The Global War on Terror-era head of the NATO alliance who once hailed Russia’s Vladimir Putin as cooperative and potentially pro-Western now hoards food against the possibility of the “lights going out”, he has said.
The West is “under attack”, Lord George Robertson [above, right], the former Secretary General of NATO between 1999-2003, and former Labour Defence Secretary has said, as he revealed his own apparently anxiety about both the likelihood of infrastructure sabotage and the vulnerability of developed countries to it.
The veteran politician and diplomat is so concerned about a “significant attack” on the United Kingdom, he has admitted in an interview with British newspaper of record The Times that he has been acquiring survivalist supplies to ensure he is personally “as ready as I could be”. Among his preparations are carrying a torch in his pocket and having an additional one in every room of his house in case of a major power outage, carrying a float of cash against the possibility of the banking system ceasing to function, a battery-powered radio to receive updates from the government in case of grid failure, and a stockpile of food and water.
While all these acts may appear to be sensible precaution-taking, the fact they have been forced on the comfortable British elite at a level as senior as a former government minister and NATO Secretary General underlines the degree to which Russian revanchism has spooked the political class.
Lord Robertson told the paper: “I think we are being tested. They’re going to the edge of what they think is acceptable. They won’t go across that line, at this point… That’s the way in which you undermine western societies. There is no doubt at all, there is a challenge to the West”. The Critical National Infrastructure which underpins modern society is “becoming more fragile and much more on a knife edge”, warning “It won’t be enough to wait to until the lights go out and the hospitals shut”.
The Labour politician said he believed the public needs to develop “resilience” against coming emergencies, and The Times stated that: “Robertson believes the British public needs to be prepared for a significant attack on the homeland by Russia.”
Most remarkable of all, perhaps, was the clear implication that Lord Robertson believes there may have been a conspiracy to deceive in the details surrounding the loss of all electricity to the entire Iberian Peninsula earlier this year. Per the report, Robertson said “maybe” the official story that the outage was caused by a random power fluctuation that caused a cascading failure is correct, but that he also acknowledges this is “not what everybody believes.”
Specifically on Russia, Robertson said “thin skinned” Putin had changed radically from the potentially cooperative newly-minted leader he’d met several times in the early 2000s. Those remarks follow others he made in 2021, when he revealed Putin wanted to take Russia into NATO 25 years ago as an equal partner in the civilised Western world.
Earlier this year, Robertson made clear he believed this position had changed. He said in November: “Russia is clearly at war with us. I’ve no doubt at all that even though we’re not at war with them, they’ve clearly declared war on us.”
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