Vladimir Putin intends to cause the UK harm and it is “time to be serious” about threats facing Britain, a former military chief has warned.
Stuart Peach, former chief of the defence staff, said Russia poses “a threat to our way of life”, amid increasing concern that the UK’s undersea cables – which are vital to internet access, financial transactions and the sharing of essential data – are vulnerable to sabotage.
But he warned that Britain was not prepared to deal with potential threats to the nation, such as widespread power cuts and full-scale war.
He said: “The fact that Russia intends us harm – whether it’s economic disruption or the ‘dark arts’, as you might call them – I think the evidence is clear.”
His warning came in a joint interview with The Independent alongside the chair of the House of Lords National Resilience Committee, Jean Coussins.
The two crossbench peers, who are not politically aligned, highlighted the need for a sense of “urgency” when it comes to Britain preparing for potential threats.
“How many of us are prepared with enough bottled water, tinned food, batteries and medication to last for a couple of weeks – or more – if there was a national power cut, or no running water, no petrol to drive to the shops, where the shelves are empty of food anyway? No wifi, no internet, no working cash machines?” Baroness Coussins asked.
She also warned that Britain was already under attack.
“It is not a question of ‘what if?’ It’s a question of ‘these things are happening now’,” she said.
“We know we’re under cyber attack daily. We know that there are proxy attacks on the part of Russia, Iran and so on.
“We know from what MI5 tells us publicly how many incidents of potential violence they are stepping in, identifying and preventing.”
The head of the GCHQ recently warned that Russia is “relentlessly” targeting critical infrastructure, democratic processes, supply chains and public trust in the UK and Europe.
Other examples of crises that Britain has faced include the closure of Heathrow airport last year, triggered by a substation fire, which prompted more than 1,300 flights to be cancelled. More than 270,000 passengers were stranded while tens of thousands of households lost power.
Lord Peach warned malicious attacks “can have real damage” and pointed to a politically motivated arson attack in Berlin at the start of January, which caused a widespread power cut, leaving 45,000 households and 2,200 businesses without electricity, including internet and heating.
The UK needs to implement last year’s Strategic Defence Review, and “we do need to make clear that we face risks and threats”, he said.
He added: “It’s time to be serious about resilience.”
On the crucial UK cables, he said as the chief of the defence staff he had raised the issue, “and I’m glad I did, because [of] the threat to our way of life [which would be] caused by the severance of undersea cables”.
Lord Peach praised Sweden’s system of emergency advice booklets – sent to households and businesses to tell them what to do in the event of a war or another kind of crisis.
He said he thought the public and British businesses would welcome something similar, setting out what residents should do in the event of a national emergency.
“I think British businesses would be willing, ready and able to absorb and think about that, because we have – let’s be honest – got used very much to a global supply chain-led, just-in-time logistic model, and that is being challenged by events,” he said.
The committee is currently running an inquiry into national resilience and will publish its recommendations later this year.
But Baroness Coussins said that when it came to the security of the food supply chain, some of the written evidence it has already received has “raised very big question marks [about that] … Largely because we import such a high proportion of our food.”
She added: “I think one of our objectives is to make sure that we get across the message about preparedness and resilience in a way that reassures, conveys a sense of urgency, but does not scaremonger.”
She added that the committee had heard evidence from some Nordic countries, which were worried about scaremongering the public a few years ago, “but they discovered that by being completely open, completely accurate about the nature of the threats that the country might face, the public was not alarmed – it was reassured”.