Dear Prime Minister,

The security of these islands and their people is the most important job of any leader, and threats to our national security, primarily from Russia, are more serious than at any time since the Cold War.

Moscow is already waging a shadow war against the UK and its allies, but we have yet to establish effective deterrence, have invested too little in domestic resilience, and years of chronic information manipulation and poor government decisions have caused declining trust in public institutions (as the Director of GCHQ underlined in her speech of May 27).

There is also a major land war on our continent, in which Ukraine has shown what a resilient society can do when faced with an existential threat. They need the UK to continue — and increase — support that ensures a just peace.

At the same time, the escalation in the Middle East has sharply increased the terrorism threat facing the UK and Europe.

The challenges your government faces encompass military capability, societal resilience, institutional coherence, and democratic durability. Britain cannot fight shadow (also known as hybrid) wars with peacetime institutions. It is simply not ready to defend itself in a conflict that many of us believe has already begun.

We offer three recommendations for immediate action:

1. Appoint a Deputy Prime Minister for defense, national security, and resilience.

The current system is no longer sustainable as it distributes accountability widely but concentrates insufficient authority to deliver strategic coherence. You should appoint a Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) with authority to coordinate strategy and delivery by the Ministry of Defence, Foreign Office, Home Office, Cabinet Office, and the intelligence community.

The DPM should chair the National Security Council (NSC) in your absence and lead two permanent, monthly Cabinet subcommittees:

• A Cabinet Committee on National Resilience: Bringing together ministers responsible for infrastructure, energy, health, cyber resilience, supply chains, and economic security to deliver a national resilience strategy.
• A Cabinet Committee on Hybrid Capability: Holding departments accountable for delivery, including on cyber operations, information warfare, sabotage, and economic coercion.

The DPM must ensure political and financial support for a whole-of-nation response and build capacity across society, the devolved nations, and local government.

2. Modernize the Treasury’s engagement with national security.

The years after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine in 2014 saw a litany of missed opportunities and false economies. The root cause was structural: The Treasury is optimized for fiscal control, not strategic risk assessment, and lacks the expertise to weigh long-term security costs against short-term spending pressures.

We recommend three specific changes:

• A statutory defense and national security spending floor: Set by the NSC and reviewed every Parliament, establishing minimum baselines for defense and resilience that cannot be reduced without a formal parliamentary statement. In the current situation, we suggest setting this at 3% of GDP.
• A National Security Budget Directorate: A joint security-economic team in the Cabinet Office empowered to contest Treasury assessments, with disputes resolved at the DPM level.
• Mandatory strategic security impact assessments: Modelled on environmental impact requirements, these would make the security implications of spending review decisions transparent and subject to parliamentary scrutiny.

Fiscal discipline and efficiency are vital, and Treasury input should not be removed, but we must ensure resource allocation is not decided by officials whose primary metric is next year’s deficit — especially at a time when the UK’s adversaries are making decades-long investments in capability.

3. Establish an independent agency for information resilience.

The scale of the threat requires an independent agency to map and counter malign networks.

It would report to a joint parliamentary committee, with devolved parliamentary representation, to ensure strict political neutrality and safeguard freedom of expression.

It would be responsible for:

• Assessing and investigating foreign influence vectors and hostile information networks in the UK.
• Informing the public and building societal resilience to information manipulation.
• Coordinating with social media platforms, regulators, and civil society to counter state-linked activity.
• National security-related threats in the information domain, taking over powers from OFCOM, the UK’s communications regulator, and government departments.

Such an institution must operate with strong democratic safeguards, parliamentary oversight, transparency, and clearly defined protections for freedom of expression.

The scale of the threat facing the UK requires machinery-of-government changes that would once have been considered extraordinary but are long overdue.

Economic renewal, public service reform, and democratic stability ultimately depend on the security of the British state. The next major crisis will test if our institutions are sufficiently coherent and prepared to withstand sustained strategic pressure.

Britain should begin preparing now.

Yours Faithfully

Andy Pryce is a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a former British diplomat and a globally recognized expert in countering information threats, cognitive defense, and strategic communications. He brings decades of leadership advising governments and organizations on crisis management, countering foreign information manipulation, and impact in contested information spaces. As a diplomat, Andy led national efforts to counter foreign information manipulation, establishing innovative capabilities to anticipate, analyze, mitigate, and disrupt malign state actors and their proxies. His senior diplomatic roles included Head of Public Diplomacy at the British Embassy in Washington and at the UK Mission to the EU in Brussels.