BROWN UNVEILS SECURITY STRATEGY
BBC
KarabakhOpen
19-03-2008 10:52:33
Prime Minister Gordon Brown is set to outline the major threats facing
Britain in the country’s first ever national security strategy.
As well as terror attacks, it will focus on the risks from climate
change, scarce energy supplies, migration, flooding and pandemic
diseases.
The PM will address the issues and what the state and citizens can
do to confront them in a statement to MPs.
Security Minister Lord West says it is vital to look at a range
of threats.
The drawing up of such a document and getting Whitehall departments
to agree on it has not been an easy task – the strategy is four months
behind schedule.
Threats as diverse as failed states and extreme weather are expected
to rank as importantly as terrorism.
BBC Security correspondent Gordon Corera said there would be "an
emphasis on the new, complex, interrelated nature of risk and the
need for greater public awareness.
"The challenge for government will be transforming this ambitious
framework into effective action."
Lord West, the former head of the Royal Navy, rejected suggestions
that it will be no more than a "worthy" study.
"There are some areas which we have got very well under control; there
are other areas where a lot of work is needed and what this is doing
is identifying that and giving us a focus as a way to move forward,"
he told BBC1’s Politics Show.
‘Vigilance’
"If there was an easy answer to all of this we would not have had to
go down this route.
"It is highly complicated and it is very difficult, but we are leading
the world on this.
"Rather than anything in the past which was produced – very much
defence, foreign policy, a bit of Home Office, the threat to the
state – we are now much more looking at the citizen and tying the
citizen into this.
"Let’s think of their vigilance, how does this involve them."
However, a report by think-tank Demos warned recently that the
government was "lurching from one crisis to another" and leaving the
country vulnerable to attack.
It said: "The forthcoming national security strategy is a step in
the right direction but its aim must be to transform our outdated
and compartmentalised national security architecture.
"Unless we have joined-up government of national security, we will
be vulnerable through the cracks."