British civil war – not if, but when?
BRUCE NEWSOME
The government spun Rudakubana as a Welsh choirboy. Dissenters described him as a Muslim immigrant. Months later, we learned that the dissenters were closer to the truth: that the attacker is a Jihadi second-generation immigrant. In the meantime, the government jailed more than a dozen dissenters for racist speech, some for years. Parliament’s Committee for Home Affairs ruled that the violence was caused by misinformation, and called for more censorship, as reported in these pages. Meanwhile, Wikipedia dedicates an entry to the ‘far-right, anti-immigration protests and riots . . . fuelled by false claims circulated by far-right groups,’ without any mention of the government’s misinformation about Rudakubana.
Nevertheless, warnings of civil war persist. However, they appear in channels that the elite caricatures as far-right, such as GBNews. Worse, the protagonists tend to be historians, with fascinating cases but weak theories. David Betz, a Professor of War Studies, has done most in recent months to turn history into theory. He regards civil war as already nascent and inevitable. According to Betz, MI5 officers have approached him with the same concern. Interviewers tend to agree, including Peter Whittle, Louise Perry, Will Kingston, Nick Buckley, Paul Embery and Tim Stanley.
In response, Robert Tombs uses the past stability of British civilisation to forecast future stability. However, the circularity of Tombs’s conclusion that ‘as long as its present civilisation lasts, England will not have a violent revolution, or a military coup, or a religious civil war’ is evident. Many think its present civilisation is crumbling fast.
The most popular academic analysis on civil war offers ‘liberal consensus’ masquerading as theory: it blames civil war on illiberal governance, opposition to multiculturalism, and freedom of speech! Historians such as British-born Fara Dabhoiwala, who claims that freedom of speech has, historically, promoted violence, feed this pseudo-science.
In fact, the so-called ’liberal consensus’ is in fact the left progressive consensus, which drives civil war, more than it ameliorates it. It’s just a question of time.
Classical liberalism emphasises individual freedoms, but also the individual’s dependency on a benign collective to protect the individual from the mob. Liberalism was appropriated by socialism (later rebranded as progressivism), which emphasises rights that must be fulfilled by the collective. Progressivism damages both individual liberty and collective sympathy. Effectively, benign forms of individualism and collectivism (liberty and sympathy) are replaced by malignant forms (selfishness and authoritarianism). Worse, socialism/progressivism is two-tier in practice: it implements rights for fashionable identities at the expense of unfashionable identities. Wokeness is the latest taxonomy of an agenda that goes back more than two centuries. Indeed, DEI should be reinterpreted as ‘Division, Inequality and Exclusion.’
Progressivism is change-seeking. It justifies itself as creative-destructive, as replacing bad with good. In reality, it destroys social cohesion by pitting ever finer identities against a common identity (e.g., Britishness). Identity politicians disaggregate the common identity, inter-sectionally, as traditionalists, conservatives, heterosexuals, men, fathers, Christians, Jews and whites. This is why Edward Dutton warns: ‘Vote Labour for a civil war fought along racial lines.’
Political favouritism is illegitimate governance. Indeed, by 2024, 79 per cent of Britons agreed that British governance needs ‘a lot of improvement’; 45 per cent ‘almost never’ trust government to put the nation’s interests first. All political scientists and historians agree that political illegitimacy provokes instability. The only disagreement is between advocates of ‘liberal consensus’, who blame non-progressive governance, and those of us, like Betz, who realise progressive authoritarianism. Overlapping the political drivers are the technological drivers. As communications improve, the costs of mobility fall. Then, the costs of anti-socialness fall. A century ago, a villager who thieved might be ostracised. Walking into a new village without references would provoke suspicion. Physical mobility enables irresponsibility.
Telecommunications also enable isolation, which damages empathy. Decades ago, almost everybody worked, sold and bought face-to-face. Telephones, the internet, and the over-reaction to covid each accelerated a trend to stay home. Even for those living in the same home, interactions are distracted and even mediated by the same technologies. However good your technology, it can never perfectly mimic the inter-human interactions for which we evolved. Users become more internalised, more self-righteous, less empathic. These technologies are also associated with depression and learned helplessness, which in turn have political implications. Users learn to depend on technology for information, which the government is best able to control. Dependency on government information overlaps dependency on government handouts. Sedentarism (another effect of both technology-dependency and government handouts) makes people too unhealthy to consider independence or protest – except via telecommunications!
Irrespective of technology, the free movement of people is a political choice, as constituted within the EU, and as tolerated by British governments even after Brexit. Free movement is to the advantage of refugees, but also criminals escaping justice (that’s why Britain is a hub for Albanian gangs). Worse, Western legal systems treat almost all illegal migrants as refugees not as criminals, and treat deportation as a greater evil than crimes in-country. The immigrant population is also a more criminal population (although the government covered up the fact for decades, until recent freedom-of-information requests). Free movement is to the advantage of refugees from war, but also warriors, terrorists and insurgents escaping defeat. These malcontents bring their conflicts with them. That’s why Rakib Ehsan warns that civil war in Kashmir would be mimicked in Britain. Free movement also favours young men, who are better able to navigate the physical challenges of migration. Young men are better able to commit crime. Given more young men, particularly from sexist cultures, the rate of sex crime goes up. Immigrants are over-represented amongst sex criminals. British native girls have suffered decades of organised abuse by immigrant men. The government encourages immigrant sex crimes by covering them up.
Public authorities accommodate crime of all sorts by de-policing privileged communities, by negotiating with ‘community leaders‘ for access, by tolerating vigilantism by minorities, by legislating religious exceptions (such as evasion of animal welfare and food safety laws during the production of Halal food), by tolerating sharia courts, and by sentencing minorities leniently. These accommodations are counter-productive. Crime goes up. Government complicity provokes vigilantism. ‘Our country is on the brink of civil war,’ tweeted one influencer, in reaction to last week’s crime statistics.
Privileging immigrants too is counter-productive. Governments facilitate illegal immigrants by transporting, housing and paying them as asylum seekers. Private businesses even extend discounts to self-identified refugees (such as Harewood House). Immigrant privileges are paid by citizens, in taxes and inflation. The government’s latest solution is to contract private landlords, for five years at a time, to house migrants. ‘This is designed to cause civil war,’ tweeted one influencer. Immigrants have more children than natives, partly thanks to their privileges. Their birth rate perpetuates a ‘youth bulge’. Youth bulges are associated with increased chance of civil war in any society. Immigrant youth bulges are riskiest.
Overlapping the political, technological, and immigrant drivers of civil conflict are the economic drivers. One result of illegal immigration is accelerating growth of population, which strains resources. Worse, most immigrants to Britain are net takers. They show higher rates of welfare-dependency, lower rates of work. Productivity declines (despite the fakery of measuring economic growth by population). Britain has suffered an ‘almost unprecedented’ plunge in productivity over the past five years. More than half of Britons are net welfare recipients. Britain’s debt is greater than its economy. At current rate, public services will collapse for want of money and Britain will be a failed state. Without intervention, failed states always suffer civil war.
I agree with Robert Tombs that British institutions drive stability, but the drivers towards civil war are distressingly numerous: progressive divisiveness; progressive destructiveness; two-tier justice; identity politics; illegitimate governance; increased mobility; declining empathy; remote telecommunications; learned helplessness; criminal bulge; warrior bulge; young male bulge; youth bulge; vigilantism; immigrant privileges; declining productivity and national bankruptcy. The only question is how long will it be taken lying down.
This article (British civil war – not if, but when?) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Bruce Newsome
See Related Article Below
Is Britain on the Road to Civil War?
JOE BARON
According to David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London, many of the preconditions for civil war exist in Britain today. Using academic studies on social cohesion, civil war causation theory and social attitudes surveys, he argues that the widely accepted causal factors of elite overreach, factional polarisation, a collapse in trust, economic pressures, and the perceived downgrading of the majority population in a previously homogeneous society, are all present in contemporary Britain.
The current dynamics, he continues, point to an emerging conflict between radicalised factions within the Muslim community and an incipient nativist white nationalism. Professor Betz goes on to claim – using the Maoist model that divides insurgencies into three phases – that the nativists are in phase one, the so-called defensive phase in which the group begins to organise, disseminate propaganda and build a conscious community of followers.
Islamists, on the other hand, are in phase two – when violent attacks occur on a semi-regular basis, a military structure is being developed, but they are not yet strong enough to challenge the State’s monopoly on violence. (Professor Betz believes that, due to the absence of clear geographic divisions between the antagonists, Britain is unlikely to reach phase three – the offensive phase. This is when the insurgent groups are strong enough to challenge government forces.)
It is an arresting and troubling thesis. It is also convincing. The preconditions outlined above undeniably exist in modern Britain.
There has been a collapse of public trust in the State, for example. The 41st British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) report, published on 12 June 2024, concluded ‘that people’s trust in governments and politicians, and confidence in their systems of government, is as low now as it has ever been over the last 50 years, if not lower’. Indeed, a record high of 45 percent ‘almost never’ trust governments of any hue (22 points above the figure recorded in 2020); 58 percent (another record high) ‘almost never’ trust politicians to tell the truth when they are in a tight corner, up 19 points on 2020; and a striking 79 percent of respondents said that the system of governing Britain could be improved ‘quite a lot’ or a ‘great deal’, matching a record high recorded during the parliamentary stalemate over Brexit in 2019 and up 18 points on 2020.
Professor John Curtice, the Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, the organisation that carried out the BSA survey, said: ‘The government…will…need to address the concerns of a public that is as doubtful as it has ever been about the trustworthiness and efficacy of the country’s system of government.’ As Professors Curtice and Betz warn, public trust in governments of all stripes has collapsed and, with it, trust in the very system of government that we have traditionally sacralised and encouraged others to adopt. That this trend, if left unchecked, could potentially shatter an already fragile social contract is a statement of the obvious. Trust in the State unites the disparate groups of a multicultural society, acting as what Professor Betz calls a kind of ‘superglue’. Without it, the groups fracture and retreat into silos characterised by mutual suspicion and animosity.
Although the BSA report does provide a chink of light, offering the possibility of a resurgence in trust – like the one seen in 2020 after the parliamentary shenanigans over Brexit were finally put to bed by Boris Johnson’s election victory -, the signs are inauspicious. The post-Johnson resurgence was short-lived, eroded by more ‘elite overreach’ as he turbocharged immigration against the wishes of the electorate. What became known as the Boris-wave was the final act of betrayal for a downtrodden populous reeling from a decade of broken promises.
Indeed, public trust has been eroded by elite arrogance – and such arrogance shows little sign of abating. They are not only forcing mass immigration on a reluctant population; they are now actively discriminating against the white majority. The recruitment practices of our public services are a case in point. In the summer of 2023, a report found that the Royal Air Force was unlawfully discriminating against white men in a campaign aimed at boosting diversity; West Yorkshire Police recently placed a temporary block on hiring white British candidates for the same reason. In addition, a recent article in The Daily Telegraph revealed that NHS trusts discriminate against white applicants by manipulating interview shortlists to favour ethnic minorities. Our irreproachable health service encourages what is known as the ‘Rooney Rule’ – an American football policy that makes it mandatory for ethnic minorities to be shortlisted for interviews if they apply.
Furthermore, the toxic spectacle of two-tier policing is obvious to all but the most dyed in the wool progressive fantasists. The contrast between the police’s uncompromising response to the white Southport rioters – in which they rightly used batons and shields against the aggressors – and their pusillanimous reaction to the Harehills Romani rioters – in which they ran away despite a bus being set on fire – was starkly demonstrative of a system that no longer treats its citizens as equal before the law. Sir Keir Starmer took the knee in the wake of the violent Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests; he pressured judges to hand down custodial sentences to mothers who posted injudicious Tweets during the Southport disturbances.
Guidance issued by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing shamelessly highlights the current two-tier approach. It says that there should be ‘equality of policing outcomes’, meaning, to ensure ‘racial equity’, not everyone should be treated the same. Apparently, policing should not be ‘colour blind’. The justification for anti-white racism is therefore spelt out in black and white – excuse the pun. No wonder the police attack white football fans trying to protect the Cenotaph whilst appeasing the Islamo-fascists who wish to deface it. No wonder they tolerate marauding Muslim gangs in Birmingham whilst deploying armoured battalions to deal with their white counterparts.
The white, native population is in the midst of an elite driven programme to downgrade their status in the United Kingdom – a phenomenon that Professor Betz cites as a precondition for civil war. That it could lead to a backlash by those being downgraded is self-evident.
Britain is already facing factional polarisation within some of its communities. Last year, four independent MPs were elected because of a religiously-inspired preoccupation with the Israel-Hamas war. Moreover, according to government figures, the UK has approximately 40,000 Islamists on the terror watchlist. Intercommunal violence has also been playing out on the streets of Birmingham between Hindus and Muslims, as well as on the streets of London between Eritreans and Ethiopians. If you add economic pressures into the mix – stagnation since 2008, an acute housing shortage, historically high taxation, private and public indebtedness, and broken public services -, and a resentful white majority (Southport witnessed the incipient convulsions of a native population that clearly feels besieged), a heady, explosive cocktail threatens to ignite the country.
Professor Betz is right. The preconditions for civil war do exist. Years of elite overreach have led to resentment and an alarming collapse of trust in our politicians, institutions, and political system, in addition to the increased polarisation of our ever-growing migrant communities – communities that find themselves, along with the native majority, in the eye of an approaching storm. Our elites must wake up before it’s too late!
(Photograph: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lionheartphotography/, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Joe Baron is a teacher and a writer, published in The Spectator, The Sun, the TES, Breitbart, Conservative Home, The Conservative Woman and The Daily Telegraph. His blog can be found here.
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This article (Is Britain on the Road to Civil War?) was created and published by The New Conservative and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Joe Baron
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