Monbiot: Prepare campaign asks Britons to offset government failures — SkimNews
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- The Prepare campaign tells Britons to take individual action for emergencies, while government policy actively undermines resilience, according to a Monbiot column in the Guardian.
- Water UK has warned there isn't enough water to support new datacentres, which the government has declared "nationally significant infrastructure projects" that can bypass the planning system, per the column.
- The National Risk Register estimates only a 1-5% chance of a "significant" heatwave impact (200-1,000 deaths) over the next five years, despite 2,877 heat-associated excess deaths in England during May-June 2025 alone, Monbiot notes.
- One in nine new homes are being built in flood-risk areas according to Aviva data, and a recent High Court judgment leaves local authorities unable to block developments that fail safety tests, the column reports.
- The "poultry sector growth plan" is multiplying factory farms that the Scientific Task Force on Avian Influenza and Wild Birds identifies as where highly pathogenic bird flu first arose — directly contradicting Prepare's advice to wash hands after feeding wild birds.
- Anonymous senior food executives warned last week their industry is "defaulting to quick-fix crisis management" amid "material reductions in yield, quality and reliability of supply," rather than lobbying for needed regulation.
- Andy Burnham at the Labour conference pledged "a Britain where people feel the country has got their back again" and listed deregulation as one of five great evils — a break Monbiot calls significant after 47 years of bipartisan red-tape cutting.
Why it matters: Monbiot frames Prepare not as neutral public-health messaging but as a deflection tool: by asking households to turn off taps while ministers approve datacentre water use and designate factory farms as national priorities, the campaign papers over five decades of lobby-driven deregulation. The Burnham speech shows that critique now lives inside Labour, but his fiscal-rule pledge leaves him little room to reverse course.
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