I’m on the edge of Builth Wells, a historic spa town in South Wales by the River Wye, known for the annual arrival of antiques and livestock; it also has a nightclub called Dazzlarz and two separate shops named Beautifully Bonkers. Leigh Price, who has a gnomic turn of phrase and vigilant blue eyes, is showing me around his store, The Bug Out. He brings me to a display of MREs, or ‘meals ready to eat’. Among the liquefied green pouches is a packet of chocolate pudding that could be edible for another 20 years. Is it nice? ‘It’s alright,’ he says, with not much conviction. He lifts and shakes another bestseller: a large tin of freeze-dried chicken fajita and rice. Not long after Price opened the place four years ago, one of his sons peered inside – perhaps noting the army surplus gear, bushcraft knives and gas masks – and said, ‘If there was a zombie apocalypse, this is where I’d want to go.’
Many of Price’s customers already imagine a similarly undesirable fate coming down the pipe. The Bug Out is a prepper shop, one of a growing number in the UK selling survival equipment that opened during COVID. Price is eager to frame prepping as a practical, of-course-you-would pursuit. ‘Prepping is an insurance policy, right?’ he says, standing by a shelf of suede boots. ‘You insure your car against accidents, you insure your house against fire; you gotta look at prepping as insurance on life. If something happens, some sort of emergency, you’re insured, you’ve got supplies, skills, knowledge, kit.’
Price, a stolid pragmatist down to his olive Crocs, would be a useful person to know if, one day, the shit hits the fan (or SHTF, in the standard-issue prepper argot). In a post-pandemic world, fewer people are sure that it won’t. One tell for this is the spread of prepping in culturally distant provinces. Silicon Valley. Guardian columns. Mumsnet. On a Friday night in March, I was at a music industry do, chatting about this piece, when a writer I’d met only moments earlier sheepishly mentioned that he’d been building a shockproof larder of tins and pastas for years, and brought up a big-room tech house DJ who’d erected a barn for the same purpose. In recent months, several European governments have said that packing a ‘go bag’ and stockpiling essentials might not be such a bad idea (the UK did the same last year).
If preppers are inclined to treat official advice with contempt, the rest of the country is starting to feel the same. A 2024 report lays bare the degree of ill-feeling among the British public towards our leaders; among OECD countries, only the Slovakian and Czech governments are less trusted than the UK’s. Nearly a year into power, Labour is struggling to inspire optimism. It can’t do much about running trains or taps properly, has tied itself in Gordian knots over growth, and doesn’t have a bed to spare in hospitals or prisons. Though it often blames the Tories for Britain’s malaise, Keir Starmer’s government seems powerless to fix it.
Stigmas around prepping persist. In the public imagination, preppers are camo-loving, bullet-counting Pizzagaters, a few plasters short of a first-aid kit. The quintessentially red-state American stereotype has its roots in the figure of Robert DePugh, who in 1961 founded the Minutemen, a commie-hating anti-government militia. Considered the godfather of American survivalism, DePugh combined paramilitary knowhow with sinister warnings for crypto-socialists, not least in his monthly rag, On Target. ‘Traitors beware,’ declared one issue, describing milkmen, mechanics and other ordinary-looking ‘patriots’ who’d learned how to wield ‘the slow knife, the strangler’s cord’.
In the UK, COVID has aroused a dark awakening of anti-vaxxers, blade runners, climate sceptics and 5G arsonists. However diffuse their politics, these loosely affiliated cells have common cause against weather controllers and net-zero zealots, among others, in the arena of what the writer Peter Guest has called ‘the bullshit cinematic universe’.
The paranoid style is taking hold in Westminster, too. One Tory MP compared the side effects of COVID jabs to the ‘biggest crime since the Holocaust’. There’s Liz Truss, whingeing about the ‘deep state’ on her Florida safaris. And the Conservatives aren’t the only ones at it: a Labour by-election candidate was recorded saying that the Israelis knew about and ‘allowed’ 7 October to happen.
Conspiracy theorising among elected officials extends even to dull town planning models like the 15-minute city, a freedom-thieving ‘international socialist concept’, the Tory MP Nick Fletcher told the House of Commons, to disbelieving laughter. Less amusing, though, is research by King’s College London that points out that 33% of the public agrees with Fletcher on this and a range of other secret plots to turn Britain into a walkable dystopia.
