LAST MONTH, I went to the UnHerd Club, in central London, to be told that we can expect at least 23,000 deaths a year in the coming conflict between groups based in the Islamist cities and those whose base is in the white rural areas. Dr David Betz, an (American) professor in the War Studies department at King’s College, London, believes that civil war in this country is now inevitable, even if we haven’t taken this on board. This prediction has been around for a while, though last month was the first time that I heard him put a figure on the carnage that he expects. He was — he explained — extrapolating from the worst years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
I am a little troubled by the thought that he might be right, and rather more troubled by the smugness of his audience at UnHerd, who find it exciting to half-believe him. They are window-shopping for catastrophes, with the added bonus of knowing that theirs is a very exclusive shop.
Professor Betz does have an argument, and parts of it seem to me irrefutable. The three factors that he identified as leading up to civil strife in any country studied were ethnic replacement, the State’s loss of legitimacy, and “polar factionalism”. That’s not the order that he put them in. No one who is Reform UK-adjacent wants to hear that racist motives are uppermost on their agenda, but, without the fury supplied by ethnic resentment, the other motives would be insufficient for the kind of widespread slaughter that he foresees.
His first cause was “polar factionalism”, the condition in which people form and hold their opinions solely out of tribal loyalty. I would entirely have agreed when I worked on The Guardian and saw how progressive thought worked, or when I argued with Brexiteers and saw how nationalism shuts down the brain; but now I think that social context — factionalism — is a vital feature of the way in which we reason and form opinions.
Looked at another way, even patriotism is a form of polar factionalism: we do and believe certain things simply because that’s part of our nationality. This is destructive between nations, as European history proves, but constructive within them, in the literal sense of nation-building.
WHAT has happened to move that kind of loyalty down a level, so that we no longer feel part of our nationality but part of some subculture? When did this kind of loyalty become toxic?
Here, I suspect the internet and the sheer profusion of stuff to read must take some of the blame. It is so much easier not to read and engage with the people with whom you disagree, while those who entertain you drift further and further in the directions that their audiences pull them.
This leads us on to his third cause, which is the loss of faith and trust in the political process, which he calls legitimacy. He blamed Remainers for obstructing the will of the people. As a Remainer, I naturally blame the dishonesty of the elite Brexiteers and the stupidity of the masses. Either way, this shows that legitimacy itself is a matter of tribal loyalty or groupthink. It’s also a very productive one, without which society cannot function. Professor Betz is obviously right that it has plummeted in the past 50 years in Britain and elsewhere in the West.
This is where mass immigration comes in — the suspicion that we are sharing the country with people who are cheating us because they don’t play by the same rules, even when these rules are unwritten. That dismaying knowledge can arise in all sorts of contexts, as it did in the Brexit referendum. It is how my parents felt about Margaret Thatcher and the spivs that she encouraged — and spiv is a word that exactly captures the defalcation from the social contract. It is also the rage that Partygate roused. It is one of the great motors of class warfare, in both directions. But, on the Right in Britain today, it is inextricably bound up with racism, as it is in Trump’s America. And, in the online Right and Left, all racial questions are seen through an American prism.
You need only look at the comments underneath YouTube recordings of Professor Betz’s talks, or a class photograph tweeted out by the head teacher and educationist Katharine Birbalsingh, to glimpse a seething abyss of racist fury. The fact that few people will say such things offline and under their real names is one thing that gives me hope; another is that there are very few guns in private hands in this country.
