as the US's willing poodle than about poodles facing the consequences of a master going rogue.
National Conversation Needed
Forgotten in the resulting row over how to find more money for defence—to which Bailey's answer is a mix of new instruments for borrowing and reforming procurement—is Robertson's call for a national conversation, levelling with the public about what exactly all this means in practice. After much public prodding, Starmer seems now to be engaging, though arguably too little and too late for the review's frustrated authors. As I write, Robertson and his co-author Fiona Hill are due before a parliamentary committee on the national security strategy, while Hill is expected to spell things out more bluntly in a lecture on Wednesday.
Despite seeing the damage that cheap, mass-produced drones can do in Ukraine and across the Gulf, Hill warned last week that Britain still is not properly prepared for a drone flying through the window of a strategically important building. Our overstretched NHS may not be able to handle mass casualties—and we lack the stockpiled food supplies or analogue backups to digital systems that would help us ride out a successful cyber-attack or serious act of sabotage. Preparing for this unfamiliar form of attack is not just about buying tanks and fighter jets, but also about two things that most Labour voters probably expected a Labour government to do anyway: shoring up the public realm to cope in a crisis, and forging a more mutually trusting and tolerant society that is resilient to extremism, where neighbour does not fear neighbour and people willingly help each other in a crisis.
Starmer has not found the words to articulate any of that yet—and if May's anticipated local election drubbing is bad enough, he may not be here to make the case for much longer. But anyone with ambitions to succeed him must be able to show both that they are capable of leading a country under attack, and of explaining the puzzling nature of that attack without inducing panic to a public heartily sick of being asked to make sacrifices. A war this hard to discern, even when it is supposedly upon you, may not feel yet like much of a threat. But lives may in future depend on seeing clearly into the shadows.
