Picture the scene in Portcullis House last Thursday: Tan Dhesi MP, chair of the Defence Committee, leaning forward with the earnest gravity of a man who has just noticed the house is on fire. Around him, colleagues shuffled papers and nodded solemnly while the machinery of inquiry creaked into life. The title alone sounds like something from a Cold War thriller: The UK’s Article 3 obligations and the Defence Readiness Bill. One almost expects a trumpet voluntary and a blast of dry ice.
Yet beneath the pomp sits a bracing truth. For years Westminster has treated the home front as an inconvenience best left to the occasional think-tank seminar. Now the committee wants to know whether we can actually resist armed attack, protect critical infrastructure, and keep civilians from turning into collateral when a peer adversary decides to test us. The answer, if we are honest, is that we are woefully underprepared.
Ensuring the UK’s ability to defend itself at home is one of the most fundamental duties of government, and as a NATO member, the UK is compelled to honour its commitments under Article 3 by maintaining and developing capacity to resist armed attack. In times of war, the whole country must come together, and civilians will be part of the war effort.
So says Tan Dhesi himself in the committee’s release. One can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from retired generals and the odd patriotic think-tanker. At last someone in the political class has remembered that Nato Article 3 is not a polite suggestion but a binding commitment to spend 1.5 per cent of GDP on resilience. That covers everything from shielding power grids to hardening networks, civil preparedness, and, crucially, a defence industrial base that does not rely on importing widgets from potentially hostile suppliers.
The inquiry will poke at cross-government coordination on the Home Defence Programme, a phrase that sounds reassuringly bureaucratic until you realise it has been starved of urgency for the best part of a decade. It will examine what extra powers ministers might need when escalation turns into actual shooting war, and which of those should be stuffed into next year’s promised Defence Readiness Bill. Best practice from European allies will be dusted off and admired. Written evidence, limited to a crisp 3,000 words and submitted in plain Word format by October, is invited from anyone with a brain and a spine.
The civilian question nobody wanted to ask
Here is the part that should make the chattering classes squirm. Dhesi notes that if the military is pulled away to help Nato elsewhere, the home front could be left vulnerable. Civilians, he says without flinching, will be part of the war effort. This is not some bloodthirsty fantasy; it is the oldest lesson of total war, dressed up in modern jargon. The Blitz spirit was not conjured by focus groups. It came from ordinary people who knew their role because someone had bothered to tell them.
Yet for too long we have preferred to talk about diversity workshops and net-zero targets while the lights flickered and the stockpiles dwindled. The inquiry’s timing is telling. It builds on earlier parliamentary warnings that we lack both resources and coherent planning. Those reports gathered dust. Now hybrid threats and peer adversaries are no longer abstract nightmares peddled by excitable colonels; they are the daily fare of serious strategy.
