Labour has a cheek urging people to become more resilient in the face of growing threats from multiple enemies which could disrupt food and energy supplies when it’s done next to nothing itself to improve national resilience.

Recent Tory governments were missing in action on this front, too, even as the world became a more dangerous place. But Labour has failed to make up for lost time.

Even though the threats – cyber, terrorist, state-sponsored disruption and disinformation by Russia, Iran, China – stare us in the face, Labour ministers are just as complacent as their Tory predecessors, if not more so.

Its ‘Be Ready’ preparation checklist published on Thursday – sleeping bags, blankets, warm clothing, a battery-powered radio, a ‘grab bag’ in case of emergency evacuation and three days’ supply of food, water and essential medicines – is fair enough, if no more than the minimum required. But even that was botched.

The Cabinet Office sneaked it out via a website and a written ministerial statement. Dan Jarvis, the security minister in charge of the initiative, was nowhere to be seen. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting was visiting a new munitions factory in Shropshire just as the policy was being announced. A perfect opportunity to speak of resilience in the face of danger, you might think. But he didn’t say a word about it, until pressed by journalists.

As for the Prime Minister, not a dickie bird. Perhaps he was too busy prepping for his appearance on Celebrity Gogglebox, or recording yet another TikTok on a matter of supreme national importance (perhaps the urgent need for supermarket trolleys to have four wheels that go in the same direction).

Andy Burnham heads a Government which has called for a ‘national resilience conversation’. But we’ve had nothing but silence from him. Not so his Housing Secretary, Angela Rayner. Her contribution was to reveal what would be in her grab bag: ‘mascara, concealer and a bottle of sauvignon blanc’.

Well, it’s only national security. So why not joke? It’s not a priority for the Government.

It has nothing useful to say. Unlike others.

George Robertson warned in April that the UK was ‘under-prepared... under-insured… under attack’. Coming from a former Labour defence secretary and secretary-general of Nato, you’d think his words might carry some weight with a Labour Government.

Not a bit of it. Britain remains just about the least resilient country in Europe in its inability to cope with threats. Other governments – from centre-Left Canada to centre-Right Germany – have realised that in a dangerous world it no longer makes sense to over-depend on global supply chains for essentials.

Not Britain. In any conflict or severe disruption to trade we’d quickly discover that without imports we’d be unable to feed, heat, power, rearm or medicate ourselves.

Successive UK governments for more than 40 years have lauded globalisation and its signature feature, free trade, because it meant cheaper stuff for consumers (ie voters).

That was fine when free navigation of the high seas was a given and the might of the US Navy, backed by a formidable Royal Navy, sailed these seas to keep them free.

Well, free navigation is no more: think Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf and Bab al-Mandab at the southern end of the Red Sea. We can no longer depend on America to uphold the world order that underpinned globalisation. And we no longer have anything resembling a navy.

In 1990 we had 46 frigates and destroyers. We now have 13, most of them undergoing some sort of repair or refurbishment.

Thirty years ago we had 22 submarines. Now we have nine. Four of them are for nuclear-deterrent purposes only. Of the remaining five, most of them are also in for repair.

We struggle to keep tabs on Russian ships dawdling suspiciously over the undersea data cables and energy pipelines crucial to our economy, so we’re hardly in any position to keep the world’s sea lanes open as America retreats from such commitments.

Yet we still import most of our food, iron, steel, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, gas and oil. In any prolonged disruption to these supply chains we’d quickly be on our knees.

You’d think a strategy to bring these products onshore might appeal to Labour. You might even call it an industrial policy. But on such matters Labour is brain dead.

Energy provides the starkest example of our lack of resilience. By allowing our North Sea oil and gas fields to atrophy prematurely, we now import most of what we need. Donald Trump’s war on Iran has shown how easily supply can be disrupted and how quickly prices can rise.

Yet we store barely seven days of gas, roughly 4 per cent of what Germany stores, 5 per cent of Italy and 7 per cent of France and the Netherlands. In any major disruption to gas supplies we’d quickly run out. But it’s even worse than that.

Our biggest facility for storing gas is a former offshore gas field called Rough. The Tories foolishly allowed it to be mothballed. But efforts to bring it back into use have been stymied because of a dispute between the Government and energy supplier Centrica, which owns it.

There’s even talk of it closing early next year. Bang would go half our gas storage capacity. So much for national resilience.

The Government this week belatedly gave the go-ahead to the Jackdaw gas field in the North Sea. But it comes at a price: to keep Labour’s Net Zero zealots happy, it looks like the massive Rosebank oil field to the east of Shetlands will not be developed. This is madness. We will need oil and gas for the foreseeable future. We should be deploying all the latest extraction techniques and AI to exploit what’s left in our part of the North Sea, just like the Norwegians. But for Labour the virtue-signalling of Net Zero matters more than the realities of resilience and security of supply.

The knock-on effects are serious. The Net Zero obsession has given us the highest energy costs in the world, which has undermined our heavy industries, from steel to chemicals.

So we import most of our steel, as well as crucial chemical-based products such as fertilisers. Another blow to our resilience.

Everywhere you look we’ve become dependent on other countries – states that could easily turn on us in times of tension. More than 90 per cent of penicillin now comes from China, along with an array of other antibiotics. Yet we’re supposed to be a world leader in pharma. We’ve also sold the pass on food production. In 1980 we produced 72 per cent of all the food we consumed and 84 per cent of the types of food you can produce in Britain. Today the equivalent percentages are 60 per cent and 72 per cent.

A report this week revealed Britain has become less self-sufficient in eggs, fresh vegetables, beef and seven other staple commodities than it was three decades ago.

You’d think Brexit would have led to farm policies specifically designed to increase UK food production. But the Tories and Labour have preferred environmental incentives to more home-grown food – yet another example of resilience playing second fiddle to more fashionable considerations.

Our food vulnerability is made all the worse by the fact that unlike, say, Germany and Poland we have no strategic stockpiles of food. Or any plans to create them. And unlike Sweden, which last year began to rebuild its reserves of emergency grain for the first time since the end of the Cold War.

No wonder the rest of Europe regards us as something of a joke when it comes to resilience.

Nowhere more so than on defence spending, where Burnham’s refusal to tell us how and when we’ll get to 3 per cent of GDP, much less 3.5 per cent, is a disgrace and an embarrassment. No government can be taken seriously on resilience if it refuses to rearm the nation while dangers multiply.

That is a failure for the history books for which we’ll pay dearly. But I’m told you can’t play loud music on the train any more. So there is that.