The UK is heading towards civil war, and nobody knows how to stop it. Professor David Betts and Tim Stanley discuss the possibility of civil war in the UK, and why the state is failing to deal with it.
00:01:02.000And if we get a lot of engagement on social media, do let us know.
00:01:07.000Let me know if you're in contact with me on Getter.
00:01:09.000Let Grace know if you're in contact with her.
00:01:11.000If we get a lot of engagement, perhaps we'll continue the theme.
00:01:15.000What we're looking at is something that Steve Bannon referred to earlier on in the week, which was Colonel Kemp, a UK retired colonel, had mentioned that the UK was heading towards civil war.
00:01:32.000And we're very honoured to have on the show today, Professor David Betts.
00:01:38.000This guy is really, I think, one of the most original thinkers in the UK, an academic.
00:01:43.000And he's really the guy who first started putting some serious thought into the possibilities of a total fracture in UK society.
00:01:55.000What I hope to do is explore this theme going forward over the next few weeks and have an opportunity for in-depth conversation with some of the names in the news who are thinking about this.
00:02:11.000Because obviously it has ramifications right across the political spectrum.
00:02:16.000As I say, we're very honoured that Professor Betts is going to be coming on the show.
00:02:21.000First, however, I'd like to bring on Tim Stanley, who's a great journalist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote about this a couple of months ago.
00:02:31.000All of the links were put out on our Getter channels.
00:02:35.000So we're referring to those, obviously, on Rumble as well when I put out the video.
00:02:47.000You obviously referred to David Betts as well in your piece.
00:02:50.000There's the headline, Britain is lurching towards civil war and nobody knows how to stop it.
00:02:56.000Before we hear from the man himself, just give me, if you would, a quick opener on this theme.
00:03:02.000What first attracted you to this rather shocking thesis that the UK is not a very stable society right now and could indeed head towards civil war?
00:03:18.000It's based upon a general feeling of tension in British society.
00:03:22.000When we talk about civil war, it's important to define that.
00:03:25.000We're not talking like the United States civil war, big army north versus south.
00:03:29.000We're talking about the potential for social strife, anarchy or civil insurgency.
00:03:34.000And one might argue that we've had that in the past.
00:03:37.000We've had terror campaigns like the IRA.
00:03:39.000And one might argue that we're going through it right now.
00:03:42.000Last year, we had very significant urban riots.
00:03:45.000This year, we've had a series of protests outside what are called migrant hotels.
00:03:49.000And what it's rooted in is a decline in the competence of the state and in trust in the state, which has been made much worse by the policy of mass migration, which leads to a competition over resources and a growing sense of cultural fragmentation.
00:04:05.000And because many people perceive that mass migration is something they didn't vote for, that it was a conspiracy against them, they feel locked out of ordinary democratic processes.
00:04:14.000So we're seeing a rise in petty vandalism.
00:04:18.000We're seeing a rise in disrespect towards the police, a rise in disengagement from politics and a rise in rioting.
00:04:24.000And when that happens, the state always pushes back.
00:04:27.000When the state pushes back, that delegitimizes it further.
00:04:31.000So you'll know that after last year's riots, a great number of people were locked up for a very, very long time.
00:04:36.000And that sends the message that the state is picking a side in a culture war.
00:04:48.000So the point is, is that we are stuck in this loop of growing tension, that we are not saying – I don't want to put words into Professor Betts' mouth.
00:04:57.000He's a very interesting man, a proper academic.
00:05:01.000We are not saying that we are lurching towards a north-south cavalier round-haired war.
00:05:07.000What we're talking about is fraying social relationships, decaying trust in the state, and a rumbling low-level insurgency, which will result either in disorder or, I think equally as worrying, an authoritarian turn by the government.
00:05:25.000I think for the first time in my life, it is conceivable that the British might vote for a party that is openly racist.
00:05:32.000And that is a tragic outcome of mass migration.
00:05:58.000You've made the suggestion that the UK is starting to resemble the term failed state, which is something that is normally applied to overseas foreign countries.
00:06:13.000Would you just give a quick word on that and say what things, following from what Tim himself was saying as an analysis on your work, in your own words, what would you point to to justify that conclusion?
00:06:29.000So my point is that Britain today exhibits all the standard warning signals of a country which is vulnerable to the outbreak of civil war.
00:06:44.000There are fundamentally three that are important.
00:06:51.000They've been building for a long time.
00:06:53.000The first is the factionalization of the society, which is increasingly of a type which I call, which is known in the literature as polar factionalization, where people are not disagreeing on issues per se.
00:07:08.000They're essentially differing in accordance with what they think is the consensus view of their tribe.
00:07:15.000And this is a form of factionalism which only occurs when people are beginning to feel unsafe.
00:07:21.000It's a reflection of a perception of insecurity in society that makes people wish to look to their tribe for security.
00:07:28.000The second factor is a perception on the part of a formerly dominant majority that they are losing their status in society, that they are trending ultimately to a minority status in their own society.
00:07:45.000And that tends to be a very, that is a very significant predictor of civil conflict.
00:07:52.000And that basically is the situation throughout much of the Western world, particularly in Western Europe and increasingly so in the UK.
00:08:04.000The third factor is essentially a loss of faith in the functioning of the normal legitimate system.
00:08:12.000People lose people when people lose faith in the ability to solve collective action problems through the not through normal political means.
00:08:21.000They then seek alternate means of achieving change.
00:08:25.000Those alternate means can vary in type, but it is very likely in my view that that will take the shape of some sort of civil conflict in the UK.
00:08:42.000On top of those factors, we need to be, there are some more proximate issues.
00:08:48.000These would include the looming, essentially the longstanding expectation gap amongst, particularly amongst youth who have poorer economic prospects, lower levels of security.
00:09:05.000In fact, possibly even diminishing expectations of lifespan and health and so on in society, less opportunities to own homes, procreate and so on.
00:09:20.000There's an expectation gap that derives from structural economic problems in society that have been building for a long time that are likely to come to a crunch point here in the UK, probably in the next six months.
00:09:32.000Given, I'm not an economist, but I think that's a fairly reasonable view, certainly widely expressed economic viewpoint.
00:09:43.000And another proximate factor hinted at by Tim Stanley there is the lack of a unified and competent elite in the UK.
00:09:55.000The government is simply not terribly competent.
00:10:04.000They are reacting in a highly capricious manner in as essentially as frightened people do when they when they themselves are fearful of the monster that they've created and they can see arising.
00:10:20.000And so you have a situation now where the elite is already beginning to is not competent, but is also beginning to fracture.
00:10:33.000So you're seeing defections from the elite across the across the political spectrum, which results, for instance, in the in the rise of.
00:10:47.000Anti status quo parties, a multitude of them now.
00:10:51.000So these combination this these combination of factors, I would just stress, are long term.
00:10:57.000They've been building for a long while, but they're nearly they're really now coming to the boiling point.
00:11:02.000And we are seeing therefore and we're seeing that they are coming to a boiling point in the headlines in a range of headlines today, some of which Tim had already hinted at.
00:11:17.000I'll give way to Tim in just a moment, but I want to respond to one of the many things that you mentioned.
00:11:26.000Really, we could spend all day picking the chapter headings that you that you listed because they're certainly serious enough to deserve that.
00:11:34.000But this idea that a formerly dominant social majority fearing that it's in danger of losing that dominance.
00:11:43.000There's a term, a concept in geopolitics, which Steve Bannon talks about all the time on the show, the Thucydides trap, which is really applied to regional hegemons.
00:11:55.000And the theory is this, that when you have a rising power and a declining power, there's the friction of that normally creates war as the declining power tries to maintain its dominance.
00:12:10.000I don't want to put words into your mouth, which is why I'm going to ask you the question.
00:12:15.000Would it be an inauthentic interpretation of what you were saying to suggest that there is a similar sort of dynamic or there may be a similar sort of dynamic taking place within a nation itself?
00:12:30.000This isn't to regional hegemons, but perhaps in the geopolitical sense, but perhaps cultural hegemons as a historic predominant force in the UK wanes and is overtaken within the same territory of the UK by another force that might also lead to tension and war.
00:12:51.000Would that be an authentic way of synthesizing what you were saying?
00:13:01.000I have no problems with putting it that way.
00:13:06.000I mean, I don't tend to employ the Thucydides trap in my own work.
00:13:14.000It's usually, as you point out, it's usually used in the context of international relations rather than with the politics that are internal to a particular nation.
00:13:28.000But the phenomenon you describe, I think, is or the idea is perfectly portable into the context of a domestic situation.
00:13:39.000And in fact is, you know, so that's that's perfectly reasonable.
00:13:44.000What what you have is a situation where a group fears that it is losing control and that and moreover, they fear that they are doing so imminently, which powers a certain sense of urgency to act while they have the wherewithal to do so.
00:14:04.000That ultimately is, I think, a reasonable way of paraphrasing the Thucydides trap.
00:14:11.300And it's also essentially the narrative that surrounds the what popularly is referred to as the great replacement or replacement theory or, to be honest, often is described as conspiracy as a way of kind of assuming that's about trying to explain it away.
00:14:34.300But within the civil wars literature, it's it's referred to by the term downgrading, which is effectively an academic way of of of explaining the same concept, the same words applied essentially to the same phenomenon.
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00:16:52.520Tim Stanley, you were one of the, I think, the most influential and important UK journalists a few months ago to pick up on what Professor Betts was saying.
00:17:06.060What is your response there to what he's just outlined on the war room?
00:17:09.780Well, to go back to what he was talking about, the fear of replacement, the fear of a loss of power. At the heart of this, what we're trying to get to here is a recent report that suggested that within 40 years, white Britons would be a minority within the UK.
00:17:29.860Now, it's important to stress that that demographic change and those figures have been challenged by people.
00:17:35.900There are some who would disagree with that. But when we talk about state failure in the case of Africa, we're very used to and comfortable with talking about tribal competition, competition between ethnic groups and resources.
00:17:48.120We take it for granted that that goes on in Africa, that it's par for the course.
00:17:52.300When we talk about it in terms of Britain, we suddenly pretend it doesn't happen.
00:17:56.420But we're starting to see signs of it taking place, be it people voting along ethnic lines.
00:18:04.800So we now have a grouping within parliament of MPs who are elected on the basis of the Gaza issue.
00:18:10.700And there's no escaping that much of their constituent support is Muslim.
00:18:16.300So you see that. You see rioting in response to crime.
00:18:23.160You see recent protests against migrant hotels.
00:18:27.860And really, illegal migration is, if you like, the sharp end of the ethnic multicultural debate, because that's the bit on which we can all agree it shouldn't be happening.
00:18:37.640The conversation about legal mass migration is more complicated, because we definitely need migrants to provide services, etc.
00:18:45.860And again, we don't want to sound racist. We don't want to be racist. It's unchristian to be racist.
00:18:51.080But when it comes to illegal migration, we can legitimately say that shouldn't be happening anyway.
00:18:57.040And in that case, we have the phenomenon of the state housing large numbers of very often young men in towns that haven't seen populations like that before,
00:19:10.440where some of those young men are accused of crimes against women.
00:19:24.240I grew up in a country where we liked to say, I don't see race.
00:19:27.820But mass migration has now reached a point whereby you can't ignore it anymore, because it is changing the nature of the society and the politics.
00:19:36.080And as Professor Betts said, one problem is we do not have an elite that is imaginative enough to manage this change and to reassure people,
00:19:45.620or to take the steps perhaps to correct it.
00:19:48.640And I suspect that that elite will at some point in the near future be swept away by a new elite who are willing to take much tougher steps to correct it.
00:19:57.820That's one thing that really worries me.
00:19:59.820When I wrote my piece saying I suspect there will be a civil war, left-wing people who read it accused me of wanting to start one.
00:20:06.880Right-wing people who read it accused me of wanting to surrender.
00:20:09.220Because I must emphasise I am perhaps more concerned by the inevitable eventual far-right backlash than I am by this process of social change and the disturbances it's bringing.
00:20:23.240Tim, it's absolutely clear reading your article that you're not advocating for fascism.
00:20:28.820But at the end of your article, you make it clear that that is the – no, you're absolutely clear that you're not doing that.
00:20:33.700But the pained tone of what you're writing is that unless these problems are dealt with – and you mentioned the Muslim phenomenon and the lack of controlling of immigration as two principal causes of the social tensions right now.
00:20:52.240Unless something is done to tackle that, that is where we are going to end up in the moment.
00:20:58.720And thanks for Denver for pushing that article back up on the screen.
00:21:03.440I do want everybody to go and read that article.
00:21:06.260And also to listen to the original podcast with Louise Perry and Professor David Betts when for an hour and a half he really dives into these themes.
00:21:21.200Going back to Professor Betts, there was something else that you said.
00:21:26.100Sadly, given the time constraints, we can't go into everything I had wanted to do.
00:21:30.780But there was something else that you mentioned.
00:21:34.180And I just want to have a quick – in the closing five minutes of this segment, I want to ask you.
00:21:39.460You mentioned that when the government is talking about social conflict and the possibility of great tension socially, it's casting, if you will, the threat, the fear externally towards Russia.
00:22:00.780But obviously, as your arguments make clear, as Tim Stanley's analysis of what you're saying makes clear, really the tensions are homegrown and domestic to the UK.
00:22:11.720Would you mind just, in your own words, say a little bit about your reaction of the – I don't want to use the word because you haven't used the word of Russophobia – but the idea of casting this external threat into a place where it really isn't appropriate to do so.
00:22:32.760Give me a few words if you wouldn't mind on that, please.
00:22:35.640Well, I think what you're alluding to is the possibility that what the UK government and other European governments are now doing
00:22:47.200is resorting to time-honoured political gambit, which is presenting the public with an external – when governments perceive there to be a significant domestic threat to their – the security
00:23:10.960of the regime of the regime to kind of – when there is a significant domestic turmoil, it can be very helpful to call on the nation to unify.
00:23:26.380And in that case, having an external threat, an outgroup on which to concentrate people's attention can have a unifying effect.
00:23:37.980This is a very time-honoured political technique.
00:23:42.740It's normally referred to as the short victorious war theory, which dates back to the early 19th century when a czarist advisor suggested to the czar that a short victorious war with Japan
00:24:00.680would be very useful in terms of quelling, building domestic turmoil within the Russian polity.
00:24:10.520So one of the explanations, in other words, for the Russo-Japanese War is essentially a reaction on the part of the Russian authorities to their perception of the looming danger of civil conflict,
00:24:29.560which was a valid and appropriate concern on their part.
00:24:34.500That's where the term comes from, but it's a time-honoured technique.
00:24:39.100I don't sit in cabinet, so I can't say that they're doing that.
00:24:41.600But it's very logical, very logical, plausibly, that a government that is under significant domestic pressure uses external threat to deflect.
00:24:58.120That is undoubtedly what happened in the early days of the Russo-Ukraine War with Boris Johnson's intervention in that conflict,
00:25:06.440which occurred at a time of his maximum domestic political trouble.
00:25:13.980So that's, I'll admit, that's a matter of speculation on my part.
00:25:20.220As I said, I'm not sitting in cabinet, but I'd be very surprised if astute political operators in the UK were not aware of this time-honoured political technique
00:25:30.680and using it very adroitly, it must be said.
00:25:35.740I mean, arguably, you could suggest that nations around the world use this, the short victorious war device to lock us all down during COVID.
00:25:49.660Given that, no doubt, there will be a similar infringement on our personal liberties.
00:25:55.320I would hope that the government would correctly identify external threats to social well-being in the UK.
00:26:04.480And it would seem to me to be somewhat perverse.
00:26:09.260It's not just the present government, right?
00:26:11.560It's a succession of British governments that they've allowed this threat to social stability to arise.
00:26:22.100And now they're suggesting elsewhere to look elsewhere for the blame.
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