The government would like you to be slightly anxious too

Author: Slightly Anxious       Date: 16th July 2026         Time to read: 10 minutes

Slightly Anxious is here to help you turn any crisis into a manageable adventure — for you and everyone you care about.

Well, this is awkward. For months we’ve been quietly telling you that a little preparedness is just common sense — a torch here, a few tins there, nothing that would alarm the neighbours. And now the government has gone and said the same thing, only louder and with a press conference.

The Times reported this week (15th July 2026) that a national ‘resilience’ campaign will launch later this year, urging households to keep basic supplies to hand “should the worst happen”. The suggested list will sound rather familiar to regular readers: battery-powered or wind-up torches and radios, portable power banks, first aid kits, bottled water, and non-perishable food. Ministers are also planning the largest national home defence exercise since the Cold War — a multi-day rehearsal with the suitably dramatic name of Operation Albiston Shadow — and the government’s classified crisis plans, the so-called ‘war books’, are being updated for the first time since 2004. Schools will even get new guidance on teaching children how to stay safe in emergencies.

Now. We know exactly what a headline containing the words ‘prepare for war’ does to a person’s morning cup of tea. So before anything else, let’s take a calming breath and sort out what this actually means for you and your loved ones.

What this announcement is — and what it isn’t

First, the reassuring part, and it’s genuinely reassuring: governments run worst-case exercises all the time. That’s their job, and as their own spokeswoman put it, exercises are not a prediction of future events. The scenarios being tested — cyberattacks, disruption to power, water, or phone signal — are precisely the sort of ‘grey zone’ nuisances that fall well short of anything cinematic. If you’ve read our article ‘Why you’re right to be Slightly Anxious’, you’ll know our position: the realistic planning horizon for a UK household isn’t a bunker in the garden, it’s about a week of managing at home with the utilities misbehaving.

Second, the genuinely useful part: the government’s advice and ours are, rather gratifyingly, the same advice. A resilient household is a resilient household whether the cause is a cyber incident, a burst water main, or an especially ambitious storm. The kit doesn’t care why the lights went out.

And third, the honest part: an official campaign means a lot of people will be thinking about this at once. The one predictable consequence of a big public awareness push is a brief, entirely avoidable scramble for exactly the items on the list. The calm move is to sort your kit before the campaign launches, at your leisure, with no queues and no drama. Preparedness is normal, not extreme — and it’s never more pleasant than when done early.

The Whitehall-approved shopping list (we got there first)

Here’s the government’s suggested kit, with our researched picks — because ‘get a wind-up radio’ is advice, but knowing which one is a service:

• A wind-up or battery radio — when the network is down, the radio is how news reaches you. The Midland ER10VP Weather Radio with Flashlight at c.£40-£50 does radio, torch, and phone-charging in one. We covered why this matters in ‘How to keep informed and keep talking’.

• Torches, plural — a head torch gives you light plus two free hands. The Petzl Actik Core at c.£60-£80 is rechargeable with a battery back-up. See ‘What to do when the lights go out’ for the full lighting plan.

• A portable power bank — charged, please, not sitting in a drawer at three per cent. Low-power mode and rationed screen time do the rest, a trick we borrowed from the festival-goer in ‘Slightly Anxious salutes the festival-goer’.

• A proper first aid kit — the St John Ambulance Home First Aid Kit at c.£15-£21 is compact and comprehensive. Always read the label and consult a pharmacist if unsure.

• Bottled water — the guideline is three litres per person per day for drinking, and our article ‘What to do when the water has been turned off’ walks through storage without turning the spare room into a reservoir. Oasis Water Purification Tablets (200 for c.£7-£9) weigh almost nothing and earn their place.

• Non-perishable food — food that needs no fridge and, ideally, no cooking: tins, energy bars, nuts, dried fruit, the reliable peanut butter sachet. Our ‘Kitchen in a crisis’ and curated meal guides turn this from a grim shelf of beans into something you’d actually eat.

• Medicine — a sensible stock of your regular prescriptions plus everyday remedies. Talk to your pharmacist about keeping a buffer of anything you truly depend on. Consult a pharmacist if unsure.

If you’d rather do the whole thing in one organised swoop, that’s exactly what our article ‘Slightly Anxious says Get a Grab Bag’ and ‘The complete UK household emergency preparedness guide’ are for. We’ve done the research so you don’t have to.

The indoor camping holiday, now with official endorsement

Regular readers will recognise the frame: a week at home with no mains power and questionable water isn’t the end of days, it’s an indoor camping holiday — inconvenient, occasionally character-building, and entirely endurable with the right kit and the right attitude. The government calls it resilience. We call it Tuesday, with candles.

And no — none of this makes you a Prepper. It makes you the person on your street who, when the campaign posters go up, has already quietly ticked every box and can offer the neighbours a cup of tea made on a camping stove. There’s a certain satisfaction in being ahead of official advice.

Savour it

As a member of Slightly Anxious, we’ll even keep pace with Whitehall for you: every three months we’ll remind you to recharge your devices, refresh your food and water, and swap your kit for the season. The government gets a multi-day exercise with hundreds of civil servants; you get an email and a fifteen-minute potter around the house. We know which we’d rather.

So when the resilience campaign arrives this autumn, you can watch it with the serene detachment of someone whose grab bag is already by the door. That’s not luck. That’s preparedness.

Remember, keep calm and visit us here.

This blog post has been AI-assisted with human oversight