Building Awareness Of Community Resilience Erosion by Poor Strategic Decision Making

The current situation within the halls of power of Westminster is constantly demonstrating two warring parties who are losing situational awareness of what is actually happening across the UK. As the Brexit question continues to shatter the fabric of communities, depending on whether you are "in" or "out", there is an increasingly apparent trend of poor strategic leadership decisions now returning to haunt the ministers that made them; there is also the failure to admit them. Is this a failure of moral courage to accept mistakes and address the issues at hand?

Austerity policies have caused a number of issues that have resulted in the environment to create increased violent crime. The impact of these issues have decreased the resilience of the communities across the UK and the ability to provide adequate security and local intelligence gathering. These issues are:

• Reduction in community centres;
• An over-stretched, under-resourced and under-funded NHS, with some trusts not having enough vehicles to cover critical activities;
• Ongoing poor pay and support for teachers, resulting in children being poorly educated for the workplace;
• Limited emotional resilience support for teachers and young people;
• Decrease in police on the streets (21000 personnel), resulting in a reduction in community engagement and a loss of local intelligence networks;
• Reduction of the Armed Forces capability, impacting on national resilience and ability to respond to critical national threats;
• Failure to build a way forward for the next generation, resulting in an increase in the younger population seeking to find other ways;
• Eroding of the UK's international standing within key influential organisations, such as the EU, The Commonwealth, the G8 and NATO;
• A rapid increase in the number of children living in poverty;
• A continuous attack on local councils to reduce funding, which in turn leads to a deconstruction of social support frameworks;
• Increasing council taxes, pushing more families into poverty; and
• An increase in the homeless on our streets.

If we were to look at this situation through another lens we may see things differently. Applying the framework that the UK military sought to apply in two Resilience building campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can observe how these issues would be treated in combat. Using the guidance of Templar (Malaya), Patreaus (Iraq) or McChrystal (Afghanistan), if you are fighting a counter insurgency, the issues listed above are the things you seek address quickly through the provision of resources, as well as to provide the host nation its own integral capability to fight the lure of the insurgent. This is not a situation just for the Middle East; this approach was also used in Northern Ireland to help stop the ongoing slaughter during the OIRA / PIRA insurgency campaign. What it does demonstrate though is that the current UK government, across all parties, have lost sight of the bigger picture, with the majority of focus being spent on Brexit. Discuss.