Resilience and Renewal: Labour and ‘Whole of Society’ Defence

The 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) was commissioned by Sir Keir Starmer as Labour entered government, updating the UK’s defence and security posture in the face of a more dangerous world. Alongside the agenda of rearmament and defence reindustrialisation put forward in the Defence Industrial Strategy, the SDR set out plans for a ‘whole of society’ approach to homeland defence and national security. 

In light of the hybrid challenges posed by the UK’s adversaries, this proposes to go beyond conventional military aid to incorporate a wider social and economic fabric. Key features include closer civilian-military coordination, reinforced protection of Critical National Infrastructure, and more active incorporation of industry, communities and civil society in planning for readiness and resilience.

Commissioned in light of the country’s severely diminished capability in these domains, the SDR will take time and effort to realise in practice. Importantly, this process presents the Labour government with a political opportunity to tell a story about where the country is going and articulate the vital part Britain’s people and places will play within it.

The immediate threats of cyberattack and sabotage on critical national infrastructure, as well as the increasingly less distant prospect of conventional assault on these vulnerable islands we inhabit surrounded by sea, necessitate planning for resilience. This is a means not only to deter, repel and recover from attack on our shores, but also to be able to effectively support our allies in the event of a wider conflict. The geographical, physical and spatial character of the threats we face and how we respond to them reframe who, what and where matters in our political economy.

On the basis that we already find ourselves in a state of complex conflict with Russia and face challenges to our liberal democracy from other actors like China and Iran, the SDR promised to rapidly initiate and accelerate a sorely necessary ‘defence conversation’ with the public. This is a conversation that the Government has neither started nor really knows how to initiate or handle comprehensively, lacking confidence in its ability to appeal to and draw in all sectors of society. 

There has been a steady drip-feed of interventions from the likes of the Defence Secretary, the Chief of the Defence Staff, the Head of the MI6 and a handful of MPs spelling out that the UK can no longer be said to be in a state of peace. However, nervousness seems to have stymied the government’s capacity to seize political opportunity in the present moment, partly because uncertainty about policies like the Defence Investment Plan means that any rhetoric is undercut by a transparent absence of resource.

Whilst there are a set of policies slowly falling into place – for instance, on how SMEs can realise the ‘defence dividend’ in every corner of the country through greater access to MoD procurement – an inability to prioritise defence in spending plans is problematic, Treasury caution on making material commitments to rearmament open an obvious target for opposition ridicule when attempting to kickstart a public conversation on the topic. 

This is unfortunate because in many ways the defence and security context creates a golden thread through much of the most interesting and ambitious elements of the government’s political agenda, which at its best and most focused sets out to reposition Britain’s industry, infrastructure and skills for a new world.

But there is also a sense that the defence conversation, owing to its uncomfortable character, may present a political challenge to building consensus around other aspects of Labour’s programmes, because of the tough choices and priorities it would call into play.

Namely, there would, as I have written elsewhere, be understandable concerns that the demographic fractures of contemporary Britain would undermine any attempt to plausibly pose the prospect of a ‘whole of society’ mobilisation to deter, repel and recover from future conventional or unconventional attacks.

In advancing a vision of home defence, the government might find that, to paraphrase Thatcher, there is no such thing as whole of society, just individuals and families. It raises the question of who feels at ‘home’ on the so-called ‘island of strangers’, and what it is precisely about our liberal democracy that they see themselves as defending.

However, the concept of whole of society or whole of nation home defence itself provides a self-contained response to these same quandaries. It is this that makes the wider defence conversation indispensable for the kind of national reconstruction for which there is growing political clamour against the backdrop of a broken Britain.

In opposition, Labour advanced as part of its broader ‘securonomics’ pitch a kind of corporatist compact between businesses, workers and communities around a project of industrial and therefore national renewal. This itself represented an attempt to localise broader geopolitical imperatives. In a more dangerous world, voters were promised that a redirection of resources towards critical industries and infrastructure would make a difference on their doorsteps in the form of jobs, livelihoods and local growth. 

However, the fundamental and inescapable contradictions and antagonisms of our sclerotic economy complicate attempts to find an economic or industrial basis around which to build social partnership and repair the cultural and ideological fabric of the nation on the basis of material factors alone.

In a way, the whole of society approach and the prospect of preparation and mobilisation for home defence may provide an alternative path to accomplishing the renewal and reconstruction that was once promised under the banner of tripartite bargaining, social partnership and so on.

At its boldest and most optimistic, Labour proposed that government investment would be put in service of reindustrialisation underpinned by the extension of bargaining coverage. This would forge a new spirit of compromise around a productivity effort in the national interest – partly by putting workers and communities themselves at the centre of that interest.

However, in government Labour have gradually withdrawn from such a politics of production. Regardless, material economic interest alone may always have proven insufficient to accomplish the intended outcome of a new social contract. It may be that the defence conversation presents a chance to rehouse the search for a new social contract – based on both rights and duties – within a more compelling framework of policy and practice. 

Ultimately, this has to rest not just on a conversation – when the country is already operating by necessity in an ultimately reactive way against a rapidly evolving threat landscape, we lack the luxury of time to discuss and debate at length - but also an active process through which a broad swathe of society participates together in preparing for the worst.

As set out in a new paper from the Centre for the Public Understanding of Defence and Security, this process should incorporate a collective effort on everything from community cohesion to supply chain resilience and reskilling of the workforce. 

The paper, Making Sense of Home Defence, is the outcome of a roundtable held with 20 representatives from various parts of the armed forces, emergency services and government departments tasked with the country’s resilience and protection from threats.

A good example of this existing institutional structure is the Local Resilience Forums, which bring together local law enforcement, emergency services and in some cases armed forces and reserves in a place-based way to deal with hazards and threats that emerge – the recent storms, for example. 

At present though, the pace at which the promised pivot to ‘whole of society’ defence and security is playing out is too slow. The paper sets out some of what needs to be done to realise it in practice – whether via overall government organisation, local structures, or training and education.

The paper covers broader political economy in ways that connect to the project of national reconstruction this government must undertake to impress itself successfully upon circumstances – for instance, the capacity to compel or incentivise companies to prioritise a new national interest as part of social responsibility rather than shareholder value.

Anticipating some of the discussions at this week’s parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy, the paper also addresses some of the weaknesses of our current approach to preparedness. To give one example, much of what is available to the public on this front essentially centres on a website as the main vector of advice when one of the first things to be compromised in event of attack would be internet connectivity. 

The Dutch, by contrast, have recently delivered a paper leaflet to all households spelling out preparation and recovery protocols in event of a range of dramatic scenarios; even including the need to repurpose railways for movement of military equipment. The Swedes, meanwhile, have issued a national guide for businesses – In case of crisis or war – encouraging readiness and preparedness across industry. Such examples show that the UK has a lot to learn from European allies.

Essentially, however, this model of ‘home defence’ provides a potential method through which to do the necessary political work of accomplishing national renewal or reconstruction – namely, by building up our sovereign capability to deter and defend from attack and if required, to steel the country to support allies elsewhere.

As well as arguing that government must immediately designate or generate a lead department to be responsible for owing and driving forward home defence efforts, a key recommendation of the paper is that there should be the roll out of a nationwide programme of training as a means of staging the defence conversation. This training would effectively involve the creation of cross-sectoral and cross-functional cohorts across the country, rooted in particular regions and communities, who would be armed with the knowledge to take decisions in a low-information environment. This could begin at the level of executives and leaderships in the public and private sector and cascade down, or start from the bottom-up and meet in the middle; the aim would be to construct social partnership across industry, government, and civil society in practice. 

A key aspect would be using wargaming techniques to effectively run accessible table-top exercises that enable participants to put themselves forward into different scenarios across the competition-conflict spectrum, building the confidence and responsibility for different actors to play their part. In this way, such a programme would stage the defence conversation in practice, on the ground, without the complication of the competing priorities of government and backbenchers and the shifting carousel of topics that issue from the Downing Street media operation’s crazy-paving policy grid, which often distract from the bigger issues confronting the country and its allies.

Ultimately the very challenges posed to the realisation of a ‘whole of society’ approach to home defence also present a political opportunity. The process through which we can make ourselves better prepared as a nation brings focus to primary concerns about place, identity, belonging.

The trials and tribulations of the Defence Investment Plan notwithstanding, Labour should be more confident about launching the whole-of-society defence conversation not just because of the existential stakes, but precisely because of the risky but worthwhile political work it can accomplish for the future of the left in this country.

Most significantly, as I have touched on in a recent piece about critical minerals, the whole of society approach to home defence and national resilience demands a new recognition of the power and prestige of peripheralised people and places left behind by a peacetime economy based on services, but pivotal to the security and prosperity of these islands in a present and future ‘age of unpeace’. 

For Labour, this political and economic reset offers the opportunity of levelling up Britain not through a disempowering politics of compensation for the outcomes of a collapsing global order, but through an empowering politics of contribution to the national interest in an epoch of conflict. Crucially, the definition of the national interest must accommodate this contribution by being articulated in terms that people recognise and feel ready and willing to row in behind. This is the purpose of the coming defence conversation.

Frederick Harry Pitts is a contributing editor of Renewal and Deputy Director of the Centre for the Public Understanding of Defence & Security. He is Head of Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus and an Associate Professor in Political Economy & the Future of Work.