Visions of an English civil war

New Statesman​

3 days ago

Ulster Larne Demonstration at Drumbeg. Photo by Smith Archive/Alamy
Last year, amid the riots that followed the Southport murders, the great sage Elon Musk prophesied that civil war in Britain was 'inevitable'. So far, he's been proved wrong, but then prophets can claim they're just not correct yet. A year on, such talk has surged. The Financial Times reported councils, MPs and charities comparing the mood in parts of Britain to a 'tinder box' and a 'powder keg'. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy warned that Labour's northern heartlands are so disaffected that they 'could go up in flames'. Journalists have been reporting members of the public talking about civil war; in May, Dominic Cummings told Sky News such conversations were no longer abnormal, and wrote about 'incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs'. Matthew Goodwin has been demanding to know if Britain is 'about to blow'.
Talk of a 'coming civil war' took off in February, when the podcaster Louise Perry recorded an interview with David Betz, a professor of war in the modern world, which duly went viral. Betz's thesis is that, driven by immigration and ethnic division, exacerbated by economic woes and reaction against elite overreach, 'civil conflict in the West' is 'practically inevitable' – and that Britain may well go first. He predicts that weak points in our energy infrastructure will come under attack; the cities will 'become ungovernable' and be seen by the indigenous rural population as 'lost to foreign occupation'. Tens of thousands may be killed each year, for years. The chances of this starting by 2029 he puts at around one in five.
What is going on here? A clue lies, I think, in a striking assumption: that all this talk is unprecedented. When Perry asked why we think 'civil war won't happen here', Betz cited Brits' self-conception as 'rather peaceable, well governed, cool-headed folk'. Also taking this line, an article in UnHerd invoked the historian Robert Tombs' observation that the English harbour 'a complacent and often apathetic assumption bred by a fortunate history that nothing seriously bad can happen'. But over the last century, people in British politics have worried about civil war, repeatedly, in ways not unlike today. What did they fear, and why? And what might we learn from the fact that those fears disappeared?
Even before the advent of full mass democracy, Britain was troubled by the prospect of a radical right revolt against a reckless left-liberal government. The outbreak of world war in 1914 tends to overshadow the extreme political tensions over Irish Home Rule that culminated that summer. In 1912, nearly a quarter of a million men had signed the 'Ulster Covenant', vowing to resist Home Rule by 'all means which may be found necessary'. But this happened on the 'mainland' too: in 1914, a 'British Covenant' also attracted hundreds of thousands of signatures. Its journal's motto was 'put your trust in God and keep your powder dry'. With armed volunteers openly drilling in Glasgow, Liverpool and London, and the army's willingness to enforce Home Rule in doubt, Britain was, according to the historian Dan Jackson 'arguably on the verge of civil war'. The outbreak of European conflict cut this off, but in 1916 Dublin witnessed violent rebellion against the London government.
After the 1918 armistice, as full-scale war erupted in Ireland, waves of industrial strife crashed through a Britain full of angry young veterans. The government's response was sometimes startlingly militarised. In 1921, David Lloyd George solemnly announced to the Commons that he was setting up a civil defence force of volunteers to resist a joint strike by miners, railwaymen and transport workers, describing the situation as 'analogous to civil war', in the teeth of which his government were committing themselves to 'almost warlike' measures. 'For the first time in history,' he declared, according to the Times, a British government was 'confronted by an attempt to coerce the country by the destruction of its resources. The government proposed, therefore, to call for volunteers to save the mines. These men would need protection, and so a special appeal would be issued to citizens to enlist in an emergency defence force.' Union leaders lambasted the government for blithely taking on 'the grave responsibility of provoking bloodshed and civil war'. By the start of the following week, 70,000 men had joined the Defence Force.
In the end, the rail and transport unions backed off, but the emerging struggle for power between the state and unionised labour continued to simmer. Days before the 1924 general election, the 'Zinoviev Letter' came to light, supposedly revealing a Soviet plot against Britain. The Daily Mail ran it on the front page, under the headline 'Civil War Plot by Socialists' Masters'. The letter was a forgery, but it hit home because in certain quarters, the scenario felt horribly real.
With the Depression, and the fall of a Labour government in the face of financial crisis, this intensified. In 1933, the Labour MP Stafford Cripps delivered a lecture setting out how a newly elected socialist government would need to face down aggressive establishment resistance by suspending constitutional norms, even temporarily becoming a dictatorship. In Democracy in Crisis, Cripps' ideological ally Harold Laski suggested that in such a 'revolutionary situation… men would rapidly group themselves for civil war'. Right-wing writers like Hugh Sellon agreed: such a crisis would 'almost inevitably cause real civil war'. Reading reports from Vienna of the bloody crushing of a banned workers' militia by the right-wing authoritarian regime, some on the left found it all too easy to imagine the same thing happening here.
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With the advent of the post-war settlement after 1945, such fears faded, for a time. When Churchill's Conservatives attempted to use them against Labour in the 1945 election, they embarrassed themselves. But the arrival of Commonwealth citizens from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent began to provoke another nightmare scenario. Today, Betz's analysis refers to theoretical warnings that 'one of the most powerful causes of civil war' arises when a dominant group perceives it is facing 'status reversal'.
This recalls the fear Enoch Powell stoked in April 1968 in his 'rivers of blood' speech. Powell uncritically quoted a middle-aged worker saying 'in 15 or 20 years' time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man'; this imaginary threat was the reason why Powell thought it appropriate to conjure visions of racial civil war. This didn't happen, but the fear that it might rippled through the Labour cabinet. Barbara Castle thought Powell had 'helped to make a race war… inevitable'. James Callaghan worried that Powell would trigger racial tension akin to the religious strife of the 17th century – when England really had descended into civil war.
In 1972, something like Powell's vision was sketched out by the young liberal novelist Christopher Priest. Some of the scenes in Fugue for a Darkening Island prefigure Betz's vision of a near-future civil war today: of people fleeing 'feral' cities, and the establishment of 'secure zones'. The novel imagines a near-future Britain in which a nationalist politician preaching 'racial purity' takes power, as boats full of African refugees arrive in the Thames. The country splits into a pro-government, pro-deportation majority, and part-white, part-refugee resistance. As society disintegrates and people make knives out of bathroom mirrors, some flee the cities with their barricaded enclaves, only to find rural roads too dangerous to travel after dark, and that farms and villages that have become stockades.
And while fear of racially inflected civil strife bubbled away through the 1970s, the stand-off between state, capital and labour returned. Around the time of Powell's speech, another apocalyptically minded public figure, Daily Mirror boss Cecil King, was also panicking about social collapse – because of imminent financial crisis. Nursing visions from his Irish adolescence, King took to asking 'If civil war could break out in Dublin in 1916, why couldn't it flare up in… London in… 1968.'
By the early 1970s, as strikes spread and inflation pushed towards 20 per cent, even more measured establishment figures found it difficult to see a way through that did not involve the use of force to overcome the massed ranks of the pickets. Retired military commanders like Lt-Col Sir David Stirling, founder of the SAS, planned to helicopter a private army over picket lines to seize back worker-occupied factories. The Conservatives began developing their own – more cautious, but still incendiary – plans to defeat strikes. When these were leaked to the Economist in 1978, it ran them under a headline invoking the American Confederate surrender in 1865: 'Appomattox or civil war?'
All this culminated in the miners' strike of 1984-85, during which leaders like Dennis Skinner warned that the army might be deployed against the strikers. That didn't happen, but nonetheless, the strike is remembered by many as a kind of civil war. Nothing so intense has happened since, but the idea still haunts our politics, as the background to last year's riots and the belated announcement of an inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave attest.
Writers have continued to detect the phenomenon even in less violent events. In September 2004, a few protesters against the Blair government's ban on fox hunting invaded the Commons chamber, triggering the startling Daily Mail front page headline: 'CIVIL WAR' – an echo, doubtless unintended, of their Zinoviev Letter splash 80 years earlier. Brexit – which Betz sees, not unreasonably, as the trigger for today's divisions – was cast in TV drama as the 'uncivil war'. At least one leading Leaver saw Brussels as a latter-day Charles I.
So contemporaneous fears of civil war sit in a long tradition – in which, so far, the most consistent thread is that they have not come true. Visions of unrest in the 1920s drove draconian new laws, but also moves to find compromise. Cripps' talk of suspending the constitution was driven by the urgency of dealing with mass unemployment; once the Second World War made this a more consensual goal, those scenarios became a relic. Powell's nightmare of racial civil war was chased away by the quiet efforts of working-class Brits of all races to make multicultural life work. And those 1970s calls to use force against strikers were made redundant by another shift in the bounds of the politically possible. By the early 1980s, inflation had trumped unemployment as Britain's overriding political fear; as the jobless total was allowed to rise, it undermined the unions' power years before the miners' began their last, doomed battle.
So it may be that the return of talk of civil war is less a glimpse of our near future, more a signal that something has become intolerable. Clearly this is partly about immigration, but look beyond the fevered talk on YouTube, X and GB News, and something else comes into view. When Sky's Liz Bates challenged Dominic Cummings to explain what he meant by 'civil war', he didn't talk about ethnic strife, bar a passing reference to 'no-go areas'. He cited widespread anger at the decay of public services from closing police stations to inaccessible GPs, 15 years of flatlining pay, and repeated broken promises of change. This chimes with a public mood that More In Common and other pollsters have been reporting for months. Likewise, Betz mentions the pressures caused by financialisation reaching 'the end of the line'.
The Starmer government knows it needs to act on illegal immigration, but if – if – it can deliver the economic change it promised, then it may be that the issue will become less intensely symbolic of wider long-term government failure. The real threat that talk of civil war expresses is that the public is so sick of being let down that trust in mainstream democratic politics may die. As in the past, such fears may help impel a government to break economic taboos and make people's lives better. There are plenty of worse scenarios, but if they can manage it, the talk of civil war will fade. And in 30 years' time, perhaps a new generation will find themselves expressing similar fears – and will complain that the British are always too complacent, and never think it can happen here.
[See also: One year on, tensions still circle Britain's asylum-seeker hotels]
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