EVERYONE IN BRITAIN must stock nine liters of bottled water and three days’ worth of tinned food, the government said yesterday in the latest attempt to gaslight the public about “imminent” threats—but the well-informed British public appears to be unfooled.
A clip of a caller on an LBC phone-in show went viral, after he talked about the way the British government pushes people to believe Russia, Iran or China are “despicable” yet supports “a country that massacred 70,000-odd people”. (He did not name Israel.)
In response, LBC host Ian Dale obediently pushed the official “them pesky Russians” narrative, but the caller was unfooled, and most voices on social media sided with him.
“Russia is not our enemy, and the West is not the Beacon of all that is good,” said Darren of Plymouth, a popular social media voice on X.
Simon S Pembroke agreed: “The caller is right. LBC presenters live in a bubble.”
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DISARMING
UK Defence Secretary Wes Streeting yesterday tried to make the water and tinned food campaign (called “Be Ready”) sound less political by emphasizing that it would be useful for a variety of weather-related disasters, and without specific mentions of Russia, Iran or China.
Yet popular media such as the Daily Mail yesterday printed the report with a picture of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
Britons’ natural skepticism makes them harder to fool—as was obvious in the discussion on X. “The mainstream media is complicit in telling fairytales,” said Wendy Puerto, an artist.
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BALANCING ACT
Journalists and politicians in the UK and across Europe are playing a difficult balancing act. They have clearly been told to simultaneously push a pair of contradictory lines: one being that Russia is a pitifully weak, collapsing state, and the other being that almighty Russia is actively starting a host of new wars with the UK and Europe.
But many people in the west are well read, and tough to trick.
“Evidence of a Russian ‘hybrid war’ in Europe is vanishingly thin,” wrote geopolitical analyst Thomas Fazi in a report for Responsible Statecraft this week.
“Many of the most widely publicised cases of alleged Russian sabotage — the 'jamming' of the GPS signal of von der Leyen’s plane, the Baltic cable incidents in late 2024, a crashed DHL cargo plane, a fire at Heathrow Airport in 2025 — ended up collapsing upon basic scrutiny. In each case, Russian involvement was ultimately ruled out,” he wrote.
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My (late) Mum was an expert in 'emergency contingency preparations' - water in several buckets, rice, sardines, salted fish, Chinese sausages, salt, sugar, local coffee powder, matches, mosquito coils - wakakaka
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