Politics: a matter of detail

By Richard North - July 14, 2025

If, as many believe, the onset of civil war will be gradual, with violence intensifying in a series of incremental stages until the nature of the conflict becomes unmistakable, we will probably need future historians, looking backwards, to pinpoint the time (or incident) which proved to be the trigger.

Bearing in mind that Betz argues that as many as ten European countries are at risk of conflagration, and the conflict could start in any one of them and then by a process of contagion, spread to others, we need not even be looking to domestic events for that trigger point.

It may be too far-fetched to say that the this has already occurred, but if it had, it might look something like the situation in the south-eastern Spanish town of Torre Pacheco where, for the past two nights there has been sporadic violence directed at the immigrant community.

The initial spark, it seems, occurred on Wednesday when a group of youths – later identified as Moroccan – savagely attacked a 68-year-old resident, recording the attack on a mobile phone and uploading it onto social media.

One response to the attack, which had the victim admitted to hospital, was for the city council to call for a rally on the Friday evening (11 July) in a central square, “in response to recent criminal acts”.

Although the rally was intended to be peaceful, it was hijacked by what are being called “far-right elements”, with a group called Deport Them Now calling for attacks on people of North African origin.

The outcome was two consecutive nights of riots, with local men forming “hunting parties” to seek out and attack Moroccan men and setting up barricades in the streets. Stone and bottle-throwing ensued, with knife fights and damage to vehicles. The national Guardia Civil deployed 75 officers and a number of arrests were made. More officers from the reserve are expected to be deployed.

As the violence carried over into the second night, the great and the good mobilised with boiler-plate condemnations of the activists. President López Miras declared: “The residents of Torre Pacheco want to live together as they have until now, and the calls for violence we are seeing from both sides cannot be permitted or tolerated”.

He went on to state: “The residents of Torre Pacheco are honourable, honest, hardworking, and have lived peacefully in their town for many years, and they don’t want this to happen. That’s why calls for violence cannot be permitted”.

However, Torre Pacheco is one of the towns with the largest foreign population in the Campo de Cartagena region and is widely regarded as a “pressure cooker” with a background of inter-ethnic friction.

Questions are being asked whether the recent intervention of the radical right Vox party has contributed to the unrest with its call to deport eight million migrants from Spain, including second-generation immigrants – the children of those who came to Spain from their places of birth.

Spain is suffering a similar demographic upheaval to that which is being experienced in the UK, with Vox citing a study by expert Alejandro Macarrón of the CEU-CEFAS Demographic Observatory.

He warns that, by 2044, Spain will have “more foreign-born population than Spanish”, amounting to around 50 percent of the total population. He adds that the deadline for action would be 2039 in Vitoria, and, immediately afterward, the same scenario would occur in Almería.

Vox takes the view that this migratory flow is leading Spain to the verge of “disappearance” and “a point of no return” due to the transformation being caused by “the demographic replacement that is changing the makeup of society”.

Party representative, Rocío de Meer, blames the country’s “two-party system” for bringing about the “change in population density and characteristics”, arguing that: “If of our country’s 47 million inhabitants, eight million are people who have come from different origins in a very short period of time, it is extraordinarily difficult for them to adapt to our ways and customs”.

The party thus asserts that the deportation scenario that could be implemented is the “least worst solution”, proposing that “all these millions of people who have recently arrived and have not adapted to our customs and, in many cases, have caused scenes of insecurity in our neighbourhoods and surrounding areas, will have to return to their countries”.

In Spain, De Meer has christened this process “re-emigration”, with the conviction that with this methodology they “preserve” and maintain the “right” of the Spanish “to want to survive as a people”.

The press report notes that Vox’s anti-immigration ideas stem from the French and German far right, pointing to the former which coined the term “Great Replacement” and the latter which pioneered the proposal to expel millions of people from Germany. A proposals that has become embedded in the ideology of the “far-right” Alternative for Germany (AfD).

In factual terms, data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) suggests that Spain has 49.1 million inhabitants, of which 6.9 million – which represents 14 percent of the total – are foreigners.

This compares with the 16 percent of the UK population who are foreign-born, amounting to roughly 10.7 million residents. It is interesting, therefore, that similar levels of incomers are creating the same sort of stresses, with similar remedies being proposed by “right wing” factions.

As to the current situation in Torre Pacheco, the British media are beginning to pick up on the reports – which have been circulating in the Spanish press for days, and even longer on social media. The Telegraph is currently running a piece, but it’s superficial stuff that doesn’t really get to the core of the issue, or sketch out the broader background which is driving events.

And it is indeed the background of mass migration, and the growing public unease which is driving events, with similar responses in different countries, disparate nationalities eventually have to resort to the same violent tactics, in the face of official indifference and gaslighting – which seems the same in any language.

As elsewhere, though, the gaslighting is suffering diminishing returns. In a delicious op-ed in the Spanish journal OK diario, headed “Torre Pacheco, the people against the State”, the writer pulls no punches.

Those who suffer the violence in Torre Pacheco, as in Sabadell, Alcalá de Henares, and so many thousands of municipalities across Spain, he writes, are the humble people, that proletariat with a cross-party vote who express their weariness with the revolutionary demand to walk through their neighbourhoods and streets safely and peacefully.

They don’t want to suffer the terror sponsored by those who bubble over private security in fortifications. The same people who make laws to regulate crime are the ones who have allowed the defence of physical integrity and security to be in the hands of private individuals, because the State has disappeared from the streets.

This is a state, he says, which in the words of Rothbard has become a band of thieves, made up of the most immoral, greedy, and unscrupulous individuals in society. And when the State abandons the people, the nation unites accordingly.

Back in the UK, there has been a sort of low-key version of Torre Pacheco, in that there was a substantial demonstration at the Bell Hotel in Epping, which houses asylum seekers, one of which had sexually assaulted a young girl.

The local response has been not dissimilar to that in Spain, except that this demonstration was peaceful, apart from a fracas with a small counter-demonstration mounted by Stand up to Racism. This was quickly contained by the police but, in another time or place, such events could quickly turn viral and spiral out of control.

I think this is the point Betz is making. The surge of migration and the presence of unassimilated, and very often hostile migrant populations has set us on the path to civil war. If not Torre Pacheco, and not yet Epping, we will be seeing multiple responses to the perceived (and very real) migrant threat, not all of which will be contained.

Given enough dry tinder, the spark will eventually generate a flame which will blossom into a conflagration. It is only a matter of time. Which spark and when is only a matter of detail.