Consciousness of Sheep
Related Articles
When Elon Musk tweeted that civil war in the UK was inevitable, he was roundly mocked. It simply couldn’t happen here, the political class assured us… prime minister Starmer reportedly saying that “there was ‘no justification’ for Mr Musk’s comments,” and that “my focus is on ensuring our communities are safe. That is my sole focus.” The problem, of course, being that the political class’s apparent failure to protect majority white communities – as evidenced by the Southport stabbings, the earlier Manchester Arena bombings and the ongoing failure to address the child SA gangs – is creating the kind of division which has resulted in civil war around the world.
The difficulty with raising the possibility of civil conflict in the UK, concerns our understanding of the term “civil war.” Just as everyone’s go-to for political extremism is the failed Austrian painter, so everyone’s go-to for civil war is the American 1861-65 conflict (which is arguably also the first industrialised war). A few in the UK – those whose knowledge of history extends beyond the Second World War and the Tudors – might also think of the English Civil War 1641-51 or – less likely – the prolonged Wars of the Roses, 1455-87. History nerds might also mention the conflict between the armies of Stephen of Blois and Matilda of Boulogne 1135-54 (back in the days when the British were oppressed by the French – surely a case for reparations could be made?). In short, not only could civil war occur in Britain, but it has also done several times in our bloody past. Nevertheless, the image of civil war – of rival armies fighting what looks like a conventional war, but over domestic territories – is highly improbable in a developed economy like the UK’s.
There was though, a more recent civil conflict in the UK which is much easier to imagine could be repeated. That was the so-called “troubles” between protestant-loyalist and catholic-republican paramilitary groups, beginning in Northern Ireland, but spilling over across the UK… particularly following the “Bloody Sunday” killing of civilians by the British peacekeeping (sic) force (30 January 1972). At no point in the conflict – which resulted in the deaths of some 3,600 people, almost took out the Thatcher government, and blew out the windows in Downing Street – did rival armies square up to one another on a battlefield. Rather, the conflict involved a combination of assassinations, skirmishes with the British army and police, and most notably random bombings of civilians.
As Bill Kissane at the London School of Economics points out:
“By saying ‘civil war is inevitable’ in Britain Elon Musk is stirring the pot. But this social media tycoon has not been the only one to bring warnings of civil war to western democracies. Journalists, soldiers, and political scientists have done the same. Their intentions are pure: none can be accused of using disinformation to fan the flames of racial violence. Their interventions raise questions about the supposed immunity of western democracies to civil war, about a form of conflict that has occurred throughout human history…
“Since civil war suggests an all-out conflict, it is hard to see how the mob violence and racial intimidation on British streets will escalate into something of this sort. Violence and polarization are not sufficient conditions for civil war. Variables such as state strength, political legitimacy, and territoriality also matter.”
These broader issues were raised by Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London David Betz in a recent podcast, and in an article for Military Strategy magazine, where he argues that most of the precursors for civil war are present in the UK in 2025. These include declining prosperity and a loss of state legitimacy, together with a form of factionalism in which a former majority believes itself to be deliberately discriminated against:
“In my view, there is no good reason to fault the main thrust of extant theory on civil war causation as described above. The question, rather, is whether the assumption of the conditions which have traditionally placed Western nations outside the frame of analysis of people concerned with large-scale and persistent eruptions of violent civil discord are still valid.
“The evidence strongly suggests that they are not. Indeed, as far back as the end of the Cold War some perceived that the culture which ‘won’ that conflict was itself beginning to fragment and degenerate…”
According to Betz, the riots which followed the Starmer government’s mishandling of the Southport stabbings are less likely to accelerate into open urban violence, but will, instead, result in growing attacks on infrastructure – the widely supported (by a displaced London white working class) “blade runner” destruction of ULEZ cameras cited as an early manifestation. A repeat of the trucker-farmer blockades of September 2000 could also occur and would be more damaging in 2025 than they were then because of the closure of refineries and port facilities. More worryingly, Betz warns that the location of most of the UK’s critical infrastructure is in the public domain, and that the British state lacks the resources to protect even a fraction of it.
Anyone with a grasp of real events in Germany in the early 1930s, rather than the cartoon version living in the heads of neoliberal leftists, will understand the extreme danger resulting from dismissing working class concerns as mere manifestations of a mythical “far right” – eventually the term loses its potency… and if everyone is a fascist then who cares? But this, of course, is precisely the way in which the Starmer administration has chosen to avoid addressing the growing concerns of the working-class majority. As in 1930s Germany, the danger is that the ongoing loss of prosperity, coupled to growing disenchantment with neoliberal “democracy,” will result in a wide embrace of any charismatic authoritarian who comes to the fore (in this respect, by the way, Trump and Farage are the regime’s safety valves rather than its executioners – their purpose – supported by a lot of corporate funding – seems to be to save the regime from itself rather than to bring about the revolution desired by the mass of their followers).
For Betz, the political danger in the UK at this point is that the British state is neither fish nor fowl:
“The literature on civil wars is united on two points. Firstly, they are not a concern of states that are rich and, secondly, nations which possess governmental stability are largely free of the phenomenon. There are degrees of equivocation on how much regime type matters, though most agree that securely-perceived-to-be-legitimate democracies and strong autocracies are stable. In the former, people do not rebel because they trust the political system works justly overall. In the latter, they do not because authorities identify and punish dissenters before they have a chance.”
In this, the UK is in the dangerous middle ground. While the boomers may still remember the high-trust society which emerged from the ashes of World War Two, Gen Z are having to cope in an extremely low-trust society in which few people know their neighbours, where narcissism has become the main focus of most people’s lives, and where almost anything is permissible in pursuit of individualism. For the state, this shift is most pronounced as a shift away from a society which largely polices itself, to one in which ever more layers of state surveillance and coercion have to be added – at an ever-higher cost in taxes and broken services – just to keep the lid on. Despite this drift to authoritarianism, the state has lost the trust of a majority of the population, but its rulers refuse to go full-dictatorship and use Stasi and paramilitary forms of policing to quell civil unrest before it has a chance to normalise.
So how might a British civil war begin? Mark Walsh, a trauma specialist who has worked in civil conflict zones around the world, offers a chillingly realistic scenario which he refers to as “Bloody Salisbury.” The scenario begins with another mass murder of children by a Muslim migrant. As happened in Southport, the Starmer administration attempt to hide the perpetrator’s background. The result is a mass protest which brings the town to a standstill, and which risks spreading to urban districts across Britain. To pre-empt this, Starmer orders the police to break up the protests, using force if necessary. But in response, the Chief Constable complains that he lacks the manpower to do so, and requests military support (Salisbury being close to several big army bases).
It is not clear who fired the shot, although the army would be widely blamed, even though several armed police units were in the area. However, someone opened fire – perhaps only intending to fire over the heads of the protestors – killing three people, one of which was a child.
The government immediately attempts to duck responsibility, claiming that they had never sanctioned the use of guns. But only the metropolitan liberal minority is buying it. For the mass of the population, it is just another example of the state’s war against them. And inevitably, further protests break out in working class districts throughout Britain’s towns and cities. And just as inevitably, minority groups – particularly Muslims, and especially the small jihadi minority among them – are going to defend themselves against the minority of the native population who think setting fire to migrant hotels is acceptable.
The point is – and most likely Betz is only saying publicly what security advisors have been telling government ministers in private – that these forms of violence can ramp up quite rapidly. And that increased violence will oblige the peaceful majority to take sides and thus enable yet more violence. In practice, this means the working class majority being driven into the arms of whatever genuine fascist group emerges, immigrant minorities having to side with those terrorist groups who claim to defend them, and – most worryingly – the metropolitan professional-managerial class siding with an increasingly weak and discredited state.
Notice too, that much of the discussion of possible civil conflict is taken up with Britain’s political crisis. Little thought has been given to the economic unravelling which has gathered pace over the past five years. A repeat – on a bigger scale – of the 2008 crash seems inevitable. Indeed, with the Trump administration being backed by accelerationists like Peter Thiel (people who believe economic and social collapse is inevitable and so believe the best course of action is to accelerate the collapse to clear the way for some kind of revival) it seems likely that a massive reset of the western economic system will occur sooner or later… most likely by a massive round of government debt defaults which wipe out a large part of the paper “wealth” from the current system.
If this occurs – and again, the Trump administration seem to be accelerating it – the so-called “soft power” that western states have used to pacify their populations – NGOs, neoliberal media, technocratic labour and equalities laws, etc. – will no longer be affordable. At the same time, real public services and benefits – universal health care, unemployment and disability payments, old age pensions, social care, etc. – will have to be severely curtailed, further undermining what remains of state legitimacy.
In the UK, this is already happening under a Labour (in name only) administration whose main achievements since being elected nine months ago have been to maintain child poverty, remove winter heating support from the poorest pensioners, imposing prohibitive taxes on employment, and kicking disabled people out of their wheelchairs in the insane belief that this will cause them to walk again. With hiring falling and unemployment rising, the upcoming welfare cuts threaten to drive millions more into the arms of parties outside the neoliberal “Overton window” (which, given the idiocy of the neoliberal left, means national conservatives at best, and third positionists at worst).
Simply mouthing the words “it couldn’t happen here,” is the very worse form of denial at this point. But it appears the neoliberal parties and their supporters prefer this to changing course. It is the mentality of someone sawing through the branch they are sitting on. Rather like the Hollywood luvvies who voted to dispense with vegetation management, to cut fire fighters’ funding, and to divert water elsewhere, despite knowing there was an ongoing fire hazard, Britain’s elite class has readily embraced social and economic policies which could only work in a high-wealth/high-energy economy. But even as the wealth and energy retreated to a handful of affluent, gated suburbs adjacent to the centres of government and the top-tier universities, increasingly extreme versions of these policies have been imposed. But, most likely sooner rather than later, the branch is going to break… and as Betz points out, those metropolitan suburbs are the very worst places to be when TSHTF. There is still time for the elites to change course… but not as much as you might imagine!
As you made it to the end…
you might consider supporting The Consciousness of Sheep. There are seven ways in which you could help me continue my work. First – and easiest by far – please share and like this article on social media. Second follow my page on Facebook. Third follow my channel on YouTube. Fourth, sign up for my monthly e-mail digest to ensure you do not miss my posts, and to stay up to date with news about Energy, Environment and Economy more broadly. Fifth, if you enjoy reading my work and feel able, please leave a tip. Sixth, buy one or more of my publications. Seventh, support me on Patreon.
