A top academic and government advisor warns that the UK will experience a civil war within the next five years caused by the “destruction of legitimacy” brought about by the government’s failure to secure the border.
Professor David Betz made the comments during a podcast appearance with journalist and author Louise Perry.
Betz teaches at Kings College London and has advised or worked with the UK MOD and GCHQ as well as being a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
The professor, who describes himself as a “classic member of the establishment,” told Perry that British society is now “explosively configured” to suffer mass unrest.
He said the fallout began with the fracture of the social contract after the political establishment in the UK tried to subvert the Brexit vote.
Subsequent years have brought about a “destruction of legitimacy” as a result of successive governments’ open border policy and their inability to protect children from grooming gangs, in addition to a two-tier justice system presided over by a highly-politicised judiciary.
“If you want to create domestic turmoil in a society, then what the British government has been doing is almost textbook exactly what you would do,” said the professor.
Betz said that the situation is now “too far gone” and that a national eruption which will outstrip last summer’s riots is likely to happen within half a decade.
Writing on his Substack, Paul Embery outlined some of the other arguments Betz made during the podcast that led the professor to make his fateful prediction.
Betz contends that we now live in a deeply fractured nation and one that has much less connection to those aspects of its history which previously made it content and well governed. The nefarious activities of certain individuals and groups serve to exacerbate and magnify our divisions.
So, can a society in which such realities are playing out be said to be destined for civil war? Well, here comes the interesting bit. Betz explains that highly-heterogenous societies (those comprised of many different social, cultural and ethnic groups) in which there is no single dominant cohort are not especially prone to civil war. That is because no group has enough power or status to co-ordinate a widespread revolt. Similarly, highly-homogenous, or ‘unfactionated’, societies are not particularly vulnerable on account of the fact that it is generally easy to arrive at consensus positions. The danger area, Betz asserts, is in the middle – societies that are becoming more heterogenous and in which a previously dominant social majority fears that it is losing its place. In such societies, a nativist sentiment manifests in a narrative of what Betz calls ‘downgrading’ and ‘displacement’ – the most powerful causes of civil conflict. Throw in long-term structural economic decline and the apparent inability of the government to offer ‘bread and circuses’, and the sense of dispossession deepens.
He also addressed the phenomenon of ‘asymmetric multiculturalism’ in which ‘in-group preference, ethnic pride, and group solidarity – notably in voting – are acceptable for all groups except whites, for whom such things are considered to represent supremacist attitudes that are anathematic to social order’. This ‘provides an argument for revolt on the part of the white majority (or large minority) that is rooted in stirring language of justice’.
On the surface, the United Kingdom would seem like the least likely country to be susceptible to mass civil disorder, but thanks to years of societal malaise and mass immigration, it unfortunately feels like we’re on the brink of experiencing just that.
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