Is Civil War Really Coming to Britain?

Complexity is one of those things frequently evoked but seldom understood or explained. Let us take the much-hyped narrative of an impending civil war in Britain, which has been pushed relentlessly by the center-right press in both Britain and America, following dire warnings from Professor David Betz about a coming clash between UK’s Muslim left and the white far-right. Several things can all be true at once:

First, the British ruling class has done a woeful job governing the country. Decades of awful decisions have added up, damaging social cohesion and severing the moral unity between rulers and ruled.

Second, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a power-hungry politician who would deliberately inflame tensions in order to justify harsher crackdowns and to impose an AI-driven digital ID system, further tightening Britain’s already draconian regulation of speech and social media.

Third, various clandestine foreign forces—American, Israeli, Russian, Iranian, and even Chinese—may seek to foment chaos and exacerbate the civil war narrative for their own ends.

Fourth, social media, eager to generate clicks with new swill dumped into the pig slop trough, has a vested interest in pushing sensationalist headlines.
Finally, most Brits are still watching soccer, eating takeaway, and binge-watching Netflix—not plotting insurrection. By historical “bread and circuses” standards, Britain still has a surfeit of both.

I remain skeptical about the prospect of widespread civil conflict in Britain. Such conflicts require tightly organized minorities, funding, stocks of arms and munitions, and explicit aims, causes, and demands. Professor Betz frequently cites “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland as a precedent for what is about to befall Britain, but virtually none of those conditions prevail here. Quite apart from the fever dreams of Daily Mail columnists, the Muslim communities in Britain are mostly led by moderate, regime-compliant types who are part of the Labour Party machine, not militant jihadis. To the extent they are organized, it is to harvest ballots with a shamelessness that would make even Joe Biden wince.

“The right,” meanwhile, is scarcely organized at all, for fear of the law. It’s almost illegal to be right-wing in Britain, let alone to be right-wing and organized. Nearly all such attempts are subject to infiltration or intervention by the security state, whose vigilance on this score hysterically puts right-wing groups on par with the aforementioned militant jihadis. So, the notion that these two tribes—both proscribed as terrorists by the British state—are about to go to war seems like fantasy.

On one side, we have Muslim communities that literally can’t figure out how to organize rubbish disposal. On the other, we have “the right,” whose best organizer is the anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, who is about to lead a large “free speech rally” in London, even as Reform UK Leader Nigel Farage disavows him (perhaps wisely). These groups and their rallies are crawling with law enforcement. The most organized minority is still the government, which can play divide and conquer all day long and win 10 times out of 10.

For the past decade, the beanie-hatted YouTuber Tim Pool has been declaring an impending civil war in America. That civil war never came. Undeterred, Pool now welcomes British guests to his studio to hype civil war in Britain. You can decide if this is analysis, or slop designed to maximize view counts. When I said Trump’s re-election would face little resistance, I was angrily called names by confident political pundits who predicted mass riots by the left. Those riots never came, either.

Political theories that rely on spontaneous mass action as part of their logic seldom see it materialize. The idea of bottom-up, grassroots change is a comforting fiction that avoids confronting more troubling truths, such as the fact that the BLM and Antifa riots during 2020’s Summer of George Floyd were top-down, state-backed, and media-backed, not a spontaneous mass movement. Antifa and BLM were stormtroopers of the regime—counterrevolutionary forces, not revolutionary ones. The truth is that it was ever thus, as demonstrated by recent revelations about U.S. federal agencies backing left-wing activism domestically and abroad.

When the peasants actually do revolt without state or media backing, as we saw during the COVID lockdowns, the truncheons and nightsticks tend to come out. In the history of peasant revolts since 209 B.C., only six out of out of 143 documented cases were successful; 131 were utterly crushed by the authorities.

This is not to say that the UK is a well-governed country. It is not. But it takes a lot for “the people to rise up,” especially when they are well-fed and entertained. In America, the white population’s post-1965 demographic decline to just under 58 percent has spurred many claims of impending civil war, such as Thomas Chittum’s 1996 book Civil War II: The Coming Breakup of America. The people did not rise up then, and Donald Trump’s re-election has put the right back to sleep. According to MAGA cheerleaders, “America is saved.”

In Britain, the white demographic decline is just beginning, and is fashionable to say it is a powder keg waiting to explode. But nothing happens spontaneously; civil war requires concerted organization and leadership. Little will result from Britain’s current unrest other than the election of Nigel Farage, but his function, too, will be to put people back to sleep. By the time they wake up again, the damage will already be done.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/columns/riding-the-tiger/is-civil-war-really-coming-to-britain