I fear Britain is lurching towards civil war, and nobody knows how to stop it

Telegraph

03-04-2025

I now fear Britain is heading for open sectarian conflict, possibly war, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Here's a snapshot of what I'm hearing.
On one night in Westminster, I met someone who argued for voluntary repatriation, two generations back; a Labour activist told me we must 're-educate' Muslims; and Jacob Rees-Mogg, debating me on GB News, said Britain should take 'zero' refugees. I spluttered a reply about the good Samaritan and staggered off to bed, confused and depressed.
For two decades I've argued for controlling immigration, and successive governments, including Jacob's, increased it. Suddenly I've woken up in a land where everyone manically wants to reduce or even reverse it, and they've leapfrogged me into a pool of dark resentment.
Nigel Farage is mocked as a 'dhimmi' for appointing a Muslim to chair his party; he looks nervous of his own supporters. Even Labour has turned on the Sentencing Council, which, for all its faults, was trying to fix a genuine racial disparity (it's black people who tend to get longer sentences than whites, not the other way around).
On that last saga, so much hinges. It goes to the heart of how a society kills itself with kindness.
Nearly 200,000 YouTubers have watched an interview given to Louise Perry by David Betz, a professor of conflict studies at King's, London. Betz argues that the conditions for a failed state we ordinarily apply overseas are now found here: frayed social contract, falling trust, polarisation. Into this mix Britain injected multiculturalism, encouraging millions to move here without expecting integration.
If you think 'fear of the other' is a human instinct, the policy was mad to begin with. Combine it with economic decline and you invite ethnic competition over services and jobs.
Implicit in the Sentencing Council's guidance is the belief that when you operate a multicultural society – packed with groups with different values and experiences, advantages and handicaps – the only way to achieve equal outcomes is to treat people differently. In this spirit, says Betz, the modern state acts like an imperial administrator, promoting the interests of preferred minorities while trying to avoid a riot.
I grew up in a post-colonial world where we said 'I don't see race' and honestly, if naively, meant it. Over the past 30 years, liberal institutions have taught us to see race again – by stressing the wonders of diversity so persistently that some white people feel the state has actively taken a side against them. Ancient, binding concepts, such as 'equality before the law' ring hollow. The latest Police Race Action Plan openly rejects the principle of 'treating everyone the same' in favour of 'equality of police outcomes'.
A situation in which millions believe cops are not impartial public servants but an occupying force is the headline metric of state failure. Mainland Britain has become Ulster.
It isn't an endorsement of white resentment to acknowledge that it's real and growing, that beyond the curated Question Time audience, millions have evolved from irony to nihilism to something more disturbing. Just read the comments beneath the Betz video. 'As a 28-year-old, fighting-age male, I am ready to lay down my life for Mother England and the survival of my folk.' Viewers refer in code to Rotherham – to avoid being muted in the forum – and the grooming scandal that suggested the authorities were willing to cover up rape to maintain the peace.
The UK is 'a tinder box waiting to explode', writes an unhappy reviewer, which is also the worry of Canadian officials. In 2024, its police force produced a report warning their nation might be further buffeted by inequality, climate change and 'paranoid populism'. Separately, a government think tank warned of 'civil war… in the United States' as a potential 'underanticipated disruption'.
In fact, the low level insurgency has already begun. Ireland has seen arson at asylum hotels. Last year, Britain had riots. Why did No10 insist that so many be thrown into jail? Betz notes that while Islamist terrorism is more lethal than far-Right extremism, there are only 4 million Muslims whereas there are around 50 million whites.
Were the latter group radicalised, things might go south very fast, hence some in the security forces clearly regard white Britons as the emergent threat.
Well, when 'a formerly dominant social majority fears it is in danger of losing that dominance,' to quote Betz, it doesn't surrender its position quietly – and yet this is what elites constantly tell the white working-class they must do, while refusing to abandon their own privileges.
Labour, the party of racial and gender equality, has never seen fit to elect a non-white or a woman as leader. Neither is it willing to revive the economy with free market capitalism; nor to revive solidarity with socialism.
Instead it tries to knit the country back together with petty cash thrown at potholes or a roundtable on the spectre of white male violence. Centrist dad redux.
Labour's instinct is to lean into multiculturalism, flirting with laws against islamophobia: the worst response imaginable. In that vein, what moron thought it would be clever to ban Marine Le Pen from running for office?
Every conspiracy theory is confirmed, and without a democratic outlet for anger – seeing their aspirations limited and being too poor to emigrate – where else will a militant faction of angry whites go but to violence?
Reform is a vehicle for dissent but offers no programme for change. The Tories lack imagination, and the world they exist to preserve is dead. We have no national culture to reunite us; no universalising religion to appeal to. When I saw a Tory MP tell GB News that the Sentencing Council evinced a bias against 'white Christian' defendants, I laughed at the innocence. If someone's in the dock for murder or rape, they probably don't go to Evensong.
Betz sees no solution, so suggests we prepare for anarchy. I'm more concerned about fascism. We're not far away from a politician running for office as explicitly anti-Muslim, and to those who say authoritarianism cannot happen here, I reply: lockdown.
Did you ever think the state could imprison us in our homes? And if it can isolate the diseased from the healthy, the vaxed from the unvaxed, do you think it can't, or won't, someday separate us based on race or religion? We are literally debating the legalisation of euthanasia, a favourite tool of tyrants.
As my companion on that horrid evening spoke of repatriation, I imagined foreign-made parts of me being politely invited to leave and floating off through the window, an arm to Ireland, a foot to France. What remained prayed silently that if this country does go mad, I won't lose my head.