This could include the suspension of peacetime services, closing motorways to all but military traffic and the internment of subversives without charge or trial.
Other regulations included: Other existing legislation governing everyday matters already allows for special provisions in a national emergency.
For example, the Energy Act 1976 allows the Secretary of State to create regulations governing the production, distribution and use of coal, petrol, diesel, gas, biofuels and electricity in a crisis.
The bills' content was not divulged both on the grounds of national security and because it would be politically controversial for the party in charge at that time to do so considering their draconian nature.
The second, The Readiness Bill, covered the requisitioning of private property (including land, buildings, vehicles, ships and aircraft), preventing key workers from leaving their employment, widening the role of the armed forces and fire brigades, reorganising the National Health Service, control of transport, extra police powers, regulation of money supply and currency controls and compensation.
With the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Northern Ireland Peace Process and the Human Rights Act 1998 passing into law, these emergency powers and the legal framework that supported them became dated and needed re-examining.
Groups like the RNLI, the Salvation Army and the WRVS are charitable organisations but are pressed into service to supplement the civil defence, the armed forces and post-attack distribution of aid.