13-05-2025
Is Britain On The Brink Of Civil War?
According to David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at King's College London, many of the preconditions for civil war exist in Britain today.
Using academic studies on social cohesion, civil war causation theory and social attitudes surveys, he argues that the following preconditions are in place: elite overreach, factional polarization, a collapse in trust, economic pressures, and the perceived downgrading of the majority population in a previously homogeneous society, are all present in contemporary Britain.
The current dynamics, he continues, point to an emerging conflict between radicalized factions within the Muslim community and an incipient nativist white nationalism. Professor Betz goes on to claim – using the Maoist model that divides insurgencies into three phases – that the nativists are in phase one, the so-called defensive phase in which the group begins to organize, disseminate propaganda and build a conscious community of followers.
Islamists, on the other hand, are in phase two – when violent attacks occur on a semi-regular basis, a military structure is being developed, but they are not yet strong enough to challenge the state's monopoly on violence. (Professor Betz believes that, due to the absence of clear geographic divisions between the antagonists, Britain is unlikely to reach phase three – the offensive phase. This is when the insurgent groups are strong enough to challenge government forces.)
It is an arresting and troubling thesis. It is also convincing.
The preconditions outlined above undeniably exist in modern Britain.
There has been a collapse of public trust in the state, for example. The 41st British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) report, published on 12 June 2024, concluded 'that people's trust in governments and politicians, and confidence in their systems of government, is as low now as it has ever been over the last 50 years, if not lower'. Indeed, a record high of 45% 'almost never' trust governments of any hue (22 points above the figure recorded in 2020); 58% (another record high) 'almost never' trust politicians to tell the truth when they are in a tight corner, up 19 points on 2020; and a striking 79% of respondents said that the system of governing Britain could be improved 'quite a lot' or a 'great deal', matching a record high recorded during the parliamentary stalemate over Brexit in 2019 and up 18 points on 2020.
Professor John Curtice, the Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Social Research, the organisation that carried out the BSA survey, says: 'The government… will… need to address the concerns of a public that is as doubtful as it has ever been about the trustworthiness and efficacy of the country's system of government.' As Professors Curtice and Betz warn, public trust in governments of all stripes has collapsed and, with it, trust in the system of government that we have traditionally sacralised and encouraged others to adopt. That this trend, if left unchecked, could potentially shatter an already fragile social contract is a statement of the obvious. Trust in the state unites the disparate groups of a multicultural society, acting as what Professor Betz calls a kind of 'superglue'. Without it, the groups fracture and retreat into silos characterised by mutual suspicion and animosity.
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