Will there be another English civil war?

Four dead in Ohio? I'll raise you 23k

Last month I went to the Unherd club to be told that we can expect at least 23,000 deaths a year in the coming conflict between groups based in the Islamist cities and those whose base is the white rural areas. David Betz, an (American Canadian¹) professor of War Studies at Kings’ College believes that civil war in this country is now inevitable and we just haven’t hoisted this in. His prediction has been around for a while, though his talk was the first time I heard him put a figure on the carnage he expects. He was – he explained – extrapolating from the worst years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and 23,000 deaths a year was a figure for what we “might be able to get away with”.

“I don't want to euphemise war with terms like ‘struggle’, ‘conflict’, or ‘calamity’,” he said: “of course we could use ‘revolution’, ‘rebellion’ or ‘uprising’ but these terms imply something spasmodic and brief in duration. [The conflict I’m interested in] is not an event, but a process that has along prehistory and it won't be over swiftly.”

I’m a little troubled by the thought that he might be right and rather more troubled by the smugness of his audience at Unherd, who find it exciting to half-believe him. They are window shopping for catastrophes, with the added bonus of knowing that theirs is a very exclusive shop. If you’re a conservative, you should not be excited by the thought of disorder. But in a society where only a minority reads books at all and hardly anyone reads anything even fifty years old “conservative” labels a faction, not a philosophy.

Betz does have an argument, and parts of it seem to me irrefutable. The three factors he identified as leading up to civil strife in any country studied were ethnic replacement, the state’s loss of legitimacy, and “Polar factionalism”. That’s not the order he put them in. No one Reform-adjacent wants to hear that racist motives are uppermost on their agenda but the other motives on his list would be quite insufficient for the kind of widespread slaughter he foresees without the fury that ethnic hostility can supply.

His first cause was “Polar Factionalism”, the condition in which people form and hold their opinions solely out of tribal loyalty and can no longer recognise the world as it seems to the other side. I would entirely have agreed when I worked on the Guardian and saw how progressive thought worked, or when I argued with Brexiteers and saw how nationalism shuts down the brain. I still don’t disagree, but now I also think that social context – factionalism – is a vital feature of the way we reason and form opinions.

Patriotism itself is a form of polar factionalism – we do and believe certain things simply because that’s part of our nationality. This is destructive between nations, as European history proves, but constructive within them, in the literal sense of nation building. What has happened to move that kind of loyalty down a level so that we no longer feel part of our nationality, but part of some subculture? When did this kind of loyalty become toxic?

Here I suspect the internet, and the sheer profusion of stuff to read, must take some of the blame. It is so much easier not to read and engage with the people you disagree with, while those who entertain you drift further and further in the directions their audiences pull them.

Which leads us on to his third cause, which is the loss of faith and trust in the political process, which he calls legitimacy. He blamed Remainers, for obstructing the will of the people. As a Remainer I naturally blame the dishonesty of the elite Brexiteers and the stupidity of the masses. Either way this shows that legitimacy itself is a matter of tribal loyalty or group think. It’s also a very productive one, without which society can’t function. Betz is obviously right that it has plummeted in the last fifty years in Britain and elsewhere in the West.

One reason is that the legitimacy of social democracy rested on the promise that it would make almost everyone richer, and even the rich would become only a little less rich. That promise first broke in England in the Seventies – hence Mrs Thatcher. The legitimacy of the Thatcherite settlement was broken in the Great Financial Crisis forty years later. Few people now expect things to get better and there are very good reasons to expect them to get worse for everyone in Trump’s empire. And so the hopes of the dispossessed grown correspondingly apocalyptic. It’s hard not to hope for miracles and revolutionary solutions when no other help is in sight.

This loss of legitimacy is what makes mass immigration socially corrosive. It feeds the the suspicion that we are sharing the country with people who are cheating us because don’t play by the same rules, even when these rules are unwritten. That dismaying knowledge can arise in all sorts of contexts, as it did in the referendum. It’s how my parents felt about Mrs Thatcher and the spivs that she encouraged – and spiv is a word that exactly captures the defalcation from the social contract. It is also the rage that partygate roused. It is one of the great motors of class warfare, in both directions. But on the Right, in Britain today, it is inextricably bound up with racism, as it is in Trump’s America. And in the online Right and Left all racial questions are seen through an American prism.

You need only look at the comments underneath YouTube recordings of Betz’s talks, or a class photograph tweeted out by Katharine Birbalsingh to be shown a seething abyss of racist fury. The fact that few people will say such things offline and under their real names is one thing that gives me hope; another is that there are very few guns in private hands in this country.

Betz listed three factors that might make for stability in the face of his destabilising trends, but I can only find two of them in my notes and he largely discounted both of them.

One was wealth: so long as almost everyone is growing richer, immigrants are largely welcomed, especially when they do the jobs that natives find below them. But as we’ve seen this buffer no longer works in the state of the economy today and no one really believes the Starmer government, or any other, will get us out of it. What’s more, unemployment and relative poverty are rising up the social scale: it’s a reasonable bet that generative AI will do to the white collar sector what offshoring did to manual labour. These people, angry, disappointed, and indebted² will be the insurgent leaders, Betz predicted. This is an idea that agrees with Peter Turchin’s thesis about “elite overproduction” and Anatol Lieven’s line that nothing is more dangerous to society than a large class of unemployed graduates.

It is, I suppose, amusing in its way that people who would blame the troubles of society on Marxists with sociology degrees employed by the state now pin their hopes for change on unemployed fascists with degrees in the humanities.

The other was “an inculturated habit of obedience”. The British once had “A kind of genius for government” he said, but this had depended on a unified and competent elite. It had worked for the last two centuries, but “it is difficult to describe the power elite as unified today … people are looking for lifeboats.” The audience in the room agreed. Were they not themselves a fine illustration of the disunity of the elite?

So it’s a powerful case. We’ve already had two murders or attempted murders of MPs that might fit into his pattern – Stephen Timms was stabbed by an Islamist who intended to kill him in his constituency office in 2010 and Jo Cox, of course, was murdered by a fascist in 2016. Looking around today I wouldn’t want to underestimate the damage that Donald Trump and the Maga movement can do, either in their apparent triumph or in their inevitable collapse. Still, the paranoid Right is hindered by its own paranoia. Betz called the Lucy Connolly case “a significant miscarriage of justice”, but he added that deep in the fever swamps of twitter there is a theory that Lucy Connolly does not exist at all, but was invented by the Deep State and the Mainstream Media as an example of how the state power could crush dissent.

At that point the talk broke up for drinks. It was a hot night and I didn’t want to pay another £7 for a bottle of beer so I made my excuses and left. There is much more I could write, in particular about the collapse of the old elites, but I want to think about all this some more.

1. My mistake

2. and, I’d add, trained only for employment rather than educated for idleness as traditional elites once were