Democratic oversight of new government ‘War Book’ key to ensuring support

The country’s new ‘War Book’ must be subject to democratic accountability to ensure any new powers are just, effective and reversible, a new report says.

With a new Defence Readiness Bill slated to be enacted within this Parliament, there should be a broad public debate on the principles behind any new emergency powers the government intends to legislate for.

The creation of the new War Book – a document containing comprehensive plans for the defence of the United Kingdom in the event of war – was confirmed earlier this month by Sir Richard Knighton, Chief of the Defence Staff. Meanwhile, in response to the USA’s war with Iran, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has formed a Middle East Response Committee.

This, says the report’s author Paul Mason, should force both policymakers and the public to engage with challenges not encountered since the Cold War; challenges made more extreme by technological and demographic change.

Mr Mason, an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Exeter’s Centre for the Public Understanding of Defence and Security, says the abolition of the previous War Book in 2004 has created a paradox. The new version cannot be written without preparing new emergency powers and designing new wartime institutions; but that process is constrained by constitutional norms and information rights that did not exist for those drafting War Books in 1911, in the 1930s or during the Cold War.

There is, writes Mr Mason, a “vacuum of public assumptions” about what the state might do if the UK found itself on the brink of war. Due to the centrality of “hybrid” and cognitive aggression to Russian and Chinese doctrine, if the UK were attacked it might not enjoy a “last days of peace” phase such as it did in 1939.

The report shows how Britain entered the Second World War with a pre-designed machinery of government, a detailed transition plan, pre-existing emergency powers and last-minute emergency legislation that was designed to be reversible and kept under legislative check. All of this was accepted by a population more deferential than today’s, and in an environment where the government could control the production and distribution of information.

Though work on the new War Book will necessarily be classified, says Mr Mason, the principles to be followed are a legitimate subject of public debate. It is a basic principle of liberal democracy, he insists, that the wartime “state of exception” must be designed during peacetime.

As for the Defence Readiness Bill, he says, “Achieving maximum clarity and transparency at the design stage will be crucial for whole-of-society acceptance that such emergency provision exists, even if it is never activated.” 

Mr Mason warns that, should the Defence Readiness Bill shy away from establishing new emergency powers to protect Critical National Infrastructure, control industrial production and defend citizens against disinformation, the state risks “flying blind” into any situation where war becomes likely. He adds that the Bill should identify and simplify the primary resilience duties for each tier of government: national, regional and local.

The report also recommends:

• All Local Resilience Forums, devolved governments and Strategic Authorities should be put through a cognitive warfare exercise in the next 24 months.
• The BBC Charter, which is up for renewal, should reintroduce a modernised wartime public information duty, which would allow the government to take control of public terrestrial broadcasting infrastructure if needed, and give the BBC transparent public information duties.
• The National Armaments Directorate should be prepared to separate into a Ministry of War Production, with powers to command and control the private sector, and its own minister.
• The economic security units scattered around Whitehall should merge to become a Shadow Ministry of Economic Warfare.
• The Government should consider building a Lithuanian-style hardened and separate secure state communications system for use in wartime, which uses redundancy to overcome single points of failure.

“There is a growing literature on, and interest in, the design of “states of exception” in liberal democracies,” adds Mr Mason. “The aim of the report is to stimulate debate both in Parliament, the expert community and among the public, about the rights and duties of citizens in time of extreme crisis.”

Paul Mason is also the Aneurin Bevan Adjunct Fellow in Defence and Resilience at the Council on Geostrategy, and consulting editor at The New World magazine. He is the author of seven books, including Postcapitalism, How to Stop Fascism and (upcoming) Reds: A Global History of Communism.