{"id":631565,"date":"2026-06-10T17:45:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T17:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/631565\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T17:45:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T17:45:11","slug":"cars-burn-in-belfast-bricks-fly-in-southampton-and-the-ubiquitous-cry-of-civil-war-goes-up-again-john-harris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/631565\/","title":{"rendered":"Cars burn in Belfast, bricks fly in Southampton \u2013 and the ubiquitous cry of \u2018civil war\u2019 goes up again | John Harris"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was the summer of 2024 when it all decisively started, with the horrific murders in Southport, countrywide violence and Elon Musk\u2019s observation<\/a> that a British civil war was somehow \u201cinevitable\u201d. A year later came a hot season of flags on lamp-posts<\/a>, protests outside hotels used to accommodate asylum seekers, the ubiquitous use<\/a> of the word \u201ctinderbox\u201d and constant predictions of widespread riots that never actually materialised. Now here we are again, in the aftermath of the awful murder, and treatment by the police<\/a>, of Henry Nowak and frightening violence and arson in Belfast, and the civil war predictions seem to be increasing by the hour.<\/p>\n

The archive of such material is already bulging. In August 2024, amid the riots, a YouGov poll found<\/a> that 32% of people thought a UK civil war was either \u201cvery\u201d or \u201csomewhat\u201d likely. A year later, Dominic Cummings said<\/a> the UK was only \u201crandom viral posts away from riots and prairie fires getting out of control\u201d. Even Labour\u2019s Lisa Nandy offered the opinion<\/a> that the north of England was so tense \u201cit could go up in flames\u201d.<\/p>\n

But then as now, the king of the civil war genre, even if he usually avoids directly using the term, remained Nigel Farage, whose lexicon of expressions for anarchy and general breakdown includes \u201csocietal collapse<\/a>\u201d and \u201ccivil disobedience on a vast scale<\/a>\u201d, as well as predictions that Britain is \u201cnot far from major civil disorder<\/a>\u201d, presumably fired by the \u201cpure, cold rage<\/a>\u201d he so disgracefully incited last week. Unsurprisingly, such talk is an international phenomenon, as evidenced by similar predictions<\/a> of civil conflict, strife and war \u2013 usually pinned on immigration and Islam \u2013 from just about all the key populist politicians of mainland Europe.<\/p>\n

All of which, it seems, has left the Tory party feeling rather left out. So Kemi Badenoch has tried<\/a> to combine a vague tone of restraint and reason with the use of a telltale term presumably intended to grab the attention of disaffected former Tory voters who now support Reform UK (or, if they have more hardcore tastes, Rupert Lowe\u2019s Restore Britain). Her interview for a new BBC Radio 4 programme, titled England\u2019s Identity Crisis<\/a>, resulted in a quote that was a bit of a rambling mess \u2013 an attempt to blame \u201cidentity politics<\/a>\u201d for social fragmentation, of a piece with her proposal to scrap parts of the Equality Act \u2013 but she eventually uttered the two crucial words.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are seeing more and more hostility to people of every ethnicity,\u201d she said, \u201cwhether they\u2019re English or not English, because people are bringing political conflict into an area where we didn\u2019t have political conflict \u2026 This is why it\u2019s really important that politicians understand this properly and have policies that make a difference, rather than use the political conflict as a way to get some votes from one particular community \u2026 In the long term, that\u2019s how you end up with civil war.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you want a more pointed set of civil war predictions, one high-profile source is David Betz, a Canadian academic and \u201ccivic nationalist<\/a>\u201d based at King\u2019s College London who looks and sounds like a character from a peak-period JG Ballard novel. Among other factors, he blames multiculturalism and degenerate elites for what he sees as the very real prospect of civil war across the west<\/a>, which will be \u201cdemarcated along ethnic lines\u201d. For reasons that elude some of his readers, he thinks Britain stands an 18.5% chance<\/a> of falling into such a conflict in the next four years, and that such an eventuality would entail the death of about 23,000 people a year.<\/p>\n

The essential theory behind this is based on the idea of society breaking into three \u201czones\u201d \u2013 as he puts it<\/a>: \u201curban enclaves where non-native populations dominate\u201d, \u201cmixed regions where instability will be fiercest, particularly capital cities where state authority still exerts influence\u201d and \u201clargely contiguous native-dominated areas, comparable to the French regions voting National Rally in 2024, forming bases for counter-mobilisation\u201d. The west\u2019s urban centres, he says, may turn into what the US military once called \u201cferal cities\u201d. Such projections, moreover, come wrapped in cast-iron confidence: \u201cThat civil war is looming in the west is a logical conclusion of standard, well-understood precepts of social science,\u201d he reckons (although the KCL professor of economics and public policy Jonathan Portes considers his ideas \u201cabsurd\u201d<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Somewhat inevitably, Betz is a major presence on rightwing podcasts and YouTube videos, which pour such ideas into hundreds of thousands of people\u2019s feeds and everyday conversations. The day of last October\u2019s Caerphilly byelection for the Welsh Senedd, for instance, I fell into conversation with a Reform supporter<\/a> who was standing outside the town\u2019s library with a party placard, having been thrown out by the staff. No more than a minute into our chat, he fixed me with a laser-like stare and asked a very pointed question: \u201cYou know there\u2019s going to be a civil war?\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d I replied. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be a tipping point,\u201d he went on, and mentioned illegal immigration. \u201cAnd do you say that with relish, or does it frighten you?\u201d I asked him.<\/p>\n

The answer came back in a microsecond \u2013 \u201cIt scares the shit out of me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, understanding modern British politics without reference to this kind of stuff is impossible. For lots of people, mundane daily reality now carries a lot less weight than what they see hundreds of times a day on the small screen they carry in their pocket. And if you are partial to a vision of a Britain constantly on the verge of violent crisis<\/a>, your algorithmically curated video feeds will deliver exactly that kind of stuff \u2013 fighting, riots, angry altercations on public transport \u2013 and foster the sense that you are living in a dystopian drama, for which Farage constantly provides the ugly narration: witness how his online call after Monday night\u2019s stabbing in Belfast for police to disclose the suspect\u2019s identity and immigration status accompanied an image of the attack<\/a>. What you watch might also fuse with the economic injustices that millions of people have to live with: scant social housing, stagnating wages, no rights at work. But most of the \u201ccivil war\u201d merchants never mention those things. Funny, that.<\/p>\n

Still, the most effective civil war narratives weave their stories into a simple political message: that in such unprecedentedly turbulent and violent times, you have to make unprecedented choices. And in the UK, that means making Farage prime minister. Meanwhile, there are a lot of borderline irrelevances that many people in politics and the media are still hanging on to, from a lot of TV news to the weekly pantomime of prime minister\u2019s questions. They should be more aware of what people are watching on phones so overused that their screens are full of cracks, much like their owners\u2019 understanding of what is still \u2013 and I say this somewhat hesitantly \u2013 a largely stable country. A nation with solvable problems is being recast as violent dystopia, close to civil war, and why? To smooth the path to power of some of the most terrifying politicians Britain has ever seen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was the summer of 2024 when it all decisively started, with the horrific murders in Southport, countrywide…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-631565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}