Please, no more bank-style bailouts for basic negligence.

Please, no more bank-style bailouts for basic negligence.

We seem to have entered a strange era where preventable operational failures get repackaged as “strategic resilience events” — and somehow end up with the same government treatment as a banking crisis.

A company leaves its digital perimeter porous, an attacker strolls in like they’re late for a spa appointment, and suddenly taxpayers are underwriting the consequences.
Cue the solemn press briefings.
Cue the economic melodrama.
Cue the “protecting jobs” chorus — as if job protection only ever matters after the breach, never before.

Let’s call this what it is: a bailout for negligence, dressed up in the language of national importance.

What bothers me isn’t the support — people in the supply chain absolutely need stability.
What bothers me is the precedent:

“Don’t worry. Skimp on cyber. Cut corners. The Treasury will catch you.”

That logic rotted the banking sector for a decade.
It will rot industrial cybersecurity even faster.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth everyone wants to dodge:
This wasn’t a black-swan event.
It wasn’t quantum-enabled adversaries bending space-time.
It was a long-ignored fragility finally being stress-tested by reality.

Patch late, audit later, invest never — and then send the bill to the public when predictable chaos arrives.
We’re rewarding the behaviour that created the crisis, not the people trying to stop it.

If an organisation wants to enjoy the profits, the brand prestige, the market dominance of being “critical national infrastructure,” then it has to accept the responsibility too.
No more emergency parachutes woven out of taxpayer cash every time a neglected system finally keels over.

What we need isn’t another bailout.
It’s minimum viable competence:
• Proper cyber investment.
• Transparent reporting.
• Real accountability.
• And the basic admission that operational failure is not divine intervention — it’s a management decision.

Until we stop cushioning negligence, we’re not building resilience.
We’re breeding dependency.

If we keep doing this, the next breach won’t just shake an industry —
it’ll expose the fiction that someone else will always clean up the mess.