We talk a lot about resilience. But how resilient are we really? Lessons from the UK for the rest of Europe.

It is almost impossible to go to a security conference in Europe these days or read an article on conflict and defence without seeing the word “resilience” at least once or even on multiple occasions. In Brussels, discussions on resilience are especially popular. The EU has appointed Hadja Lahbib, the former Belgian foreign minister, as its first Commissioner for Preparedness. We live in uncertain and dangerous times when the old instruments of security and defence on which we relied for decades during the Cold War, notably nuclear deterrence and tank divisions along our borders, no longer seem sufficient to reduce our vulnerabilities so we can live normal daily lives. That may well be because we are confronted with a much more reckless and risk-prone leader in Moscow. Vladimir Putin is much more determined than his Soviet predecessors to interfere in our internal politics and economic supply chains using a wide spectrum of hybrid warfare tactics. Over the past few years Russia’s hybrid campaigns have moved from largely the digital sphere of cyber-attacks, disinformation, computer bots and election interference to the more kinetic domain. There have been drone strikes on aircraft, sabotage of critical energy infrastructure, railways and defence companies, and arson against warehouses and telecommunications centres. The EU has monitored over 200 such incidents thus far in 2026. The Russian Foreign Ministry has recently threatened strikes on companies across Europe that supply Ukraine with military equipment and components, accusing them of being co-belligerents in the war. Declarations such as these take hybrid warfare out of the domain of covert, deniable subversion and into the domain of direct, overt state aggression, tantamount to war. This is the reason why the EU Commissioner for Defence and Space, Andrius Kubilius, has suggested that Russian attacks on European defence companies could potentially trigger a NATO Article 5 collective response.

But the mounting sense of insecurity is also the result of an endless series of shocks to the system which cause massive new disruptions when we have barely recovered from the previous one. Shocks hitting us one by one, even in quick succession, are still manageable; but today we are living in the age of simultaneous and mutually reinforcing shocks, with immediate effects producing longer-term damage. For instance, COVID-19 treatments put longer-term stresses on national health services, causing millions of more routine treatments and operations to be postponed, risking lives or further deterioration in medical conditions, or the longer-term impact of lost schooling, social isolation and mental health stresses on younger generations. Another example is how low water levels in Europe’s rivers due to this summer’s extreme temperatures cause nuclear power plants to be shut down, leading to more coal to be burned and CO2 emissions pumped into the atmosphere. The UK National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has warned of food shortages this winter due to El Niño, the heating of the Pacific Ocean, exacerbating an already 40% reduction in crop yields caused by the summer heatwave. When it comes to disruptions, wars will inevitably be the main culprit, particularly when they go on for years, as is the case with Putin’s aggression against Ukraine and now most probably the US attacks against Iran and the resulting turmoil in the Middle East. Yet geopolitics and military force are not the only factors. The financial crisis and the collapse of banks back in 2008 and the COVID pandemic in 2020 fuelled Europe’s mounting deficits, excessive borrowing and debt spiral. The growing impact of climate change inflicting on Europe its hottest summers on record and drought conditions across the continent have sharply reduced agricultural yields. For example, wine in France fell by 40% in this growing season. Inevitably, this will lead this winter to higher food prices, more dependency on imported food and an uptick in inflation, making hard-pressed European governments worry even more about the cost of living for the average voter. As the political centre struggles to cope, the populists on the far left and right stand ready to pounce.

Yet it is not just these hard to fix, long-term problems that make the issue of Europe’s resilience so urgent. Under-investment in critical infrastructure makes us vulnerable to the sudden and severe knock-on impacts of technical glitches and failures. Even if the disruption lasts only a day or so, businesses can lose millions in revenue and thousands of individuals can have their lives turned upside down. UK airports have experienced this in spades over the past two years. A fire in an electrical substation at Hayes near Heathrow Airport in March 2025 produced a power blackout at the airport lasting 16 hours and over 1,000 flights to and from the airport being cancelled. Over 200,000 passengers were stranded, sometimes for days before they could rebook flights. Heathrow had no backup power supply, a classic case of a single point of failure. British Airways has experienced repeated breakdowns in its passenger booking and online check-in service, an issue affecting European carriers more generally in September 2025 when a cyber-attack forced airlines to resort to manual check-in procedures at Brussels, Berlin and Heathrow airports, extending over several days and severely delaying flight departures. This past summer has been the turn of the UK air traffic control system, NATS, to provoke public backlash. The filing of flight data for a single military aircraft led to the collapse of the whole air traffic control system for a day, leading to airports across the UK shutting down and again, the usual misery for both airlines unable to fly and passengers stuck in departure halls with limited food and water during the busy summer season. A few days later the problem occurred again, this time because of a software glitch that lasted only a matter of seconds, causing flight delays and cancellations at airports in the north of the UK. Again, there was no backup system, deemed to be too expensive by NATS whose CEO, Martin Rolfe, has come under persistent pressure from angry airlines and consumer groups to resign.

The situation has not been much better on the water front. Underinvestment by privatised UK water companies has led to leaks in Victorian-era pipes and dysfunctional water treatment facilities producing untreated sewage in rivers and coastlines and temporary shutdowns in water supply to both businesses and households. Gatwick Airport’s operations were disrupted over several days during the summer when water cut-offs disrupted toilet and catering facilities. UK TV viewers are also by now well used to seeing pictures of villagers in Kent, Devon and other southern locations queuing up for packages of bottled water as water companies such as Thames Water and Southern Water prove to be consistently incapable of guaranteeing secure supplies of safe drinking water to thousands of their customers paying ever higher water bills. Unsurprisingly, a particularly well-applauded part of Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s recent speech to his Labour Party annual conference in Liverpool was his promise to bring back into public ownership the underperforming private water companies. These examples are drawn from my home country, the UK, but they offer a typical illustration of the resilience challenges that are being experienced across Europe more broadly.

Murphy’s Law dictates that “if it can go wrong, it will go wrong”. Because there are so many vulnerabilities to test our resilience, and so many potential scenarios to think about, we can’t expect our governments to cover all types of risk at any given time, or always to predict and be prepared for the next crisis. Resilience is often about making guesses and sometimes governments make the wrong choices like when the UK stocked up on influenza and Avian Bird Flu vaccines only to be overtaken by the COVID-19 outbreak. We may be tempted to conclude that we are condemned to stumble from one crisis to the next, patching up our networks and infrastructure as best we can along the way. But today it is different. A conjunction of factors is testing Europe, and the patience of European voters, like never before. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have combined with Europe’s rapid pace of climate change, declining economic competitiveness and a fraying transatlantic partnership to create the perfect storm for the continent’s future stability and security. Resilience is all about the balance between risks and the robustness of supply chains to mobilise to mitigate those risks. When there is little that can be done in the immediate to reduce the external shock factors (such as conflict or climate) because Europe has all by itself, little influence over them, it has no choice but to increase its internal resilience. This is all the more necessary when, over the years, the supply of key commodities like energy, fuel, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and raw materials has shifted from domestic production to increasing dependence on foreign imports. Waiting for the crisis to hit is too late. If governments are not prepared and have not built in the necessary backups and spare capacity, the risks can rapidly turn into full-blown political and economic crises.

We are currently witnessing this with rising energy costs and especially in the transportation sector. Diesel fuel has become a major concern. One third of UK diesel now comes from the US at a time when President Trump has threatened to stop US diesel exports in order to flood the domestic market and bring down prices for US consumers. His concern is with the midterm elections and MAGA supporters in the farm belt, not the European road haulage industry. Diesel prices at the pump in the US have now exceeded $6.5 a gallon, an all-time high and a 70% increase since Trump launched his war against Iran, leading to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The US is the world’s largest exporter of diesel with 1.5mn barrels a day. The UK has only 42 days of stored diesel supply compared to 1,000 days for Japan and a combined 900 days for France, Germany and Italy. Over the past two decades, the number of UK refineries able to produce diesel has fallen from nine to just four, and the largest of these is currently out of action for renovation work. With nine refineries in operation, the UK used to be able to cover 85% of its diesel consumption through domestic production; but it now imports 55% of its diesel. Many motorists have switched to petrol or electric vehicles but there are still 15mn diesel vehicles on UK roads and diesel is still the fuel used in agricultural vehicles, road haulage and commercial shipping. Higher prices mean that today diesel has exceeded £2 a litre for the first time, making the average family car cost £110 to fill up, £32 more than at the start of 2026. Naturally, the impact on business transport, using much larger amounts of fuel, has been significantly greater. All this is obviously putting even more strain on the cost of living at a time when electricity bills in the UK are due to rise by 25% in January, reflecting higher gas prices and the continuing standoff in the Persian Gulf, which has driven oil prices back above €100 a barrel. Finding alternative sources of diesel is not easy either. Russia used to be a major supplier but since the war in Ukraine, the UK, like the rest of Europe, has curtailed imports of Russian oil and gas. In any case, Russia’s own production capacity has dropped 30% due to the impact of Ukrainian drone strikes on its refineries. Russia is now importing diesel from India. China has also suspended diesel exports as well as jet fuel. Last week the G7 leaders convened an emergency summit and agreed to release 100mn barrels of diesel on to the market from their combined strategic reserve. This will be managed by the International Energy Agency in Paris and should drive down prices a little. Europe’s contribution will be 50 million barrels front-loaded over the next 20 days. Usefully, as part of the G7 agreement, the US committed not to stop its exports of diesel. But 100mn barrels represent only 2 days of global diesel production so the G7 agreement will bring only temporary relief, unless it is followed by much more decisive action. With Trump and the Republicans under pressure in the US midterm elections, there is no certainty that Trump will stick to the deal. But disrupting the international diesel market may not work for the US either as the West Coast is much more dependent on imports than the other parts of the country. Lack of fuel resilience and increasing dependency on foreign supplies, subject to the whims of geopolitics and populist politicians, promises the average UK voter, like their counterparts in the EU, only higher inflation, which now runs at over 4% in many European countries. It promises higher interest rates and mortgage costs, with the average 5-year mortgage rate having now hit 6% in the UK for the first time in three years. It promises higher borrowing rates, especially for heavily indebted countries like France, Italy and the UK.

Diesel may well be the most pressing challenge but there are other aspects of resilience that need attention as well. Economies that have adjusted to “just in time” rather than “just in case” supply chains have discarded the redundant capacity and diversified networks on which resilience relies. Today the UK relies on foreign imports for all the essential functions of the state, whether it be to equip its military forces with modern weaponry and technology, to feed its population, to supply the National Health Service (NHS) with medicines and pharmaceutical products, steel and chemicals for construction or gas and oil to heat the homes of its population. Imports and exports equalled approximately 63% of the UK’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2024, meaning that the UK economy is more reliant on the smooth functioning of international trade than many large economies such as the US, China or Japan. When a crisis comes, the UK has more problems in diversifying its trade relationships. The US could switch from being one of the largest importers of oil and liquefied natural gas to one of the largest producers. China could ramp up its mining of rare earths and minerals for its industry. Japan could increase its rice production. Trade has long been a source of prosperity for the UK, as for its European neighbours; but in the age of deglobalisation, a return to high tariffs and protectionism, a reliance on open trade can become a liability. The UK is facing the consequences of failing to predict the geopolitical shift and to plan ahead. Other European countries have done better. Germany and Poland have amassed large stockpiles of food and Sweden has recently set up a national grain reserve for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Germany has been modernising the national grid to better store electricity generated by offshore wind and distribute it from the north to the south. The UK has some of the highest energy costs among the industrial countries and this makes it difficult for UK companies to manufacture chemicals for pharmaceuticals or building materials such as cement, increasing dependence on imports. Fertiliser for food production requires ammonia and sulphuric acid and today much of this supply comes from the Gulf countries and through the Strait of Hormuz. The UK has stopped producing these commodities. Only 25% of generic medicines are produced in the UK, according to the National Preparedness Commission, an independent body set up by the UK government three years ago to monitor the state of the country’s vulnerabilities. The House of Lords has established its own National Resilience Committee to perform a similar function and quiz UK officials and experts on the government’s contingency planning for all types of scenarios. It has been investigating antibiotics and found that the UK today sources 90% of its penicillin from China as well as many other antibiotics.

Yet sourcing adequate supplies is not the only resilience challenge. The distribution nodes and networks are important too. These come in the form of underwater cables that carry 90% of Internet traffic, the increasing number of data centres going up to handle the vast amounts of data to drive AI models and future telecommunications as well as energy pipelines and overhead power lines. Resilience also involves making sure that the right supplies reach the right people and in a secure and reliable way. Drone incursions into Europe have raised the issue of the protection of ports, transport, warehouses and distribution centres. In the UK alone, there are 131 distribution centres for retail supermarket food, and each constitutes a choke point in its particular area. Yet air, missile and drone defence is an area where the UK has under-invested in modern times unlike Poland, Germany and the Baltic States, which are forging ahead with their drone shields and walls. The Royal Air Force is well used to intercepting Russian bombers flying close to UK airspace and the Royal Navy is patrolling the North Sea to monitor the activity of Russian spy ships and shadow fleet vessels. But aerial defence is still a gap, as is situational awareness along the UK borders, a vulnerability dramatically underscored in recent weeks when some small boats carrying illegal migrants from France landed on southern beaches without being detected or intercepted by the UK Border Force. The UK’s vulnerability to drone attack prompted the opposition Conservative Party to make one of the big announcements of its recent annual conference in Birmingham the creation of a Britannia Dome, a network of radars and interceptor devices to protect important sites (military and government) across the country. The cost was put at £10bn.

Resilience is also a matter of skills and personnel trained and ready in key areas of civil defence, whether this be cyber security, first aid or evacuating people from floods or putting out forest fires. The UK did not need to worry much about forest fires in the past but this summer large swaths of Scotland, Wales, Yorkshire and even southern England have experienced them, with the region going without a single drop of rain for over two whole months. Unlike many continental European countries, the UK does not have a civil defence force or a disaster management agency similar to the US’ Federal Emergency Management Agency. Because of the absence of a civil defence force, the army is frequently called in to plug the gap as with forest fires, floods or the building of temporary Nightingale hospitals during the COVID pandemic. A national guard or paramilitary force for homeland defence immediately evokes in the public mind the inept but lovable volunteers of Dad’s Army in the celebrated BBC comedy series. The UK also has fewer police officers per 100,000 of its population than its major European counterparts. Key emergency services like the Fire Brigade and the Army Reserves have been undermanned for years despite efforts stemming from various Strategic Defence Reviews under both Conservative and Labour governments to create a more attractive Army Reserve of 30,000 part-time soldiers.  Instead, the UK is attempting to organise its military veterans with call-up obligations into a more coherent and trained emergency back-up force. But despite occasional attempts by the government to recruit specialist volunteers from industry for crisis support, for instance in the field of cybersecurity, the UK is far from the Baltic or Finnish model of civilian specialist teams ready to step in to help with disinformation campaigns, power outages, health emergencies or cyber-attacks. The attack on the NHS by the WannaCry ransomware crypto worm in May 2017, which affected 200,000 computer systems in 150 countries, was ultimately stopped by a single White Knight hacktivist, with a previous conviction for criminal hacking, who worked out the kill switch for the malware and provided it for free to the authorities. A stroke of luck rather than design. Yet the skill sets needed for national resilience are broad. Engineers to fix broken infrastructure and keep the hyper-connectivity on which modern economies depend are also required. Yet UK universities are not turning out the numbers of new engineers that the country needs with one-third of the engineering workforce due to retire over the next decade. According to the Financial Times, the Royal Academy of Engineering is predicting a shortfall of 1.5mn engineers between now and 2030. Britain also has lots of unfilled vacancies for construction workers, cable jointers, plumbers and welders- all professions that it is useful to have on hand when vital infrastructure has to be kept functioning and services restored to disaster-stricken communities.

Capitalism has its positive side. It can create wealth and foster the entrepreneurial spirit.  But free markets can also emphasise dividends for shareholders over long-term investments, and light-touch regulation that leaves critical infrastructure to decay or be inadequately protected. Just-in-time delivery and constant cost cutting do not encourage redundancy in supply chains or large stockpiles of energy, spare parts and goods. A focus on small government, cutting red tape and low taxes sounds good in theory but is not conducive to the type of investment needed for a robust national defence and a truly resilient society. This is not an argument for socialism nor a proposal that Britain should go back to the Cold War days of the 1950s when over half of all the UK’s research and development expenditure, both public and private, was to equip the country to fight the Soviet Union. Rather, it is to say that in the age of grey zone warfare and disruptive shocks from all directions, governments cannot delegate social and economic resilience to the private sector, nor to voluntary codes of conduct or industry self-regulation. They must take control, set the objectives and standards and drive the necessary transformations themselves.

Yet if the rest of Europe can learn valuable lessons from what the UK has got wrong over the years, it can also take inspiration from what the UK has got right. There are some features of the British political culture and modus operandi which do point to the UK ceasing to be a laggard in Europe and becoming instead a resilience leader in future.

The first is a still surprisingly cohesive society. Certainly, this is not the British population emerging from the Blitz and the hardships and rationing of the Second World War and the 1950s when the Cold War was starting. That generation was used to hardship, casualties and nights spent sleeping in the Underground or the countryside.  They were less shy about depending on their neighbours for support, adept at coping while their partners were away at the front and better connected within their communities. There were also more people around with wartime and military experience and ready to step into leadership roles, given conscription and the much larger size of the armed forces which in turn were much closer to the average citizen than today. There is no reason for nostalgia here and this 20^th-century Britain is not coming back. But a degree of pulling together in times of crisis, exemplified by the well-known slogan “Keep Calm And Carry On” and a willingness to step up and help neighbours, friends and even perfect strangers, is still evident in today’s Britain. Contrary to the fears of many commentators, the British public has not gone soft or become so used to the creature comforts of mobile phones and Amazon parcels that they become paralysed during a crisis. During COVID there were massive demonstrations in support of the NHS. When a wildfire this summer destroyed several homes in a London suburb, the occupants were rehoused within hours by families, friends and neighbours. When thousands of Ukrainian refugees reached the UK in the wake of Putin’s invasion in February 2022, the British welcomed them into their homes. Others set up food banks, charities and drove trucks to Ukraine to deliver humanitarian aid to the besieged cities. Again, this is not to idealise. Much of the self-image of British cussedness in standing up to invaders is based on embroidered historical myths going back to the Spanish Armada and the time when the country stood alone against Hitler in 1940-1941. But if these myths have their part to play in encouraging Brits to stand on their own feet and do their bit in a crisis, not waiting for the authorities to turn up and take control, then they can still have their uses. It makes it worth the while of the UK government to bring the public into the debate and to level with the voters about the state of British preparedness and the real risks that the country is facing.

The next positive dimension of UK resilience is a culture of honesty and self-examination when things go wrong. Public enquiries into disasters, scandals or mismanagement by government, the police or the big institutions of public life, like the NHS or the media, are evidence-based, detailed and thorough and the lawyers chairing these enquiries do not pull their punches when it comes to attributing blame and making recommendations for improvement. Of course, the system is far from perfect. Enquiries, such as those into the government’s handling of the COVID pandemic (and lack of preparation and delayed responses) or into phone hacking by tabloid newspapers or the grooming of vulnerable adolescents or fires in residential buildings, can take years with the consequence that the public may lose interest. Sometimes the enquiries propose hundreds of recommendations with the result that the truly important and transformative ones get lost in all the noise. Governments may accept the recommendations but then drag their feet on implementing them. This said, public enquiries do make it difficult for governments to cover up failures and mismanagement, and they foster a culture of accountability by officials and politicians. The COVID enquiry was damning in stating that “the British state failed the people”. Enquiries also give experts, witnesses and the affected public the chance to tell their stories and make their case. Enquiries are expensive but if they drive reforms and often new or better legislation, they are worth the money.

The third element is a system of permanent state monitoring of the national resilience, which avoids the usual practice of waiting for something to happen and then reacting incident by incident. The UK is no longer in denial about resilience and government officials now go out frequently to give speeches and media interviews about it. A few years back the public were more familiar with the James Bond movie version of the head of British intelligence (“M”) than with his or her real-life counterparts who operated entirely in the shadows. No more. The heads of MI5 and MI6 or GCHQ, the government monitoring centre in Cheltenham, or the National Cyber Security Centre in Vauxhall, regularly appear on TV to describe the threat landscape and point to the changes. The same goes for the police chiefs, especially the Counter Terrorism Branch, and the service chiefs of the Armed Forces. Reality TV series in the UK have moved from Big Brother to simulations of real crisis scenarios in which former officials play themselves to provide a dose of authenticity. In sum, the government does not try to induce a false sense of public security but openly engages with it on threats and appeals for public vigilance. It was no surprise that a recent threat against the Fairford airbase in Gloucestershire, used by US B1 bombers, was unmasked by a local farmer seeing suspicious activity in the middle of the night. She alerted both the police and the Ministry of Defence. The standing bodies to keep resilience levels under review and advise the government, the National Preparedness Commission and the Parliamentary National Resilience Committee, have already been referred to. We can add SAGE, the group of senior scientists and medical experts that advise on pandemics and health hazards. The possible outbreak of plague in Russia or the spread of Ebola in West Africa will clearly be on their minds at the moment. Other institutions like the National Security Council, coordinated by a National Security Adviser, and COBRA, the government’s crisis meeting room, are now much more familiar to the media and broader public. They allow ministers, officials and experts to meet quickly, establish situational awareness by fusing the various strands of intelligence and take step-by-step actions dynamically as the situation develops. The UK also operates a National Risk Register. Today it lists 95 “acute risks” and 26 “chronic risks”. This large shopping list suggests more civil servants trying to cover themselves against accusations of negligence and lack of foresight. We need a better sense of priorities and what we need to focus on, something more like an intelligence-driven threat assessment. Also, not just a list of individual risks in stovepipes but a better sense of which risks combining in which ways would prove truly existential. But the Register at least gives a sense of how the government sees the rising or declining evolution of risks and whether resources, both human and financial, are being shifted fast enough from category 2 to category 1 contingencies.

Finally, the UK has an exercise culture which is particularly useful in bringing government and the private sector closer together. Different scenarios involve banks and the financial services in the City of London responding to a major cyber-attack or ransomware attacks on major UK companies. The way in which Jaguar Land Rover had to halt its production for months or Marks and Spencer lost its online shopping business due to cyber-attacks demonstrates that this is far more than an academic exercise. Exercises are a good way to spread lessons learned from individual cases across the public sector and business more broadly and to discover gaps in responses that can make all the difference in limiting the damage and enabling more rapid recovery when the real crisis hits. Unsurprisingly, terrorism is still a major feature of government-led exercises. Londoners trying to get to work early in the morning sometimes discover that their underground station is temporarily closed because the London Underground staff, fire brigade, police and ambulance services are together practicing for responses to a terrorist attack. What the UK has also been successful in doing is understanding how lessons learned from one sector can help to increase resilience in another. For instance, the strain on the NHS during COVID made government planners realise that they lacked a medical surge capability to treat mass casualties in wartime. The links forged between mayors of cities and the police and army in responding to forest fires mean that relationships do not need to be built from scratch following a terrorist bombing or drone strike. It seems that resilience exercises are now catching on across Europe. Recently the Netherlands organised one in Sittard, near the German border, with actors playing civilians and rehearsing civil defence and shelter procedures.

Clearly each country is different. The political culture of one cannot be simply grafted on to another. The UK is a highly centralised country, at least as far as England and Wales are concerned, whereas federal states like Germany delegate more responsibility for resilience to the Länder. Others may look to the mayors of the major cities or in France the departmental Préfets to be the first responders. Some governments may not be so ready to reveal sensitive intelligence to alert the public or to allow their military commanders to openly complain about lack of funding for national air defence, training hours or more army recruits. This said, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, Martin Jäger, has been warning of the growing danger of conflict with Russia. The ability of the UK to share its experience in building resilience with its European neighbours has also been hampered by Brexit in 2020, which cut the UK off from information sharing via the Schengen database or through Europol and Eurojust in The Hague. To some extent this has been compensated by the Security Agreement that the Labour government in London has concluded with the EU and the many bilateral security agreements, for instance with France, Germany and Poland. British ministers are appearing ad hoc at EU meetings and there should be another EU-UK Summit this autumn. The new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has openly acknowledged Brexit to be a failure (“more harm than good”) and launched a review to see what the options are for Britain to draw closer to the EU. Rejoining the bloc is one of the options, something that the Labour government had ruled out up to now. Certainly, being outside the tent will continue to have consequences for UK resilience, whether it be solidarity and mutual assistance via Article 42.7 of the Lisbon Treaty or access to security investment funds like SAFE on preferential borrowing terms, or participation in EU laws that can help build social resilience, like the Digital Services Act which, among many other things, can help to combat disinformation and propaganda on social media. Brexit has already revealed its damage in holding up cooperation between France and the UK on stopping the smuggling of illegal migrants across the Channel. The joint police and border force actions that should have been in place within months have taken years to develop to anything like an effective level.

Whatever the outcome of Burnham’s review of Britain’s future relationship with the EU, a measure of success will be to enable Britain and mainland Europe to transform faster and better to face the resilience challenge. That means faster information sharing, joint exercises, common standards for infrastructure protection, and rapid assistance across borders in crisis situations. The biggest lesson that the UK has to teach the rest of Europe, both the bad and the good, is that resilience is no longer a fashionable and fancy buzzword to be rolled out at conferences. With the threat landscape darkening rapidly around Europe and governments having to live in perpetual crisis mode, resilience is no longer simply about avoiding the inconvenience of a bus route that stops operating for a day or two or a tube station or airport runway that have to close down for a few weeks, or a glitch in our weekly supermarket delivery. It’s also far more than the candles, tinned food, bottled water and wind-up radios that our governments tell us via mass leaflets and online announcements to keep stored in our basements. Belgium is the latest to publish its survival shopping list online just this past week.

Resilience has become, like football for the former Liverpool manager, Bill Shankly, not just a matter of life and death but “far more important than that”. Quite literally, the survival of our democratic, liberal societies and the European project of prosperity in freedom depend on our collective ability to up our game, transform our traditional concepts of defence and security and “Be Prepared”. For threats that we can see and for those that we cannot see clearly yet but can at least anticipate. For they will certainly come sooner or later, and as the MIT political scientist Rudiger Dornbusch already pointed out several decades ago: “crises take longer to arrive than you can possibly imagine, but when they do come, they happen faster than you can possibly imagine”.

The views expressed in this #CriticalThinking article reflect those of the author(s) and not of Friends of Europe.