Are We Headed for Civil War? - David Betz

There is a gigantic ball of political energy that is building up. The spark is just intrinsically unpredictable. If we had to list uh factors in order, multiculturalism would be at the top and if we were to put some kind of ranking on them, it's like 90%. people who uh either express the view or nod at the view that we want our country back and the people who want you to shut the up. So there's this sense on the part of the formerly dominant majority that they are losing this status which impels them as fear usually does to act up.

David Beth, welcome to trigonometry. Thank you. uh you have been on a number of our favorite podcasts recently talking about the risks of civil war, unrest uh in Western societies, particularly in Europe, in a very persuasive way. There are many people who shout these slogans online without really having anything to say or back it up. But you you you're someone who researches this. So before we get into that, just tell everybody a little bit about who you are and what your career is about uh so that we can talk about this issue.

Okay. Uh my name's David Betts. I'm a professor in the war studies department at King's College London. Uh which is a uh which is the biggest and best war studies uh department in in in the world. Uh I've been there for uh 20 about 25 years now. My area of specialism is fundamentally contemporary strategy, contemporary military affairs. I've written on a wide range of things, but probably most pertinent to uh the dis discussion we're about to have. I've been particularly interested over many years in the topic of insurgency and counterinsurgency, which is essentially the study of how countries are torn apart from the inside and sometimes put back uh put back together.

for the most part that uh research has concerned uh uh internal wars in foreign countries in hot dusty places abroad uh and not so much at home. But it began to occur to me actually going back as far as a decade ago particularly heightening in the post um post-rexit vote parliamentary shenanigans um to subvert that vote. It particularly began to dawn on me that the conditions uh that we generally under understood to be contributo to the emergence and the persistence of insurgency in other countries of internal conflict in other countries was more and more apparent in our own uh countries. In that case particularly the the the the the quality that of a country that is particularly pertinent is the perception of legitimacy which is a huge issue in the study of of insurgency and counterinsurgency. And my feeling was that uh British governments amongst other western governments were essentially doing things in a rather textbook manner that seemed designed to um to diminish their own perception of political legitimacy and that that was a dangerous thing for our societies.

So I wrote I continued to uh uh uh research and to write on this and did a couple of papers um uh uh now many many years back but one of which was picked up by your uh friend and colleague um Louise from the maiden mother matriarch Luis Perry who picked up a paper that I probably wrote in 2022 uh published in 23 with the title civil war comes to the West. And uh so she contacted me out of the blue and said uh for reasons of her own, she'd been brooding on this subject and looked online if anybody had said anything uh had said anything about it and lo and behold, she found me. M that led to to a discussion and uh with her uh which then put um put that uh paper and the things that I'd been writing um and talking about in an academic sphere which is not terribly noticeable to be perfectly honest into um much more into the mainstream of the public sphere.

And one thing I would just say as as an observer, we've obviously had, you know, hundreds of people sitting in your chair at this point. Uh, and most people that come on our show, they usually have a thing they want to say and they're desperate to say it. You almost seem quite reluctant to be talking about this in this public way.

Yeah, I'm reluctant to be talking about it. Uh, for reasons that are probably pretty obvious. It's rather uncomfortable. I'm not a public figure uh for for one thing. Uh so it's a bit unusual for me to be sitting at a table with a camera pointed at me in a bright light. Feels a little bit you know uh feels a bit Anyway, it's new uh for me and uh slightly awkward at that. The subject matter matter moreover is extremely unpleasant. Um and the climate the the political and social climate is such that um it's it can be rather painful to talk about these things. you you make enemies whom you don't want to make. You alienate people uh friends, family uh who you would wish to alienate. So, you know, I'm not here to You're you're correct. I'm I'm I'm not um jumping at the bit uh to talk about this. Uh I feel it compelled uh to do so by by my own conscience, I guess. um and my own calculation of the state uh that that we're in and people are interested but frankly no I'm not trying to sell anything and it is uh I am a bit of the proverbial fish out of water I'll admit it's it's a detour but I think it's worth exploring.

I'm curious because I I what is the nature of the criticism from friends? I understand online people say stupid things all the time about everyone who has any opinion but in terms of your own personal life, friends, colleagues, etc. What's the nature of their concern about what you're doing?

I think people feel that when you speak about things that you actualize it. Ah, I see. People often do that. They confuse predicting that something will happen if we continue down the current path with like wanting it to happen or making it happen. Yes, that's the common thing. I mean you one does try to explain let's let's say for example you know if I was an astronomer and I'm looking through my telescope and I see the I see a meteor uh headed towards the planet and my understanding of celestial mechanics and impact energy of heavy you know like rapidly moving objects as the sweet meteor of death is headed towards our planet. I'm not calling for that to occur. I'm simply saying you know my understanding on the basis of my understanding of reality and my uh and on the basis of my observation this is our situation. Um but fundamentally I think the pro the basic problem is that people have an actualization issue uh that people think that words can create situations and there is a fear that that that perhaps it might inflame.

Yeah. No, I understand that. I I I don't think they're right. But I do understand the difference between a meteor or a comet coming at the earth and human behavior which can be modified by what they're hearing in the media and so on. So I understand even though I don't agree. But anyway, coming back to you kept using the word insurgency and I wanted to ask you to delve into that because when I think of insurgency, I think of a guy who straps a bomb to himself driving into a market in Kabul shouting Allah Akbar. I don't think of modern Britain. So what are you what are the parallels that you're seeing?

Right. So the first thing to understand is that imagine insurgency is like an iceberg. Okay. Uh and what you you what everybody knows about an iceberg is that top the the part that sticks above the water is the smallest part right? Most of the energy, the bulk of the iceberg is under the water. the bit that you just pointed to, the the guy screaming Allah Akbar, you know, strapping a bomb uh to himself and blowing himself and blowing himself up in a market or what have you. That's the shiny bit poking up uh over the surface. The important bit is underneath there, right? So the first thing is to understand that an insurgency is a social movement. Um fundamentally um and social movements are normal in every in in every society, right? If you want to move ideas around, if you want anything to happen in your society. Uh you you have you have to have social movements and a norm a normal society, you know, welcomes the these things, right? Some social movements are more contentious than others, right? The civil rights movement, for example, is a highly contentious uh social movement. Uh environmentalism from uh in at various stages, including now um might be seen as a very contentious uh social move. anti-capitalism like likewise insurgency differs from normal social movements uh only in um in the extent that it is a social movement which in some respects goes beyond the law. Nelson Mandela had a famous famous trial early 1960s he's charged by the apartheid regime um um uh with treason I think was what he was charged with. it doesn't matter particularly but he he explained why you know what his uh what his line of thought was about forming the armed wing of the ANC and uh and and so on and he said that essentially at some point uh given uh some sorts of grievances you have to decide whether you surrender to the situation to the status quo because it can't be changed within the rules of the uh or you go beyond the law. Now how you go beyond the law there's a immense variation in how you might do that. You might you might do sabotage proper or i.e. property destruction, you might uh use physical violence, rioting are the types or if you do you might conduct uh physical attacks but even then you might make calculations about whom you attack. Do you attack uniformed figures or are you less precise? But essentially with with insurgency, what I'm trying to get at here is that you have a a giant ball of energy. Uh that is the important bit but is under the surface. Uh and the bit at the top is the less important. This is the most you know most obvious in a sense but it is less uh the less important.

Now to answer your question, you are quite right. We don't have uh whatever like uh uh Britain Britain first gorillas blowing themselves up um on on in Westminster uh at this point in time or um doing other uh sorts of things like that. But what you do have is you have an increasing sense of al of uh alienation from normal politics. you have more and more people expressing the view that politics is broken, that politics, politics doesn't work. Um, and if you understand what politics is for, what politics is politics is fundamentally a way of solving collective action problems. And if politics doesn't work to solve collective action problems, then you you uh it has to change, right?

Just for people who don't know, what is a collective action problem?

Quite any collective action problem is uh is a problem which can't be solved through individual effort, right? so a political system, it it exists to aggregate people's views on a range of social on a range of social matters uh through a particular mechanism, right? Through the the political system in this case through elections. The idea being that we have elections. These people called elected politicians who go into uh parliament and discuss issues of the day and and come to uh decisions or answers about uh problems which exist in in that society. Now, you or I as individuals may differ with the decisions taken, but in a normally function functioning political system, i.e. one which is perceived as as legitimate, we accept that the rules of the game uh have been applied fairly. Right? So while we may not agree with the outcome of a particular election and the set of policies which follow from that, we accept that at the end of the day we're all British citizens. We all our our our essentially our pre-political loyalty is to Britain as a nation and there is a perception that the system itself is legitimate, whether or not we we individually agree with with those decisions.

In other words, my wife and I had a discussion about where to go for the weekend. She ended up winning that discussion. I accept it cuz I care more about the family. You have you have a very little you have a very little political system in in your family that aggregates decisions, but at the end of that I don't spend the rest of my time going, well, you know, we should never have made this decision, this is a wrong decision. We accept that decisions get made because we're a family effectively, right?

So yes, actually, that's not a bad analogy. Make this quite small, but it's not a bad analogy uh if you think of a family as a as a as a as a social unit which has a natural affinity in which the people have a the members have a natural affinity for each other and a and and a loyalty to the family which precedes their their self their their feeling well their their self-interest, right? So when you have a system like ours in which the data is in it is perfectly clear that uh trust in government is almost in single figures now. Trust in all institutions has been in decline uh in the west uh for a generation, slightly more than a generation in fact, with politics being very much in the lead in terms of rather dismal race to the bottom. So we have a system which is increasingly perceived as illegitimate, that doesn't that it that isn't a a functional way of solving collective action problems and moreover, in uh we have uh uh countries now where on account of things like the triumph of identity politics primarily, people don't share the the sense of pre-political loyalty which they once did, which uh is a I I would suggest the major contributory factor to the perception of uh illegitimacy and the perception that politics is uh no longer functioning as it ought uh to. Moreover, um the the problems are now so severe that the political system is unable to cure itself. Right? So if you if you if you want to change in essence, you're getting ve we are now getting very close both in Britain uh and many other countries to a situation where people where people in um fairly large numbers are beginning to feel that the problems are uh intolerable and urgent and that they cannot be solved within the existing rules of the game. That is essentially a description of an incipient insurgency.

And David, we've used the term civil war and I think it's quite important that we clarify. What do you mean by that? What is the academic description of civil war?

Okay. Well, there are many academic descriptions of civil war. So without boring you uh too much on that, I use the term civil war uh in uh uh in the sense of referring to a form of war in which the belligerent, two or more the belligerent parties were both under the same sovereign authority at the outbreak of the war. Now, if you take just that as a definitional uh as your um left and right brackets on the definition, quite obviously a lot of difference. There are a lot of variations in uh that might apply within that uh category of civil war. uh you know, all wars are unique and all civil wars are therefore uh unique and uh and messy um even within the same time, same historical time, there are considerable v variation from one place to another if you look at their uh at their civil wars under that uh definition, let alone historically. So there's a lot of different types that and I think that your question arises from that observation of people, well that Well, look, you know, the American Civil War, this is if that's your image of uh civil war, then David, what are you what are you um what are you talking about? Um in this case, so I use that term, however, civil war as opposed to insurgency as I as I might uh have done. Um I think because primarily because I want to highlight the fact that this is in of its of its origin, that it is internal in origin and not external uh in origin, and that is a fundamental quality of civil war which inclines me to use that term. There are other terms that might apply and and but we perhaps we'll get into this as the discussion uh uh uh moves on further that one might apply like revolution or uprising, rebellion uh so on and so forth. uh and I have tended to avoid the use of those terms because at least in my mind that implies something um something more spasmotic and potentially short term, right? So that you I mean scholars will u u will argue, I mean scholars will argue about everything, but but I think semantically for for me revolution kind of implies something that that is uh is explosive, right? It goes from 0 to 100 and but it's also short in duration. It has a big effect. So with that in mind, the use of those terms I think can uh mislead people from what I want them to understand is that this isn't a short-term thing. Once once you tip into civil war uh um we can talk about when that occurs or indeed whether we have already reached the tipping point. uh uh or the tipping point has been reached all already in the past. Um, but once you're in the civil war, they they tend to last for a long time. There is a spasmotic quality to them. Um, but there is also a a long-term process. There's a prehistory to what leads to them, the building up of the proverbial tinder uh that that explodes. And I so I want to draw people's attentions to these aspects of the coming conflict uh which I've uh described. And for better or worse, I think that civil war does that better than than than other terms.

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So that's a fantastic description. I thought it was important so everybody's on the right page because obviously when we talk about terms like civil war, everybody's got their own particular idea, particularly if you're not a scholar and academic. Now we're looking at let's look at the UK. So we've already talked about lack of faith in the institutions, lack of faith in in government and politics. How much of a role does multiculturalism and the in my opinion and a lot of people would share this, that the idea that it's not working and in fact it's actually detrimental to society. How much of a factor does that play in to your thesis?

Might be worth you saying what you mean by multiculturalism because a lot of people misunderstand that term.

Yeah. So multiculturalism is there's lots of different cultures and different religions with different values and different ways of being existing, different social mores, etc. And by the way, if that is rubbish, please push back.

No, I think uh I mean I I think I'm fine with that uh as an understanding of multiculturalism. Um I don't think we need to ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar arggue that uh point. Well, we could if you want, but I don't I don't really see the the only thing I would add to that. I think that really does matter to this discussion is the way I see is exactly as Francis described, but it's the promotion of that worldview that that is the right way to organize society as opposed to the idea that while people have their own religions and have their own cultures, their job is to integrate into the central dominant culture of the nation in which they live. And that's where I would a multi I would make the distinction between a multithnic society in which people from different backgrounds come together to be one thing and a multiple multicultural society in which you're kind of told you don't need to be one thing, just be who you are and just live in the same economic area and that's kind of it. That's where I think a lot of people's concerns are about this issue.

Yeah, I agree with that. Uh that's perfectly logical uh to my mind. Uh but your question was how how uh how important I see this and I think it's the most important factor. If if if we had to list uh factors in order, multiculturalism would be at the top. And if we were to put some kind of ranking on them, it's like 90%.

Wow. And why why do you think it's 90%?

It comes back to what I was when earlier I used the term pre-political loyalty. Pre-political loyalty is a necessary attribute of a of a normally functioning political system. Without the without a without a unified um a unified and single pre-political loyalty, then uh then you you can't have a a normally functioning democratic system. When I say normally functioning, I mean one that's perceived as actually legitimate. This legitimate is different from legality. We get into that too, but but essentially the the main the main uh uh effect is it's uh that it completely erodes the idea of pre-political loyalty, which means that you can't you you don't get the same effect where people say, well, I don't agree with this decision, but I accept how it was arrived at. I accept the process by which it is arrived at because we're all part of the same family. Okay. A nation as a big think of a nation as a big extended uh extended family. Uh and in fact, this is the genius of the nation state. The genius of the nation state is it allows it allows human beings which are which evolved which which is a species that evolved psychologically in small groups, right? To have, you know, intense loyalty, intense personal connections. It's actually a rather small number of people. There's a famous number called the Dunbar number, which I think is about 150, if I remember it correctly. And this is the number, basic number, basically of stable personal connections that a normal human being is able to uh to maintain. Nation state is a genius idea for uh expanding the Dunbar number like very very very large. So, you know, um uh um moving to a multicultural postnational model is uh is incredibly destructive to the way that most western states have governed themselves since modern times, since or since uh well, late modernity anyway. And that's that's happened effectively in uh well, in Europe effectively in the last 30 30 years or so at a at a absolutely historically frantic and unprecedented pace. And I say it's the biggest thing, you know, and actually that shouldn't be all that controversial. I mean, Angela Merkel said the same thing in Germany. Uh, one could question her motives in saying it, but she said it o over over 10 years ago that multiculturalism was a disaster for Germany. Three, four months later, David Cameron gives almost exactly the same speech, you know, in which he said that multiculturalism uh results in ghettoized communities living basically in their all their their silos, unable to u so in short, multiculturalism is uh the killer app for destroying um what has been the nation model.

So we're talking about multiculturalism, but to me, a large part of multiculturalism as well is the issue of religion. So if you have lots of different cultures, but they all share, for instance, the same religion, there's far less likely. Now, of course, there's always fractions in religions and whatever else, and we see this with Sunni and Shia, etc., etc., but it's far less likely to happen, isn't it? If you import every for instance people who are all Christian as opposed to Muslims, Christians, etc.

So um I feel that there's a separate line of argument here around um the around integration and the potential for integration and our understanding of identity and so on and so forth, which would be interesting, but maybe as a slight digression from what I'm uh what I think I'm here uh to do, which is to explain to you why or explain to your listeners why you're in actually quite immediate peril from this thing called civil war. And why I say multiculturalism is is a a big uh part of that. It relates to uh one of the core ideas in the theories around civil war causation that is about that looks at the makeup of the essentially the ethnic, usually the ethnic, but could be the confessional makeup of of society. But you you have to imagine a bell curve. You know what a bell curve looks like. And on one end you have very heterogeneous societies. Mhm. And on the other end you have very homogeneous societies. At both of these ends, the potential for civil war is actually quite low. Uh very homogeneous societies have low potential for a civil war because on account of the uh homogeneity of that society, they're relatively able to arrive at consensus decisions, even when they're quite painful. So, you know, in times of economic decline or natural disaster or war or so on, if you have a, you know, any of the kind of big pressures that might be um uh felt by a given society, whether internal or external in in in origin, natural or artificial in origin, a highly homogeneous society is usually able to weather that because they could say, "We need to pull together, right? We need to get through this. We're all We're all in the same uh what's the metaphor? We're all in the same boat." Okay. Very heterogeneous societies are also relatively stable because uh it's very difficult for any one group to uh generate mass prod. So if you if you've got a country that is broken say into 20 groups, each with 5% of the population, then it's very hard for any one or even most manageable coalitions to dominate all of the others. Mhm. So there's this paradox. Now, the most vulnerable state is at the top of that curve where you are uh uh where you have a uh formerly dominant majority which is in fear of losing its status. And in that case, there uh uh the and this is a danger for two reasons. First, because of that fear of losing status. So in the past, it was your language, it was your culture, it was your um sort of ideals and beliefs which uh essentially set the pattern, set the rules of how that society operates. Right? So uh there is a fear that you are losing that status. So your language is not going to be the dominant uh one anymore. your cultural preferences will not dominate in in that in that society. So this might be in in the current context might refer to attitudes towards women or um um well in the news recently had been uh uh attitudes towards uh uh ritual slaughter of animals for you know like and many many other, right? So you could say so there's this sense on the part of the formerly dominant majority that they are losing this status uh which impels them as fear usually does uh to act to act out. Uh at the same at the same time, because their share of the population is still quite large, they don't face the same coordination costs as a group of 5% of the population. So they still have the potential to form uh mass movements. They still have the potential muscle to try. They're not going necessarily going to succeed in this, but they still have the potential muscle to try and reverse the situation. And they and if they feel there is an urgency to do so, anyway, you could see why on this bell curve, what that represents is the propensity to civil conflict. And it's most uh and it's most dangerous in uh exactly the situation faced now in in Britain and throughout Western Europe, which is the perception of the indigenous native uh populations of Europe that they are being displaced in their own homelands.

So what you're saying is that the conditions for civil war, they're sort of approaching optimal at the moment in that respect.

Yes. Uh and but also in in other respects, they are also optimal. This is the weird thing. Okay. Uh so I'll maybe if I may, I'll give a slightly long answer, but I'll try to get to the point. If I'm to summarize the some of the big ideas in the Civil Wars literature with respect to causation, one of the one of the big factors I've just talked about, which is the uh essentially status loss by a formerly dominant majority, otherwise known in in the literature is referred to as downgrading, but it's effectively the same as the replacement or displacement narrative you hear in uh increasingly in in right and far-right circles.

Actually, it's not just far right. I I happen to live up in the north of Britain in in uh in strongly left-wing areas where it's a very firmly held uh idea. So, it's not strictly speaking actually best uh understood as a right left-wing.

Just just to make this slightly more specific, the idea being that white British people are being replaced by people who don't look like them, who don't share the same culture.

To be very specific. Yes. Okay. Or to be even more specific, I mean, so it we're we're recording this uh days after the Glastonbury event, right? So you might say it's between uh if you if you don't want to raise race, if you don't if you feel that neuralist neurallinginguistic programming effect of uh that often occurs in people when you when you use the words white population, then you might just say, look, the the coming conflict is between those people who uh either express the view or nod at the view that we want our country back and the people and the people who want you to shut the up. Right. Right. Okay. Okay. So there those two to give an example that people can latch on to uh in the current uh political climate. So there is the uh there is the downgrading effect which is very central. The the other is factionalism. Factionalism is uh uh uh is generally recognized as a highly kind of corrosive uh uh quality for a political system to have. The worst sort of factionalism is

Sorry to interrupt David. What do you mean by factionalism?

Factionalism is uh of an attribute of a political system in which peop uh you have actors who are um making decisions or acting on the basis of their factional interests rather than the larger national interest. In other words, it's no longer a family, but rather there's a lodger living in the house who only cares about themselves and is not willing to consider the interests of the family as being primary and their own self-interest to be secondary. Right. Yes. Right. Uh if you were to think of it in contemporary British terms, I would say, you know, a good example would be the the five independent or effectively the five Gaza MPs currently sitting uh in Westminster. We we had in fact what was was the thing that caught attention recently was uh you know, this faction was effectively lobbying for the building of an airport in Pakistan for the convenience of it wasn't just them. There was quite a few Labor MPs who were part of that as well. But essentially this this is what I mean by faction factionalism.

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There are different types of factionalism. Uh but uh uh so it could be an ethnic factionalism or confessional factionalism or but uh the probably the the worst sort of u the worst sort of factionalism um is uh known as polar factionalism. Polar factionalism is a situ is a is a term which um uh is is used or I use it to describe a situation where people are not arguing anymore over issues per se, like if you take abortion for example or the death penalty, right? You and I may differ on which way we fall on that particular issue and we may have very very strong views, often people do on on these issues that could be a kind of factionalism, but polar factionalism ism is a situation where we're not arguing about the issue. What we're arguing about is what we perceive to be the consensus uh opinion within our faction. So if my faction is pro abortion, right? uh then I'm going to be pro uh abortion whether leaving aside the the issues because what I'm looking to I'm looking around me to my to my faction to my tribe as an indicator of what I should believe and how I should act. Uh and one only does that in situations of extreme insecurity. Uh uh it's that's an expression of extreme in insecurity where if essentially what you're now doing is you're burying whatever your own conscious cons conscience uh might suggest because you perceive the danger to be so great. You have to be with you you have to be in line with your faction. Right. Okay. Right. So polar factionalism is is highly highly um is the most advanced form of uh factionalism. M we're now in a state increasingly of polarity of polar uh polar factionalism. The next step after polar factionalism is the war.

All right. So the other the other uh the other factor that is often pointed to beyond factionalism and downgrading is uh loss of faith. Uh loss of faith specifically loss of faith in the the the the ability of normal politics to solve the problems which I would suggest you can measure um in various ways, but our own parliament has measured this, right? So the parliament is some of the most uh most convincing um surveys done on people's sense of the legitimacy of politics are conducted by governments themselves. Mhm. They're for obvious reasons intensely interested in this question and the data is perfectly clear. People don't trust trust in political institutions is in the seller. Trust in political figures is uh abysmal. So measures of trust across all institutions are just uh in the seller. And my my suggestion here or what I'm trying to do for for those listening closely is to say that measures of trust can be taken as proxies for the measure of legitimacy. And legitimacy is the is like the secret sauce. That's the magic that allows government to work. M if you've got legitimacy, then your your cost of government goes way way down because people perceive the the system to be legitimate. Therefore, they tend to do what they ought to do without being policed all the time. Mhm. Which is why, you know, like British policemen don't have to carry guns or traditionally don't have to carry guns around and British British governance historically speaking for the last few centuries has been a kind of genius for government uh because of this high trust and high legitimacy that we're invested in the system. But that's not there anymore. We know it's not there anymore because we've measured it. And so you have you have all of the uh the pertinances of a high trust, high legitimate society. If I walk out of you walk out of this building, you're in the center of London. You can't miss it. But this the spirit's gone. The soul is gone. This is this is just structure. Uh and so that when I use the word loss of faith, I'm not talking about religious faith, but I'm I am talking about something that is kind of magical. Legitimacy is hard to to point to, but you know when you've got it and you don't.

Well, what you're saying is you have all the structures of a high trust society that rely on people to voluntarily not act in a way that's detrimental, while you have a society that is increasingly becoming low trust. And that's why the government has to become uh more um muscular about things. There's no other way. It has to police things hard. It has to police people's speech because the things that people never would have said are now increasingly being said, and therefore the government has to come in and prosecute speech of this kind and speech of that kind and everything else. So take these three factors together uh which are I I would suggest like the three big factors that that tend to be uh accounted for as uh indicators of the potential for civil war. We're right in the sweet spot in all of them. Now that's that's probably strikes people as weird. Undoubtedly it does strike people as uh as weird, otherwise I wouldn't be here. You wouldn't have invited me to because you know the the suggestion uh is uh I don't want to say it's controversial because I don't actually think it is controversial in terms of our understanding of reality. But at any rate, the thing is when I say the word civil war, you probably think of a of a different time or different places, not your own home. And I'm saying that actually take a step back and look at just what we understand about this and and take a realistic look at your own society. you realize you're in you're you are in fact um ideally in the quote unquote ideal uh position. Now that to to finish off uh uh this line of reasoning, I think an an objective person and many many people do respond and say, well, look, you know, uh traditionally Britain is a country and you know, western states don't have uh so there are there obviously significant barriers to civil war in western countries and David, aren't you exaggerating? Right? You know, and I would like to make the case uh that I am not exaggerating and in fact, I suspect that there what's going on here is a normality bias, a kind of expectation of normality that on on uh the part of many people which uh borders on complacency.

So one of the chief kind of bull works against uh civil war uh clearly is wealth. Um, right. If you're if you're if you're a wealthy place, you've got lots of money, then you can you can afford to paper over a lot of cracks, right? A lot can be done. If you think of money as a lubricant, as a kind of social lubricant, if you've got a lot of money, you can you can make things uh you you can make things work. Bearable. Bearable. Yeah. At least bearable. Anyway, right. They can function. Um, and my my suggestion, I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's an outlandish suggestion, is that as far as the financialization b of the economy goes, most western economies are at the end of the rope. We're just waiting for the hammer to drop uh essentially. So the expectation of the ability of government to continue to pay po paper over uh problems in society through essentially financial uh redistri it's not financial redistribution. They're they're creating money out of thin air. They're creating debt to toe to to appease existing problems, but they're going to run out, they're already running out of ability the ability to to do that. So the existing problems are just going to emerge. Okay.

So the another bull work is a kind of uh kind of say you might describe as a customary uh habit of obedience. Right? So with a if you have if you have a a nation state uh which has been normally functioning normally, basically well-governed for a long time, people have gotten into the people have gotten into the habit of sort of obeying um right? And I think that that is that is a factor which is very apparent in in British society for for sure. Um, and I think it's one that underpins the observations often of historians who say, "Oh, look, Britain has, relatively speaking, has a has a low tradition of civil wars." Yes, we've had a couple. We had the peasant revolt in the late medieval period. We had the English civil wars, but gen uh but generally speaking, unlike the French, say, or others, the the British are basically pretty politically passive. They have a this culture of obedience as I've described it.

I feel a little cautiously, but I do want to push back on my his colleagues who are historians on on this point because in fact, it seems to me that Britain has had a lot of little a lot of rebellions uh in uh through its history, a lot of little revolts, but what it's generally also had is a is a very unified and rather competent uh governing elite. So for example, if you look at the British the the British military, the British military has performed an aid to the civil power role now for over two centuries uh and usually pretty effectively. Uh so the British kind of power elite has always been pretty good at heading off uh revolts when they arise. you you know, they're that they can um suppress them or subvert them uh or co-opt them and they have done so pretty effectively and there's no denying that there has been a kind of gen British genius for governance uh over time, but so I think it's an exaggeration to say that there is you know, somehow that that the that the British people uh and uh have this kind of innate habit of just obeying you know, putting up with that other people uh uh don't. But uh more to the point, this idea of uh the existence of a unified and competent elite is highly questionable in in

You become very British, David, in your understated British act of diplomacy.

Okay. I'm glad I've I'm I'm glad I've integrated that. Right. So, you know, you you both laughed, so I really probably don't need to go into substantiation. No one thinks the elites are well good or skilled or smart or so. So, no no more said on the matter of competence, but I I think there's something to be said about the idea of the unified elite and the unified elite is um is a very important factor. Usually, if the elite can stick like when you when when things get tough, if the elite can stick together uh they they normally will prevail, particularly if they right uh and particularly if they can hold the security forces, if they can hold the arm. So if the elite is is competent and unified, it can usually weather um uh these periods of uh turmoil. It's not just that there this this elite is not competent. Uh they're also not unified. So you're already beginning to see uh elite defections. Uh and you can see that like in the last week, how many political movements have been announced into existence just in the last uh last day. We've got advance reform, restore. Um, what are what are these? These are expressions of essentially these are expressions of this feeling that the system is is the system is broken, right? Uh because you wouldn't you you wouldn't name a movement restore or reform or advance if you thought things were more or less hunky dory, but you wanted to change a few things, you know. So you're seeing uh defections from the system and you're seeing also the true allegiances of the of the uh power elite become more and more obvious, right? When people talk about the uni party for example, this is effect effectively what they're talking about is like, okay, we now recognize that most of what you know like what you guys have been arguing about is effectively drama. So Ed Balls and uh uh George Osborne recently, for example, had a very congenial uh kind of pausy discussion about how they both had no

The idea that there was all this, uh, um, uh, industrial raping going on. But sorry to interrupt, but actually, it's much worse than that. It wasn't that they had no idea. What they actually said, if you listen to that clip, is they didn't think politically it was something for which there needed to be a discussion, effectively. That's what they which is far worse, in my opinion, than not knowing about.

Yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right. I mean, Corbl, I, I've just like undersold something, right? This wasn't coming across the desks of cabinet ministers. I mean, I don't know whether you ever had any, um, dealings with it. I didn't. I didn't directly. I mean, there was definitely, you know, there were the emerging prosecutions in places like Rotherham, and I guess there was a sense in conservative circles that, you know, this was embarrassing for Labour because these, uh, areas were run by Labour councils, that the Labour councils often drew a lot of support from the local Pakistani origin community, that they didn't want to kind of call it out. There was definitely, but we never, we never thought that was something that you could sort of politically exploit, frankly, really. Um, I mean, I would have thought if you thought this was something which was embarrassing for Labour, you would have thought, "Well, too politically." I mean, I'm, I think when Karma was going, um, about this in that period, it wasn't really on the political.

Okay, so it's neither unified nor, uh, nor, uh, competent. So you've got elite defections occurring, um, uh, perhaps somewhat less obvious in the British context than in others. The most obvious elite defection is Trump. Uh, but one can think of multiple other examples of essentially what I think is occurring is you have a fracturing of the elite. Like, so it's not, "Hey, we're all in the same boat." It's literally, they're all looking for their own lifeboats. Uh, and one has that, uh, anyway, one has that, uh, uh, that impression, which rather suggests, therefore, that what traditionally has been a strong bulwark against, um, civil war in the form of a unified and, and competent elite, no longer is quite the barrier that it once was.

Can I challenge you on this to stress-test this? Because I was about to say, isn't the strongest counterargument to your predictions the election of Donald Trump and the incredibly rapid rise of the Reform Party, which is currently on, on current polling, you know, polling, what does it mean? But on current polling, they're said to win hundreds of seats at the next election. So isn't that exactly the system working as intended, which is things go to shit, people will vote for a fairly, uh, robust challenge to the existing system that will then come in and, as we're now seeing in America, will do quite a lot to try and set to reset the system back to where it might, might be perceived as being the right place for it to be.

Um, that's a fair, that's a fair point. Uh, and but I don't invest, uh, as much confidence in, uh, in it as, uh, you might from your suggestion, anyway. Maybe it's just a hypothetical, uh, you're, you're presenting, you know, actually presenting your, your own point of view. But let me deal with it on a hypothetical level. Then it depends how you interpret, uh, uh, Trump, either Trump or, uh, Reform. Actually, let's just concentrate on Reform. I think Reform is actually much more, uh, my suspicion is it's much more, uh, a very predictable system defense mechanism where, uh, essentially it's a pressure valve. Uh, Reform, despite the name, is unlikely to reform very much. Uh, Farage seems to me increasingly a status quo figure.

Um, what, why do you say that? Primarily because of his statements and his and Richard Ty's statements around, uh, the central issue which is multiculturalism, around which both men have expressed a kind of, uh, or actually was not just that, that was very specifically put to Tyce in a recent interview, um, that, you know, Britain, I think it was Matt Goodwin's, um, point that by 2063, uh, the white British population would, in, would be in the, in the minority. And T, and the interviewer asked, well, you know, are you worried about that? And you could see he was obviously uncomfortable, hesitated for a bit, and then said, well, you know, uh, um, I, I'll be dead by then. You, I'll be dead by then, right? As though politicians are not supposed to think about 20, 30 years in the future. Farage has already, you know, made it clear in numerous interviews is that, um, he's, at any rate, fair, at least publicly, very sanguine about about this.

Is this, I mean, you know, is he basically posing for a degree of political respectability with a view, with a view to catching swing voters so that he can be more radical, uh, in government if he ever gets, uh, to it? I rather suspect. No, but my understanding of the Farage position, uh, is effectively that he believes in the end of multiculturalism and the celebration of British identity as the uniting, uh, worldview into which our multi-ethnic society can buy in.

Okay. Right. Well, I mean, what else is there? You deport millions of people because they're not white. Like, so let's, let's park this part for Farage, uh, for, okay, a, a moment. By the way, I'm just testing the idea. This is trying. No, I'm happy with, uh, I'm happy with your line of questioning. I'm just trying to address it in a systematic, uh, manner.

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There is the matter of the electability of Reform. There is the matter of the intention, uh, of Reform. Both of which we could argue. I'm not a political scientist. I'm not a political pundit. And so maybe we've kind of exhausted my potential for commenting not, um, cogently, um, on that specifically. But then there is moreover the ability of Reform, even if, uh, even if Farage is is radical in his his intention and does matter, it does manage to be, uh, elected with a decent majority, that he'll probably just be subverted, uh, by the, uh, by the state bureaucracy, uh, which can tangle him up at least for a parliament with, I think, very little difficulty.

What's, you know, uh, that is my biggest concern, definitely. Should it, uh, should it wish to, uh, which it, by all accounts, it probably would wish, uh, to, I think that's a pretty reasonable, uh, suspicion. And we know that there is that there is a, a huge potential of bureaucracies to subvert, um, even quite radical reformers, because that's what happened in Trump's, uh, first, first, uh, administration. So it may be that the political system, uh, is able to generate, uh, uh, uh, reforms, reformers, rather, uh, who can take, um, big, potentially very, very big decisions. And you mentioned exactly the, the main one is, what do you do with people? You know, what do you do with, how many people have arrived? I've since 2013. I don't know. Anyway, like multiple millions. What do you, uh, what do you do? Um, but, um, the, even if they get into, so the point is, the political system might be able to plausibly be able to generate some kind of answers to that, to that, but not at the speed of the development of events. So if you, if you, if you think about people's sense of urgency, sense of urgency, as I described when I was talking about, uh, the perception of downgrading, that's skyrocketing. And the, the pace of political change seems to be, you know, creeping along. Right? There is no, you know, one is a ballistic missile and the other is, uh, a London bus, right? It is not going to c, it is not going to catch that. It is not going to catch the problem. It's not going to catch the mood. And that's what it means, that, and that difference between what needs to be done and what is, what has the plausible potential to be done within the normal political system is the thing that drives the, the, the breakdown of the political system. Is the very definition of that kind of problem that I described at the beginning.

So David, if we accept, and I'm inclined, unfortunately, to accept your hypothesis that the conditions are optimal, what is, what, what is it? An event that sparks a civil war? Is it a series of events? Could it be like a clip going viral on social media? I mean, if we look back at last summer, where you had the horrific, the horrific atrocity in Southport, is it something like that?

Yeah. So the most common metaphor, uh, when talking about, employed when talking about this subject, is that of tinder and the spark. All right. Or sometimes of like a, a powder keg. Uh, and your question is like, what is the spark? But, and I, I'll try to, as best as one can, to answer what the spark is. But the important thing is not the spark. The important thing is the keg. The important thing is the tinder. Right? The, the, you know, sparks are not a problem if you are not in a room full of gunpowder. Uh, sparks are not a problem if you're not wearing, you know, plastic petrol-soaked, uh, you know, clothing. You get my line of reasoning. Mhm. And that's what I urge people to concentrate on is what are the policies? What are, what are the, what are the things that have contributed to the existence of all this tinder, all of that? Okay, go back to my iceberg metaphor. All that, like, frustrated political energy in the system. That's the, that's the real problem. And that didn't come overnight. That took a long time to build. And whether it was accidental or deliberate, the fact of the matter is there is a gigantic ball of political energy that is, uh, is building up. Okay. Now, the spark, the spark is just, just intrinsically unpredictable. If you think of the Arab Spring, lots of people in, uh, lots of people might, might have predicted that, uh, and many people did, that, you know, the Arab world was highly politically frustrated, you know, socially, you know, very fractured, lots of huge, lots of political economic problems that were kind of building up over a long term, but no one was going to predict that it, that the thing that would set it off was an Algerian, uh, fruit seller getting so frustrated with the local, basically licensing police, that he poured petrol on himself and set himself on fire in a market. And so, yeah, because you can't, you, you can't just, you just can't predict those, those low-grade effects. In prefacing your question, you talked about last summer. So, you know, I would think yes, another, another, uh, attack of that sort might be a, a target. People get, tend to get upset when, uh, when their children get slashed apart, you know, like if you, you want to make an enemy, behead someone's daughter, or attempt to, I mean, it's probably a pretty egregious example, but that's the literal reality. That is what that is what that is what hurt, what happened. It could be, uh, and I think the government's main fear is that now is, uh, it could be just the steady drip of increasingly vile revelations coming out of the gang inquiry. Um, which is, uh, as opposed to terrorism, very close in terms of people's perceived offensiveness. Not quite as bad as decapitating your child, but like still pretty offensive to one's person. Um, and on a much larger scale. That's the thing is that it's, whereas terrorism is a frankly a statistical blip in the national death register. Uh, the, uh, the, the scandal is is gigantic and has touched many, many, many, many, many people, and many of them still alive. Uh, although lives probably very basically permanently affected. So it might be just a kind of steady drip of increasingly vile revelations coming out, uh, of the gang inquiry. Um, or it might, might be something else that nobody's, nobody's predicted.

My suspicion, or and my feeling is that, sorry, I would say two further points on on this is increasingly everyone wants to fight, right? You know, is not just on the left or on the right, it's, you know, people are angry in all quarters. You saw that in Glastonbury. You're not going to get 5,000 people, you, you know, clapping like seals at someone screaming death to the IDF, um, if this is not a, a, a group of people who are pretty belligerent, right? That is that is an, that's just an expression of an underlying mood which I think is is, uh, inclined, uh, to fight. And the extremists on either, on either side know how to, know how to direct that energy. It's not a mystery how you take, uh, existing fractures in a society, like putting on a marble table, and and peel them apart. Maybe it hit a, you know, they hit a dance class, and then maybe a kindergarten next, or a maternity hospital, or, or something else, or, or something else we nobody's, nobody's thought of. But we know how the effect of this, and the extremists know how to do it, and the technology of doing it is not all that difficult. Go down to Tesco or go on Amazon, get yourself a big knife. Um, get yourself a panel van, drive down, uh, there are all kinds of, it's not difficult to do. It's more the, the will to do it rather than the technical ability, uh, that, technical, um, the strength or technical ability to to do it. Uh, and, uh, the second point I, I wish to make on on this with respect to, um, uh, the, um, the, the spark is, I think for me, the, the telling point is going to be when an, an, a validly native group that no one's heard about does something, um, and, and I think my, my, uh, feeling is that this in Britain, as in other countries, but particularly in Britain, uh, the, where it's first going to surface on the, on the "we want our country back" side, is going to be in a, in a pattern that looks a bit like a Latin American dirty war. Uh, so it, it's likely to be an attack, I think, a targeted attack on a noteworthy figure or a series of noteworthy figures in the judiciary, pro, possibly, or, uh, influencer, influencers of, of, uh, of some kind, uh, and you'll see a group that no one's heard about because they've recognized that, uh, actually, if you don't want to get caught, because the only thing that the British police really are looking at intensely is online behavior. Just don't blather about it on the internet, and the police will have, uh, no idea. So, I suspect that there are going to be plenty of sparks, uh, this summer and continuing on. Any one of which has the potential to set that tinder, uh, alight. But the really electrifying moment, the, the really kind of, "Oh, you're now in it" moment, is going to be when someone, probably, I'm going to guess, goes after a judge. Uh, and you can see already people, uh, they're, that's, you know, in terms of doxing and briefing on on who these, uh, uh, people are. That's, that's been happening over the last 18 months with increasing frequency.

I'm I'm really glad that you mentioned social media because that is something that we haven't spoken about, but that is social media, particularly Twitter, that provides more sparks than any other type, doesn't it, really? Yeah, there's, uh, I think that social media has, uh, we, we could, we do whole, you know, a series of, uh, uh, discussions around the effect of social media. Um, but I think the way in which social media, uh, both contributes to the fracturing of society as well as the, is, uh, significant. Right? So part of the reason why we have this, uh, factionation that I, uh, that I discussed actually relates to, um, technological developments which allow people to live in, uh, silos in a way that was harder to do in, in less, um, connected, uh, uh, times. The other thing is that social media does is it allows extremes to find each other. So there's this, um, you may have heard of the, the long tail effect. Mhm. Right. Pertinent idea usually in marketing, but basically it says like there's, there's, there are niche markets for things. Is like whatever, you know, um, polka dot socks or like whatever, you know, or, or very, you know, uh, maybe lots of people like polka dot socks would probably pick a better example, but the long tail basically says you, you've got these niche interests and that's in interesting to marketers in a connected world because now you can address these without a physical store because they, uh, because of the connected nature of things, you could, you can now provide, uh, a product to these people and, uh, despite the fact that they're distributed all over the place, in aggregate, they, they can market, uh, and it, so basically the weirdos, actually, I'm loading the term when I say weirdos, I just say like the extremes can find each other in ways that, uh, that, uh, hadn't been the case before, although this figure like, when it comes down to it, any still though the basic point is like, I, I think is that insurgency, which we might say is a form of civil war, is a social movement. And any social movement depends on having, uh, essentially, you have, uh, passive supporters, um, and social media is great for reaching your passive, passive supporters. So you, once you've got a kind of viable narrative which states a grievance, which indicates a conscious, a specific, the conscience community, I a particular grievance community, states a grievance, states a potential rectification of that grievance, and call for support. So now you begin to animate your group of, uh, of essentially passive supporters who weren't necessarily doing anything for you except, you know, maybe pressing like or just listening along, right? Uh, um, then you got your active supporters, a subset of that. Your active supporters might be, uh, helping to amplify or propagate your message or delivering you information. For example, if, if you're one of your active supporters happens to be a person who is in a gatekeeping role, that can be, uh, um, uh, very, uh, very important from the, from lots of points of view. But if you're trying to infiltrate an organization, for example, or simply you're just trying to generate an accurate intelligence picture of things, it's very helpful to have people who are active supporters in the system who can do stuff for you, but they're not literally going out and breaking heads for you, right? I mean, you, you may have a bunch of active supporters who are grandmothers, you know, old men, fat men, you know, whatever. You know, you, you basically, you, you don't need them for their physical muscle. You need them for their position. Then you need your adherents. Uh, your adherents are the, the guys who were, who were, and it's probably mostly guys. The adherents are those who are prepared to, to go to, really go beyond the law, to break stuff or to break people in various ways. And how many of those do you need? Uh, surprisingly few, depends on what you're, what you're trying to achieve, but, um, and what the techniques you, uh, apply. If you're trying to do it through street fighting, then you're probably going to need, uh, a fairly, you know, fairly substantial, a fairly substantial number. You know, if you're talking about the inter-war period in central Europe and street fighting is the name of the game, that's why the Nazis developed the brown shirts and all of the, you know, and all the, uh, right, because you need that kind of, that kind of physical muscle and you need it in fairly large numbers. Um, I don't think that's our, our climate is political climate or social climate is the same, and I don't expect that it is going to, that it's street fighting and rioting that is likely to be, uh, the operational technique, uh, in, in use.

To get to the point of your question, I think that the most likely, uh, uh, technique, or certainly the one that is most talked about within anti-status quo movements, and now, and this is a discussion that they've been talking about this for a long, long time. It's very well-established ideas. The idea that the cities themselves are both the locus of, um, the problem in a sense. So that it's the cities that are perceived as alien. Uh, the cities are where you find this, the where the elite live. Uh, uh, and, uh, so the, if the, the cities are perceived as essentially the locus of the problem, effectively a kind of occupied territory. Um, but the cities are, are intrinsically unstable. Um, city, the most, the most basic and functional definition of a city is a community which is unable to feed itself with its own, uh, resources. It has to draw them in from, from outside. So if you think of a city in that sense, then, uh, cities are very vulnerable to rejection by their hinterland, because the hinterland can, can cut them off. This has probably always, uh, been the case, but people in urban studies now for many years, going back at least 50 years, have been saying that there is something actually peculiar about the modern city, i.e., city of the last 100 years. Given its size and its complexity, that makes it even more like, much more vulnerable than it had been in the, even in the past, because the cities are not just pulling in food, they're pulling in water, they're pulling in energy, they're pulling in the, all of the goods and materials that effectively make a city work, make it function. Um, and, uh, moreover, you add on top of that, uh, dynamic, a social dimension, right? Which is that the cities exist in this kind of, uh, balancing act. We're not designed actually to live like, uh, uh, piled on top of each other, um, in this way, but we're able to do it because of various long-standing conventions and, uh, ways of handling the urban condition. But, but the basic point I'm trying to make here is that even under natural circumstances, the, the urban condition is a balancing act. And in the early part of the 21st century, given the size and the complexity of cities, both materially and socially, that balancing act is, is quite perilous and vulnerable to disruption. That, in fact, is the technical term for the technique I'm about to describe to describe, which is system disruption. Is an idea most written about, most capably by an American analyst named John Robb, runs a website called Global Guerrillas, very worthwhile, uh, looking at, uh, and wrote a book in the early 2000s called Brave New War, exploring this, uh, topic, not, it must be said, primarily in Western countries, but in elsewhere, but his logic is, is still very valid. So, system disruption as a technique focuses on the attack upon infrastructure, effectively, with the view to causing, um, um, cascading effects within that society, which, which then unbalance this already kind of fairly, uh, unbalanced system, causing it to descend into chaos. By chaos, what I mean for a London listener, or any British listener, think the 2011 London riots, right? If you were in London at the time, you'd basically, a week-long period where most normal people were afraid to go onto the streets. Um, uh, for, because on any given night, and actually to some degree also in the daytime, but especially at night, um, there were two to 3,000 guys on the street causing mayhem. Of those two to 3,000, maybe two to 300 were seriously violent people. Most were just, uh, opportunists, right? That completely overstretched, almost completely overstretched, rather, the, uh, ability of the government to, it took a week to shut this down. Mhm. That was at a point where the British police are stronger, were stronger than they are today, uh, and the kinds of, uh, the kind of, uh, chaos that I'm suggesting is going to occur when you switch off the gas and and electricity to, uh, London, uh, not just once, but every couple of weeks through a winter, you're going to see 25, 35,000 people on on the street. Um, and moreover, uh, a substantial proportion of these people now are actually, uh, young and just naturally, naturally angry and up for a fight. That then is going to cause all kinds, all kinds of effects. For one thing, perfectly obviously, it's going to make the place completely economically unviable. Okay.

Uh, before we head on over to questions from our audience, uh, I'm going to have one more go at disagreeing with you from a naive and positive and optimistic perspective because I come back to this Trump and Reform point. Okay, which is the, what I see with Trump's second term as, so far, we don't know how it's going to wrap up, but effectively he is addressing many, many of the concerns that people had. And sometimes, you know, almost finding out where actually the consensus in America is on some issues. For example, on illegal immigration, he kind of went too far in the perception of many Americans with like, just randomly turning up to workplaces and rounding people up. Uh, there is no appetite across American society for that. But they are nonetheless dealing with the problem of legal immigration pretty, pretty full on, right? Um, you saw after, prior to Brexit, there was a massive buildup of anti-immigration sentiment. The moment Brexit happened, it actually tailed off until people realized nothing changed, and then concerns about immigration rose again. So if you get a Farage Prime Minister and a Reform majority, and a significant majority, I mean, we had Ysef on the show a few weeks ago talking about the fact they would need a significant majority, and I agree with that. Let's say that happens, they are in a position, yes, the civil service will try and subvert, and yes, they'll, and the media will go ape, and all of that. But if they actually see that through, they close the border, uh, they deal with illegal immigration, they deal with the boats, they institute perfectly reasonable and rational policies on mass immigration such as, we want people to come, but they've got to be qualified, they've got to speak the language, they've got to do this, they've got to do that. I'm pretty persuaded that in that situation, the vast majority of people will just say, "Thank God, finally we've got a government that's trying to deal with these things. Look, things may not be exactly the way I wanted, but, you know, they're scrapping net zero, they're doing this, they're doing that. We, we kind of, we got what we voted for." And that sentiment that you're talking about building up will be channeled into that. And, you know, my big concern is how effectively they can deliver the things they're promising. That, that is a genuine concern, particularly on things like, uh, benefits and, and things like that. But overall, wouldn't you say that a democratically elected, very strong mandate, party of that nature would address many of the concerns that people inherently feel and therefore make people feel like their voice has been heard, the government does have legitimacy, and they are attempting to deliver some of the things that they want?

Well, I would say, I, I've been very gloomy for the last, uh, hour or 70 minutes or, or, or so. So, power to your bow. Um, I hope you're right. Why am I not right? That's what I'm asking you.

Okay. Uh, because I don't think, uh, well, for the reasons I've already suggested, I think they'll be, uh, I think that they won't be able to deliver. They won't be able, uh, to deliver. But, uh, for another reason, and that is, uh, one that is a bit hard to get one's head around, but it's, might call it the, the peril of the reformer. The peril of the reformer is best understood if you look at a figure like Mikhail Gorbachev. Mhm. Right. Who we all know, or actually it's quite a long time ago now, so maybe not everybody knows, but Mikhail Gorbachev was the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a great reformer, brought, not elected, but comes, comes to power, uh, with the intent to reform Soviet society, which had become both economically, uh, and socially, and just generally sclerotic and non-functioning thing. Uh, and what was his fate? The short answer is, the short answer is the country, uh, fell apart. He was removed by the August, the August coup, or in fact, uh, the August coup itself, uh, uh, failed, and he shortly, uh, came back into power, but the game was over at that point. The peril of the reformer is that you, um, uh, essentially you acknowledge the problem in a way. So you say, "Dear, dear Britain, dear citizen, yes, we're very sorry. We made this mistake." No, they made this mistake, and we're here to fix it. Uh, yes, this mistake was made by, by, by other people, by another prime minister, another immigration minister, other, whatever. These, these mistakes were made in, in our country. They are very severe. They are, in fact, so severe that we've arrived to do this quite radical thing. Uh, now people want change, and you can't change fast enough to satisfy them. And this too are the, the, can be a bit paradoxical, but the parallel of the reformer is that when you acknowledge and you begin to ch, uh, you, you begin to try to reform, that people's expectations again, uh, uh, rise more quickly than your ability to to deliver on them, um, which in the case of Gorbachev terminates, didn't quite terminate Gorbachev, but terminated, uh, his, his career as a political figure, if not as an, as an individual, uh, which in fact was also part of the kind of leitmotif of the lead-up to, uh, the Russian revolution, the first revolution of 1917, which occurs, which occurred, which have been building for a long time. You had the, the Russian state, you essentially acknowledging the problem, attempting to reform economically, economically up to the First World War. It was, uh, it was improving, arguably politically also. Um, but people's expectations, once acknowledged, often skyrocket. And again, you get to this problem of the inability of the political system to keep pace with the mood of the population.

Fundamentally, I think your argument is one that says the, the system has the ability to cure itself still. There is, there, there is still this potential in this, in this. It depends on what you mean by the system, because I would regard both Trump and Farage and Reform as not part of their league, even though they are the people at the top are always part, is inevitable, right? But the movement behind them is fundamentally an anti-elite movement, and therefore they have the legitimacy as being seen as the outsider coming in to fix a problem created by that elite over there, who are wrong and evil and bad.

Okay. Uh, we, I guess we'll see. That's my. No, I, I, I understand it, and, uh, uh, and I, I hope you're correct. So do I. Um, yeah, the, the things, by the way, I think it's important to restate what we said at the beginning, which is, I know that in describing many of the terrible potential outcomes, there was no part of you that wishes any of that to manifest and for that to happen. I live in this country. I have young, I have young adult children trying to think, you know, to make their way, uh, in the world. This is, this is, and it feels pretty bad to hand over the proverbial sandwich. Um, so I'm not calling, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not calling for it. I'm just trying to be realistic about what is there. Um, and explain to people the, explain to people, many of whom are in fact, uh, listening now and saying, "I've been thinking this for ages." Well, duh. Like, who is this guy? Who is this professor telling me stuff that, you know, I've known, uh, for ages? And I, I do wish to address those people and say, "No, yeah, you're, you're, you, you're right. I, I acknowledge that you, you saw it. You're not crazy." Amongst others, I, I wish to, uh, address, however, are people, many people, many no doubt cleverer than myself, who, who, who might, um, conceive of, uh, other ways out, other avenues to the future besides the one that, that, that I've, uh, painted. This might undoubtedly is a limitation of my point, my point of view. I'm a war studies professor, after all. I probably, you know, I, I probably do have a kind of baseline tendency to the war, to the, to the, uh, the, the conflictual. So, I really do hope that we, uh, we, uh, avoid this. In all honesty, my, and in the best conscience, I can't claim that there is very obvious potential for it.

I understand the reason I'm disagreeing with you is twofold. Number one is, I, I believe in probabilities of things rather than inevitable outcomes. Uh, and I'm on record as saying I think on the current trajectory, we're heading in the direction that you describe. There's no question about that. And that's why I think millions of people now are aware of the severity of the situation. Um, but for the reasons I think that I don't need to restate, I've already outlined, I think there's also the possibility that that energy can be rightly channeled through the democratic process into a vehicle that is genuinely perceived as being anti the current system and willing to attempt to fix it. Uh, and I think that's a far preferable outcome, and that's the one that certainly I would push for, and I'm sure you would too.

Absolutely. I think every, literally, I mean, there's a lot riding on that hypothesis. Yeah. I think it's very important. We're going to head on over to Substack in a second, but before we do, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Could you make it positive, D?

I, uh, you know, I think I can. Uh, I think that the, what we're not talking about, uh, or I, I haven't been talking about, and therefore this, this conversation with me has not been about, what's the, what, what happens after? What kind of country do we want to be? There is, you know, yes, I, I do believe we are headed into a period of really serious turmoil that will be painful. Um, and maybe that's necessary. In fact, uh, but it's not going to last forever. And what kind of country do we want to be, uh, afterwards? There are a range of, uh, uh, potentials for this. Many of them are in fact rather, rather unpleasant, but not all of them. And I think that some time spent, uh, now thinking seriously, in a way that probably the country hasn't really done very well since 1945, uh, if not a little bit earlier, about what kind of country it wants to be, would be quite useful, uh, to talk about. At least then we could put a positive future on the end of this, um, period of disruption of normal service, to, uh, euphemize. Um, so I'd like to talk about that. I think, or I'd like to hear other people, uh, talk about that and contribute to such a conversation.

David, thank you for coming on the show. If you want to follow the conversation, head over to our Substack. Looking at Europe as a whole, can Professor Bets comment comment on which nations seem particularly susceptible to civil war in the next decades? Am I right to think France is in an even worse position than the UK?

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