Politics: uncertain times

By Richard North - June 12, 2026

I’m not going to get excited about the resignation of John Healey as defence secretary, even if he has been joined by Al Carns and parliamentary secretary Pamela Nash.

Although the political impact may be profound, in the shorter-term, Healey’s passing will not make the slightest bit of difference to our defence status. He has already been replaced by former Para officer Dan Jarvis, but the task confronting him is more than any one man can deal with.

Structurally, our armed forces are a mess. Years of flawed forecasting, inadequate procurement, poor leadership and recruitment practices, on top of a sustained decline in our defence industries, has left our armed forces incapable of fighting a serious war.

No amount of money will fix that within a decade, even if there were the political will and a leadership with the vision and ability to drive through the necessary changes. And there’s no sign of either.

More to the point, though, I see no point in spending taxpayer’s hard-earned money on shiny new toys for the military, ostensibly for use against some future enemy, when the real enemy is with us, here and now, invading our shores in rubber dinghies and flying in from all quarters of the globe as legal immigrants.

When it comes to defence funding, it is germane to note that the cost of public support for asylum seekers over the last decade has topped £20 billion, while Universal Credit payments to non-British nationals (immigrants) – households with at least one non-UK or Irish citizen – over the last three years reached £24.79 billion.

Add in other benefits (such as social housing) and you are looking at north of £50 billion as a very conservative estimate, compared with the core deficit of £28 billion in defence spending over the next four years. We are scrimping on our defence to pay for our own replacement and the destruction of our society.

The irony is that, if the current unrest in Northern Ireland turns out to be more than a flash in the pan, and takes on the form of a protracted rebellion, we could see what’s left of the defence budget devoted to sending in the Army to put down the White indigenous population in order to protect the head choppers, throat slitters, stabbers and rapists in what the Guardian gleefully calls “race riots”.

And, if that was not enough in the irony stakes, last time we had to subdue the Irish, 30,000 troops were needed at the height of the Troubles. As it stands now, our enfeebled Army could not actually deploy that many men and, if it tried, most soldiers would probably resign rather than face the prospect of prosecution by Lord Helmer and his friends in the CPS.

As for the moment, the BBC was reporting in the early hours that the night had passed off without major incident in Belfast following a “robust” police response. Tensions remain high, though. There are reports of violence outside the city, and some targeted house clearance apparently continues.

If, however, the violence does subside and everybody goes back to sleep (until the next head chopper strikes), it could be that the sobering assessment of Eric Schwalm must be looked at.

He is an American and a retired Green Beret with 34 years in special forces. He has spent a career studying how insurgencies begin, sustain themselves, or collapse. He has trained others in unconventional warfare and counterinsurgency and knows what it takes for a population to move from grievance to organised resistance and what usually stops them.

He paints a picture in the UK where large rallies form. Tens of thousands turn out for events like the recent Unite the Kingdom marches in London. Anger spills into the streets after knife attacks or policy failures tied to mass immigration and governance. Social media amplifies every clip.

Commentators on both sides then declare that something fundamental has shifted but, within days or weeks, the crowds thin. People return to work. The news cycle moves on. Life resumes its normal rhythm on a purely voluntary basis. The underlying issues, runaway net migration, grooming gang scandals that still echo, two-tier policing, and collapsing trust in institutions, remain largely unaddressed or are met with new restrictions rather than solutions.

When another outrage spills into public consciousness, the cycle repeats, but each time it does so, it carries a hidden cost that should frighten anyone who still values ordered liberty.

Successive flare-ups supply the government with fresh justification for expanded powers. New public order legislation, broader definitions of extremism, restrictions on protest near sensitive sites, facial recognition expansion, and speech regulations move forward under the banner of preventing disorder.

Thus, the ratchet turns. What begins as a response to unrest becomes normalised infrastructure for managing dissent. The next time anger rises, the legal and technological tools for suppression are stronger, the precedent is thicker, and the population is more habituated to backing down.

Half-measures, says Schwalm, do not preserve options. They close them. A people that protests loudly and then returns to its routines hands its adversaries both the pretext and the time to make future resistance far more difficult and far more costly.

From this, he concludes that Britain is not on the verge of a successful popular uprising that resets the country on healthier foundations. It is, he says, drifting toward a managed decline in which unresolved contradictions, mass low-skill immigration without assimilation, elite disconnect, fiscal strain, and collapsing social trust, erode the very capacity of the state to maintain order or provide the services people have grown dependent upon.

When the dependencies can no longer be met and the grievances have no legitimate outlet, the result is unlikely to be a clean or heroic rebellion. It is more likely to be fragmentation, sporadic violence, economic failure, and a hollowed-out nation that has lost both its historic character and its ability to govern itself effectively. That outcome, he says, would be a tragedy for the British people and a warning for the rest of the West.

On the other hand – to the disgust of people such as John Harris in the Guardian – David Betz is still banging the drum for civil war.

He warns against being seduced by “hot takes” on matters of the day. The churn of the daily news cycle should not drive the analysis. The legacy media, the government, and the police have all forfeited any claim to credibility; they lie routinely, by omission and commission, and they are actively shaping the narrative to protect a failing political order.

Instead, he says, fix your gaze on the structural factors. Demography, geography, economics, and the hollowing-out of institutional legitimacy matter far more than whatever grainy mobile-phone clip is being waved at us this week.

Britain has imported, at scale and with minimal integration, populations whose cultural distance from the native majority is large and, in important respects, growing rather than shrinking. Parallel societies, concentrated in particular towns and cities, now possess the critical mass to sustain sustained low-level conflict and, when conditions align, more organised violence.

The state’s monopoly on force is visibly fraying; its willingness to use what remains of that monopoly is selective and therefore delegitimising. Trust in the police, courts, and political class is in the basement and still falling. Economic stagnation and housing pressure sharpen every grievance.

These, says Betz, are not transient conditions; they are the terrain on which coming events will play out. On the Belfast attacks specifically: the operators are clearly more security-conscious than has been the case with the migrant hotel and other protests over the last couple of years – masked, disciplined about visuals, limiting the evidential trail.

Thus, he is wary of firm day-to-day pronouncements precisely because reliable, on-the-ground reporting is so thin. He is not in Belfast, the journalistic desert in this country is real, nearly every dead-tree media and teevee pundit is a literal know-nothing.

However, what he will say – with higher confidence on account of his reading of such conflicts elsewhere in the world – is that certain escalatory dynamics are now highly probable: One is police over-reaction that produces a martyr or martyrs, further radicalising elements on all sides. Another is targeted assassination of a judge, prominent politician, or influential voice.

There could be a spectacular, Christchurch-style mass killing when some individual or cell concludes that only dramatic, indiscriminate violence will break the equilibrium. And stabbings and gang rapes will continue at their grim baseline; they are already normalised enough that they barely shift the political dial.

The deeper pattern, he argues, is polarisation, erosion of restraint, and the slow emergence of organised ethnic and ideological blocs willing to use force to defend or advance their interests. All of that is in accordance with the rules of the game of identity politics, which were created by the very same people now most frantic about the perilous consequences of their own ideology.

From this, he concludes that the centre is not holding because it has spent years delegitimising itself and disarming its natural supporters. Betz thus tells us to watch the structural trends – demographic momentum, institutional decay, the diffusion of effective small-group tactics, the collapse of shared reality – more than the latest headline.

The news will keep lying, he says. The underlying physics of the situation will not. But what the result will be, we cannot tell.