Politics: the road to civil war

By Richard North - March 24, 2025

A bloke called Ed Davey (whom I always want to call Daley, as in Arthur) has made a speech. Whether anyone beyond the conference hall at Harrogate in which he spoke actually noticed is moot, but GB News wants to tell us that it was “unlike anything you would expect”.

Rather than focus on social care, the NHS, clean water, local services and rejoining the EU, it seems he broke from tradition to proclaim to his adoring hordes that (in his own words published on Twitter): “We’re facing real threats – Putin in the east, Trump in the west, and Farage doing his best tribute act here at home”.

We need have no fear though because Arthur – sorry, Ed – told us in no uncertain terms that “the Liberal Democrats won’t back down”. From what exactly they won’t back down isn’t made entirely clear in the clip, but there are serious limits to my curiosity. I am not going to delve into the weeds to seek further clarification.

The reason for my mentioning it at all is not that I have suddenly taken any great interest in the wibblings of the Lib-Dems. Merely, I wondered whether the elevation of Farage to the status of public enemy number one – in the UK at least – marks a turning point in our politics.

For a long time, the consensus policies of the established parties were to avoid mentioning them, depriving the insurgents of the oxygen of publicity in the hope that they would wither away in their imposed obscurity. Now, that has changed to the extent that Farage has become the main talking point in party conferences.

Another possible turning point was an anti-immigration demonstration yesterday outside Belfast City Hall. This – as can be seen from the link – was reported by the BBC but, for some unfathomable reason, the broadcaster neglected to tell us that the demonstrators comprised British loyalists and Irish nationalists in an unusual cross-border alliance of formerly implacable enemies.

This was not the first demonstration of its type. There was one in August last year which the BBC also reported, then noting the cross-border mix with the headline “An unlikely protest alliance during Belfast violence”.

That they are now apparently so reticent in giving the same details might suggest that they are a little concerned at the development. Certainly, one of the Twitter commentariat found it “highly significant”.

This, he wrote, was “a once unthinkable link across the Catholic-Protestant sectarian boundary”. It reveals, he thought, “a realignment in Irish politics from separatist political to defensive cultural nationalism”, a process similar to that which had occurred in Quebec.

It is signs such as that which, in the manner of historians piecing together the genesis of the First World War, may have future writers chronicling the UK’s inexorable slide into civil war, as forecast by David Betz, professor of war in the modern world at King’s College London, and specialist in the study of insurgency and counterinsurgency, information warfare, cyberwarfare, and propaganda.

Unusually for me I did listen to the nearly 90-minute podcast – I usually avoid them like the plague, as an uneconomic use of time, reasoning that most of them could be summarised in tautly-written 1,000-word articles which required less investment on the part of the recipient.

Actually, as one might expect of an academic, he has committed his thoughts to print, as in this article – part one of a two-parter which runs to 3,500 words, published in Military Strategy Magazine in the summer of 2023.

While the likes of Starmer are trying to focus us on the external threat, his current plans to field a “peacekeeping force” being dismissed as “political theatre”, Betz argues that the major threat to the security and prosperity of the West today does not emanate from the highly unlikely prospect of a Russian invasion of Europe.

Rather, he suggests that the threat comes from the West’s own dire social instability, structural and economic decline, cultural desiccation and what he describes as “elite pusillanimity”.

As an academic, he is not entirely alone in his warnings, citing Barbara Walter’s book on How Civil Wars Start – and How to Stop Them, but he does complain that the field of strategic studies, however, is largely silent on the issue.

In fact, as he explains, current literature tends to rule out civil war in the West, considering that nations which are rich and possess governmental stability are largely free of the phenomenon.

To these two criteria Betz adds “factionalisation”, which acts in a complex way as extremely heterogeneous societies are not more prone to civil war than very homogenous ones. Rather, he says, the most unstable are moderately homogenous societies, particularly when there is a perceived change in the status of a titular majority, or significant minority, which possesses the wherewithal to revolt on its own.

Betz sees no reason to fault the main thrust of extant theory on civil war causation but questions whether the assumption of the conditions which have traditionally placed Western nations outside the frame of analysis of people concerned with large-scale and persistent eruptions of violent civil discord are still valid.

Predictably – otherwise he wouldn’t be writing the article – he argues that the evidence “strongly suggests” that those assumptions are no longer valid, not least because Western cultures are beginning to fragment and degenerate, where the “cult of ethnicity” is increasingly endangered the unity of that society.

From a high-trust society which we have enjoyed in the UK, “distrust” is now becoming society’s default emotion. The collapse of trust, he writes, reflects a plunge in the stock of “social capital”, which is both a kind of “superglue”, a factor of societal cohesion, as well as a “lubricant” that allows otherwise disparate groups in society to get along.

Additionally, he argues, “political polarisation” has been enhanced by social media and identity politics, with digital connectivity tending to drive societies towards greater depth and frequency of feelings of isolation in more tightly drawn affinity groups.

Each of these is guarded by so-called ‘filter bubbles’, carefully constructed membranes of ideological disbelief that are constantly reinforced by active and passive curation of media consumption.

Although physical fighting in a self-reinforcing feedback cycle also plays a role – as with the Leicester riots between the local Hindu and Muslim populations – Betz also sees the economic dimension having a significant effect. A gigantic “expectation gap” of well-being is opening, a phenomenon which in most literature is regarded as “dangerous”.

Nevertheless, Betz notes, approximately 75 percent of post-Cold War civil conflicts have been fought by ethnic factions, so a civil war in the West is unlikely to be different, triggered by a situation where White majorities (trending rapidly toward large minority status in some cases) live alongside multiple smaller minorities.

Another driver is a sort of “asymmetric multiculturalism” in which in-group preference, ethnic pride, and group solidarity – notably in voting – are acceptable for all groups except Whites for whom such things are considered to represent supremacist attitudes that are anathematic to social order.

Thirdly, because of the above what has emerged is a perception that the status quo is invidiously unbalanced, which provides an argument for revolt on the part of the White majority (or large minority) that is rooted in stirring language of justice, embodied in the narrative of the “Great Replacement”, where the White population sees itself as exposed to “downgrading”.

Given that multiculturalism in the West is geographically asymmetric, with a distinctively observable urban-rural dimension to immigrant settlement patterns, Betz concludes that civil wars in the West that burn across ethnic cleavages will have a distinctively rural vs. urban character – cities versus the countryside.

A long dissertation as to the nature of that conflict suggests that its strategic logic will be to cause the destruction of metropolitan centres through infrastructural attacks (such as, topically, electricity substations serving major transport hubs) with a view to causing cascading systemic failure leading to uncontrollable civil disorder generating further rapid decline.

The tactics employed, he says, are plausible on account of the tenuous stability of modern cities at the best of times, a fact observed by reputable scholars that incipient revolutionaries have simply recognised.

In the video, Betz is extremely pessimistic when it comes to advice on how to head off a conflict. He sees current governments and the elites doing all they can to exacerbate the situation and push us into civil war, while denying the possibility.

However, he warns, it is not simply that the conditions are present in the West; it is, rather, that the conditions are nearing the ideal. Furthermore, the tools of revolt in the form of various appurtenances of modern life are just lying around, knowledge of how to employ them is widespread, targets are obvious and undefended, and more and more formerly regular citizens seem minded to take the shot.

It will be interesting to see what future historians mark down as the “first shot” which precipitated the conflict. We may not have long to wait. Betz puts the timescale at five years.