It was the summer of 2024 when it all decisively started, with the horrific murders in Southport, countrywide violence and Elon Musk’s observation that a British civil war was somehow “inevitable”. A year later came a hot season of flags on lamp-posts, protests outside hotels used to accommodate asylum seekers, the ubiquitous use of the word “tinderbox” and constant predictions of widespread riots that never actually materialised. Now here we are again, in the aftermath of the awful murder, and treatment by the police, of Henry Nowak and frightening violence and arson in Belfast, and the civil war predictions seem to be increasing by the hour.
The archive of such material is already bulging. In August 2024, amid the riots, a YouGov poll found that 32% of people thought a UK civil war was either “very” or “somewhat” likely. A year later, Dominic Cummings said the UK was only “random viral posts away from riots and prairie fires getting out of control”. Even Labour’s Lisa Nandy offered the opinion that the north of England was so tense “it could go up in flames”.
But then as now, the king of the civil war genre, even if he usually avoids directly using the term, remained Nigel Farage, whose lexicon of expressions for anarchy and general breakdown includes “societal collapse” and “civil disobedience on a vast scale”, as well as predictions that Britain is “not far from major civil disorder”, presumably fired by the “pure, cold rage” he so disgracefully incited last week. Unsurprisingly, such talk is an international phenomenon, as evidenced by similar predictions of civil conflict, strife and war – usually pinned on immigration and Islam – from just about all the key populist politicians of mainland Europe.
All of which, it seems, has left the Tory party feeling rather left out. So Kemi Badenoch has tried to combine a vague tone of restraint and reason with the use of a telltale term presumably intended to grab the attention of disaffected former Tory voters who now support Reform UK (or, if they have more hardcore tastes, Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain). Her interview for a new BBC Radio 4 programme, titled England’s Identity Crisis, resulted in a quote that was a bit of a rambling mess – an attempt to blame “identity politics” for social fragmentation, of a piece with her proposal to scrap parts of the Equality Act – but she eventually uttered the two crucial words.
“We are seeing more and more hostility to people of every ethnicity,” she said, “whether they’re English or not English, because people are bringing political conflict into an area where we didn’t have political conflict … This is why it’s really important that politicians understand this properly and have policies that make a difference, rather than use the political conflict as a way to get some votes from one particular community … In the long term, that’s how you end up with civil war.”
If you want a more pointed set of civil war predictions, one high-profile source is David Betz, a Canadian academic and “civic nationalist” based at King’s College London who looks and sounds like a character from a peak-period JG Ballard novel. Among other factors, he blames multiculturalism and degenerate elites for what he sees as the very real prospect of civil war across the west, which will be “demarcated along ethnic lines”. For reasons that elude some of his readers, he thinks Britain stands an 18.5% chance of falling into such a conflict in the next four years, and that such an eventuality would entail the death of about 23,000 people a year.
The essential theory behind this is based on the idea of society breaking into three “zones” – as he puts it: “urban enclaves where non-native populations dominate”, “mixed regions where instability will be fiercest, particularly capital cities where state authority still exerts influence” and “largely contiguous native-dominated areas, comparable to the French regions voting National Rally in 2024, forming bases for counter-mobilisation”. The west’s urban centres, he says, may turn into what the US military once called “feral cities”. Such projections, moreover, come wrapped in cast-iron confidence: “That civil war is looming in the west is a logical conclusion of standard, well-understood precepts of social science,” he reckons (although the KCL professor of economics and public policy Jonathan Portes considers his ideas “absurd”).
Somewhat inevitably, Betz is a major presence on rightwing podcasts and YouTube videos, which pour such ideas into hundreds of thousands of people’s feeds and everyday conversations. The day of last October’s Caerphilly byelection for the Welsh Senedd, for instance, I fell into conversation with a Reform supporter who was standing outside the town’s library with a party placard, having been thrown out by the staff. No more than a minute into our chat, he fixed me with a laser-like stare and asked a very pointed question: “You know there’s going to be a civil war?” “No,” I replied. “There’s going to be a tipping point,” he went on, and mentioned illegal immigration. “And do you say that with relish, or does it frighten you?” I asked him.
The answer came back in a microsecond – “It scares the shit out of me,” he said.
Increasingly, understanding modern British politics without reference to this kind of stuff is impossible. For lots of people, mundane daily reality now carries a lot less weight than what they see hundreds of times a day on the small screen they carry in their pocket. And if you are partial to a vision of a Britain constantly on the verge of violent crisis, your algorithmically curated video feeds will deliver exactly that kind of stuff – fighting, riots, angry altercations on public transport – and foster the sense that you are living in a dystopian drama, for which Farage constantly provides the ugly narration: witness how his online call after Monday night’s stabbing in Belfast for police to disclose the suspect’s identity and immigration status accompanied an image of the attack. What you watch might also fuse with the economic injustices that millions of people have to live with: scant social housing, stagnating wages, no rights at work. But most of the “civil war” merchants never mention those things. Funny, that.
Still, the most effective civil war narratives weave their stories into a simple political message: that in such unprecedentedly turbulent and violent times, you have to make unprecedented choices. And in the UK, that means making Farage prime minister. Meanwhile, there are a lot of borderline irrelevances that many people in politics and the media are still hanging on to, from a lot of TV news to the weekly pantomime of prime minister’s questions. They should be more aware of what people are watching on phones so overused that their screens are full of cracks, much like their owners’ understanding of what is still – and I say this somewhat hesitantly – a largely stable country. A nation with solvable problems is being recast as violent dystopia, close to civil war, and why? To smooth the path to power of some of the most terrifying politicians Britain has ever seen.
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John Harris is a Guardian columnist
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