In September, the British government sent a message to all mobile phones in the UK, accompanied by 10 seconds of a penetrating claxon-like bleep. This was a test of the national Emergency Alerts System, of which – until the noises began – hardly anyone was aware. According to gov.uk/alerts, the point of the alarms is to warn citizens when they may be in danger from, for example, extreme weather. To most people’s ears, though, they resembled the wailing sirens that sent people hurrying to the air-raid shelters during the Second World War. That the government could so easily take over the nation’s primary means of communication – the mobile phone network – was itself eerie, if not sinister: the sort of thing that could only be justified in wartime.

Air-raid shelters? Most people would be hard put to find one, if they exist. Nor have preparations of other kinds been taken seriously. In Sweden, a booklet entitled In Case of Crisis or War, whose cover showed a picture of a soldier with a military jet overhead, has been taken seriously and many homeowners have stocked up on survival rations. The British have been more blasé in their response. Households have been encouraged to buy quantities of tinned food and bottled water, enough to see them through three days of an emergency (although why only three days as opposed to three weeks, three months or three years is not explained). However, I don’t know anyone who has actually done so. Since 1945, war has been something that happened far away – unless the British Army’s deployment against the IRA before the Good Friday agreement of 1998 is counted. No one under 85 remembers life being seriously disrupted at home.

It may be time, though, to revisit the past. War-gaming a conflict with Russia should include what would happen on the Home Front. This would have been recognised by the leaders of the First and Second World Wars. Both saw Britain put under siege. Food shortages after the bleak harvest of 1916, exacerbated by the threat from German submarines, did not precipitate a revolution – but that happened in Russia. Instead, Britain limped to the end of the war, haranguing farmers to produce more, although their horses and young men had, in many cases, already been taken for the Front. When peace came, governments forgot about Britain’s need to feed itself from its own resources. The long agricultural depression, which had begun with the importation of cheap grain from the newly opened American prairies in the 1870s, resumed its hold. Small farms did not have the money to invest in tractors or ‘artificial’, as the new nitrogen-based fertilisers were commonly known. In 1939 Britain relied even more heavily on imported food than it had in 1914.

Thus 90 per cent of cereals came from overseas. Even onions – nearly all of them – came from France and Spain, although they are easy to grow in the UK (French onion-sellers, wearing berets and pedalling bicycles festooned with strings of onions, were still to be glimpsed in the 1960s). People in high places knew that a crisis was coming. Ration books for every person in the country were ordered in 1937, but were not delivered until shortly before the outbreak of war two years later. There had been too many other things to worry about for the government to make food a priority.

As a result, rationing, when it came, was severe. A single fresh egg, two ounces of butter, four ounces of bacon or ham – these were among the meagre weekly allowance for adults. An army of Land Girls replaced farmhands who were now under arms. This effort was supplemented by a Dig for Victory campaign, urging the population to grow as much as it could at home, on whatever patches of ground were available – back-gardens, railway embankments, London parks, golf courses, cricket grounds and allotments. The slogan – so much more energising than the government’s first iteration, Grow More Food – sprung from the brain of the brilliant young journalist and future left-wing firebrand, Michael Foot, then working for the Evening Standard. It was part of a spirited propaganda operation that successfully tapped into the British psyche, using advertising techniques pioneered during the 1920s and 1930s by institutions such as the London Underground, Shell Oil and Guinness.

Dig for Victory is not quite as popular as the slogan Keep Calm and Carry On, but it continues to find a fond place on coffee mugs. It was a significant expression of the ‘let’s all pull together’ mentality that formed a counterpart to the stoical Blitz spirit. There was a performative element to some of it. While the vegetables planted in Hyde Park made some contribution to London’s diet, the area that was dug in that and other parks was constrained by the need to retain space for recreation and the enjoyment of flowers. Like the call for pots and pans and the removal of railings from streets and squares, the movement gave ordinary people the feeling that they had contributed to the national effort – even if, in the case of pots, pans and railings, most of the metal collected was not of the right kind to build Spitfires and was eventually dumped at sea. By the end of the War, 60 per cent of families in Britain were growing their own food. They were laughing about it, too, if the posters are anything to go by. For the artists responsible appealed to their public at a number of levels. There was a heroic image of a foot on a spade (although the foot, to make the picture, was placed on the wrong side of the spade to do any good): this was in the tradition of Expressionist photography seen in the films noirs that had begun to appear in France and Germany during the 1930s. Other posters used sophisticated visual imagery of a faintly Surrealist kind – a spade that can also be read as the prow of a ship, for example. Most were good-humoured and jolly. Where the artists of Social Realism would have shown musclebound workers striding towards victory, Dig for Victory prefers a man with a basket of vegetables and a pipe, swinging along the road in trousers that are a couple of inches too short.

The cartoon-like Doctor Carrot and Potato Pete sought to familiarise the public with the joy of vegetables, stigmatised by the long-held practice of cooking them until they had lost all texture and flavour. (Carrots were promoted as good for the eyesight – a fallacious claim that was put about to disguise the real reason for the success of RAF night fighter pilots: a new type of airborne radar.) Produce from the allotment or garden provided a degree of variety. Rarely can wartime cooking have hit the heights of gastronomy, but it had some merits in terms of health – nutritionists regard it as better than the over-reliance on fast food behind the obesity crisis of today. There were other benefits. Old hands at gardening advised the inexperienced. This helped build community, as did the 5,800 Preservation Centres set up by the Women’s Institute – which otherwise maintained a strict neutrality on other matters concerning the war – to cope with the age-old problem of summer gluts, when everything in the vegetable bed ripens at the same time. A painting in the Imperial War Museum, Evelyn Dunbar’s A Canning Demonstration, 1940, shows one in operation in a village hall. The hours spent in the open air improved the growers’ sense of bien être.

Who thinks that Dig for Victory could have any relevance today? Hardly anyone, probably. But food resilience is now far worse than it was in the 1930s. Some attempts were made to improve it in Britain under the Thatcher governments of the 1980s. From memory, it managed to get to a position of about 50 per cent of home production. Things changed after the Labour landslide of 1997. Then the priority for farmers was to do almost anything rather than produce food. The various diktats of the Common Agricultural Policy made farming look very expensive. Farmers were urged to develop golf courses or build houses instead. Agriculture was downgraded as a land use under the planning system. Today, the demand for housing is greater than ever before. Sites for it are urgently needed. But alas, there is not a great deal of land, particularly in densely populated England, and it has been used in a profligate way. Take out-of-town shopping centres. Every town or city has at least one, often the size of a small farm. They are composed of low-rise retail sheds surrounded by seas of tarmac on which to park cars. Yet cars could be put underground, while three or four floors of housing might be built over the shops. Instead, land is squandered that might be urgently needed to grow food.

Supermarkets rely on lorries re-supplying their shelves on a daily if not twice-daily basis. This system is called Just in Time. Nothing is stored on site. Computer stock-control means that as soon as a product-line runs out, more is delivered to the store. We know that this form of distribution is extremely vulnerable to disruption because it has already happened. The boycotting of oil refineries by protesters, the onset of Covid, the grain crisis at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, bad global harvests and blocked shipping lanes. These have all caused mini-crises and empty shelves in recent years. It is not hard to imagine how these relatively small disruptions could be amplified in times of war, not least through cyber attacks.

It is hardly surprising that supermarkets ignore food security. They are adept at externalising costs. For example, there is an epidemic of shoplifting because chains have turned to self-checkout. They no longer pay for the staff who used to ring up groceries at a till. Society has been left to pick up the cost of the crime – not just the literal cost in terms of policing (although one has to say this cannot be much, since the police do little about it) but the cost of  moral degeneration. It is bad for society that some people should routinely and in full public view break the law. Similarly, supermarkets save money through Just in Time, leaving the taxpayer to fund the road networks and other infrastructure on which it depends. And someone else will have to solve the problem of keeping the population fed when Just in Time breaks down, as seems all too likely, as soon as a country comes under attack.

There are other reasons to worry about food. There is a much larger British population to feed – 48 million in 1939, 69 million today. And it is growing. In the mid-20^th century, many people had family who still lived on and worked in the countryside; in 2025, these ties have been severed. Even youngsters who live in the countryside won’t work on the land. Despite high rates of unemployment, farmers rely on migrant workers to pick fruit and pluck turkeys. While British farming is on a bigger scale and therefore more efficient than that of other countries in Europe, it does not need to so many people to operate the big, expensive machines – increasingly computer-controlled – on which it depends. Farm workers don’t yet require PhDs but it is getting that way. Their skills do not transfer well to allotment gardening. During the Second World War, householders were urged to preserve potato peelings to feed pigs, shown genially in a state of Churchillian contentment. But modern regulations would no longer permit this homely form of economy. Concern about swine flu means that untreated food waste can no longer be used.

None of this is encouraging but there is another lesson that Dig for Victory can teach us. It is never too late to take action. No one had given it much thought before the Second World War, but the officials, scientists, horticulturalists, journalists and poster artists all rose to the challenge, extemporising to extraordinary effect. There are already a few straws in the wind (to adopt a rural metaphor) suggesting the public might be receptive to another such effort. Guerrilla gardening showcases the natural desire of urban folk to take control of the environment around them and enjoy watching plants grow. Here is a base that a new Dig for Victory could build on. Equally, the lawns that were the pride and joy of a previous generation – think of the pride taken in cricket squares, lawn tennis courts and urban parks – have been dethroned by the cult of rewilding. Lawns are unfashionably deficient in biodiversity and require chemicals to look immaculate. Gardens have grown to love scruffiness. It’s a start.

Government should build on it. War inspires innovation, seen most obviously in the development of drone technology in Ukraine. The First and Second World War spawned a new interest in agricultural science – witness, for example, the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, to promote fertility, established in 1919. These days, food production is undergoing a new agricultural revolution due to the potentialities of science. All well and good, but let’s remember that technology is not everything. Like charity, food security begins at home.