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The coming British Civil War, with David Betz
3.1k Plays21 days ago
The UK is in a dark place, but surely it couldn't reach the point of civil war? Don't be so sure. To discuss the possibility of a looming conflict, Will is joined by David Betz. David is Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London and a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Fire at Will' with David Betts
00:00:20
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. I'm interested in normalcy bias. It describes our tendency to underestimate the possibility of disaster and belief believe that life will continue as normal, even in the face of significant threats or crises. so When you saw the title of this podcast, I bet your normalcy bias kicked in.
00:00:46
Speaker
The UK is an advanced liberal democracy, albeit facing its challenges. And besides, civil wars are a thing of the past, or at least in this part of the world. I thought the same thing until I read David Betts' bracing paper in Military Strategy magazine and titled Civil War Comes to the West.
00:01:05
Speaker
David is a professor of war in the modern world at King's College London and a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. David, welcome to Fire
Is Civil War Unlikely in the UK?
00:01:15
Speaker
at Will.
00:01:15
Speaker
Thanks very much. Let's start with that assumption that I've just alluded to, assumption that civil war couldn't possibly happen here. Why does it exist? And in your view, why is it wrong?
00:01:29
Speaker
Well, I would say the assumption exists because Britain and most Western custom countries generally generally, but specifically Britain, have not been afflicted by the problem of civil war for quite a long time for a range of reasons, including that they've been essentially generally well governed, relatively speaking, highly prosperous.
00:01:50
Speaker
and more or less socially stable, none of which none of which descriptions are currently true are are true anymore.
Trust Decline in Political Institutions
00:02:00
Speaker
That's essentially where ah where it is coming from. There's a few other things though, isn't there? There there is the fact that we are generally older,
00:02:07
Speaker
then perhaps say some of the African countries that would be rife with civil war, we're richer. And there's there is also this, I think maybe below the surface, this mindset that we are ah post-enlightenment society, that we're we're more mature, we're past that point where we solve our problems with widespread violence.
00:02:26
Speaker
Is that folly to think that way? Yes, it is. There's nothing special about us. We're not different from Africans, we are in or any other people, and we're not different from our ancestors in that respect.
00:02:40
Speaker
We have historically been well-governed and had a society that was high trust, relatively homogenous, had working institutions, had high levels of inter ah interpersonal and institutional trust, and so on. all of things And but was have been a society that generally has not suffered from high degrees of factional polarization,
00:03:06
Speaker
But none of these things are true anymore. We have a situation in which there is a broad recognition by many people in society of a situation of elite overreach, where people have lost trust in the ability of normal politics to solve problems.
00:03:25
Speaker
Many people are detached, in fact, from the from the normal political system. The most commonly expressed political viewpoint in practically every country of the Western world is that politics and or voting does not matter.
Economic Stagnation and Radicalization
00:03:40
Speaker
Increasingly frequently, one hears in regular discourse amongst normal peoples the belief that elites no longer represent the nations that they're nominally elected to serve, that they have betrayed their countries, and so on and so forth.
00:03:57
Speaker
There's been a collapse of trust in institutions. Trust is one of the most one of the most significantly and regularly studied ideas in social science. And simply, no one argue no one would argue that over the last 30 years, perhaps a little bit more, there has been a steady and now increasingly precipitated precipitate decline in trust in institutions.
00:04:21
Speaker
and this isn't i mean there's a and And this is across a whole range of institutions. Near the bottom of the of the list in terms of trustworthiness, according to regular opinion surveys, are people like Politicians down at the very low end. Journalists also, it must be said, are somewhere close to politicians and ah in public estimation.
00:04:45
Speaker
Other institutions, however, are also now increasingly distrusted, whereas they had been relatively highly trusted up until recently. I know, for example, in this case, the police which now or amongst the are also
Cultural Tensions and Urgency for Change
00:05:00
Speaker
amongst the heavily distrusted social institutions.
00:05:03
Speaker
And not just at low levels, but increasingly in the middle classes, you see also distrust of police, military, other institutions, including the medical system, now probably connected to post-COVID.
00:05:17
Speaker
At any rate, we have a situation where trust is highly anemic. in our societies and the trajectory is very clear. It it just it has been steadily decreasing over 30 years and is continuing to do so.
00:05:34
Speaker
No one really but disputes this. Certainly, the facts I've just described can be gleaned from regular social science surveys or indeed and when talking about Britain, often based upon the parliament government's own research on people's attitudes towards politics and the like.
00:05:55
Speaker
There's no question either that people are are increasingly factionated, and those factions are more and more polarly opposed with each other. On top of that, you mentioned wealth.
00:06:07
Speaker
The fact of the matter is that we're entering a period, we are but already in a state of, probably in a state of structural like economic decline. or a stagnancy and in terms of real wages.
00:06:21
Speaker
gdp is gdp is ah GDP growth is anemic, and GDP growth per capita is almost certainly in decline. It's certainly stagnant and has been stagnant for well over a decade, going probably going back to the financial crisis.
00:06:39
Speaker
So there's economic pressure.
Demographic Changes and Cultural Conflict
00:06:40
Speaker
there Economic pressures produce expectation gaps. Expectation gaps are one of the most significant causes of of civil conflict.
00:06:53
Speaker
On top of that, we've got a highly ethnically fractionated society that is increasingly in which communities are increasingly at odds with each other. So the the situation is, frankly, pretty perilous.
00:07:08
Speaker
All of the problems that you've just laid out, I agree with. In fact, I think you're right. Most people, almost no one would disagree with those things. But there are different ways that people would respond to those problems. So they could vote for a protest party like Reform.
00:07:23
Speaker
They could start an online social media campaign. They could just withdraw and become disconnected from society altogether.
00:07:34
Speaker
So what is it that you think means that that those problems will reach a tipping point that will lead to conflict as opposed to an alternative way of voicing disapproval or or ill feeling about the situation today?
00:07:50
Speaker
Well, there are two reasons. The first is that the that people's I think people's expectation of the availability of non- Let's call them normal political options, i creating a new party and voting for that party in order to ah and enact very significant changes or creating. so powerful social movements, potentially on on online or other, to direct
Expectation Gaps and Youth Disillusionment
00:08:20
Speaker
policy have not been very successful.
00:08:23
Speaker
So I assume for this for this podcast, we probably have a primarily British audience, and you can see the collapse of that particular... i mean, up until three weeks ago, probably many people were investing...
00:08:37
Speaker
Many quite angry people who were thirsty for change were investing a lot of hope in the Reform Party, which is currently in the process of of imploding.
00:08:48
Speaker
So the ability of normal politics, the Ultimately, the problem here is the ability of normal politics to to cure itself, right, is probably fatally undermined. It's unable to change itself. And we've seen this pattern after pattern after pattern where people express a desire for change, vote for change, and don't receive it.
00:09:12
Speaker
And I think that on the whole, that avenue, people have become people are becoming exhausted by the or becoming disillusioned at the prospect of change through normal political normal political means.
00:09:30
Speaker
Secondly, and that might to simple... have led to simple Or rather, that situation has been probably around for a long time.
00:09:42
Speaker
It's become very obvious with with the ah current situation with the reform movement, but people have been and increasingly apathetic, detached from politics for quite a long for quite a long time.
00:09:54
Speaker
Which is why voting rates have diminished the scale that they have, which is why,
Could Current Conditions Lead to Conflict in the UK?
00:10:00
Speaker
probably why you see a lot of sort of personal behaviors of distraction by cheap entertainments, drugs, you know, the like of a highly, essentially a highly apathetic and ah rather tired society.
00:10:16
Speaker
So that's been coming for a long time. What's what' different now, current turning to the other half of this answer, is the sense of urgency the ah around the need for change.
00:10:29
Speaker
We're not just talking about drastic cultural change, speaking for Britain particularly, although what i'm what I'm saying about Britain is not untypical in many other countries throughout the West.
00:10:42
Speaker
I'll come back to that later if you wish. But there is an increasing sense of urgency at the pace of cultural change and of the irreversibility of what is occurring. So, for example, people when people express the idea the idea that they are losing their country, that they don't recognize their country, that's an increasingly commonly held belief. And it is one that is pretty...
00:11:08
Speaker
well-substantiated by evidence, both of their of people's personal lives, as well as simply well-understood, commonly reported statistics on demographic change in the country.
00:11:22
Speaker
So there' is a sense of there is a sense that normal politics doesn't work and that the situation has become urgent. And moreover, I would add to that that there is, and and I'll come to it again if you wish, plausible so a plausible strategy for dealing with
Insurgency Phases and UK Parallels
00:11:40
Speaker
this, which is outside of normal politics, which fits in, but which unfortunately is civil conflict.
00:11:47
Speaker
Let's hone in on the the multiculturalism side of this. yeah I've heard you speak about this before. you've You've talked about David Cameron and Angela Merkel raising the threat of the threat to multiculturalism over a decade ago, 15 years ago now, and yet demographic change has continued apace.
00:12:07
Speaker
When we look at the cultural divides in the UK today and the cultural divides which may lead to civil conflict, do you see the threat being fundamentally religious? As in, do you see the split as being between, say, Islamic subsections of of society and a more nativist group, for want of a better term? Or do you think it is different to that?
00:12:29
Speaker
How would you characterize the cultural divides that would lead to prospective conflict? There are two levels of fracturing. There is the fracture between what I would describe as nationalist and post-nationalist which others have described using the as the the fracture between the somewheres and the anywheres.
00:12:53
Speaker
Anywheres are people who live in a post-national globalized context. There are people who could do well more or less anywhere on the planet. They're usually employed in and socialize in networks that are highly highly global, very ancient or very international essentially.
00:13:11
Speaker
And they have a loose attachment to any particular place. Most of our elite, most of our political, essentially all of
Three-Party Conflict Dynamics in the UK
00:13:20
Speaker
our political elite, most of our government, nearly all of academia, top end of industry, are essentially post-national in their orientation. They've been educated in post-national ideas ideals. They're highly skeptical of national and of national ideals. The iron irony, of course, is that they are national.
00:13:39
Speaker
nominally national leaders who have little genuine affinity for the countries that they they lead, and which is one of the factors. And the obviousness of that is one of the factors which underpins people's perception of what I've called elite overreach. or So there is this there is this gap between the anywheres and the somewheres.
00:14:00
Speaker
Now, somewheres are people who are rooted in a place, right there Their identity, their economic well-being, their social environment is rooted in a particular in a a particular place towards which they feel strong connection and duty.
00:14:17
Speaker
So whether it's the anywheres and the somewheres or the national and or versus the post-national, that is one of fractured. area of fractured There is also quite obviously, and I think the main one is the fracture between the native white British british Christian population and the relatively new predominantly Muslim South Asian population, which has grown very, very rapidly.
00:14:46
Speaker
in recent years in in successive waves, but but very, very rapidly, particularly over the last 10 years. And now practically on a daily basis, I think we're now hitting, what, 1,700 a week
City Infrastructure Vulnerability
00:15:00
Speaker
landing on beach on and out on beaches, and that just being the illegal fraction, the legal fraction of of new arrivals being actually probably considerably larger than that.
00:15:12
Speaker
And these two these two fractures overlap and and interact. you know In many ways, for the post-nationalist political class, you know a highly bringing in a new population is highly ah is that in fact highly beneficial. I mean, if if the role of people, if the role of individual people is is essentially to be to fit in as economic production units in the neoliberal economic system, then having a population having a new population doesn't have a that doesn't have a particular attachment to the place is is actually quite desirable, as opposed to the native population, which rich requires quite a lot of heavy heavy deprogramming in order to fit into this new economic model.
00:15:59
Speaker
So I think i see there are essentially these two levels of of fracturing which feed on which feed on on each other. Is there a historical precedent for where this type of cultural fracture has led to internal conflict, or is there is there a particularly relevant one that comes to mind for view you?
00:16:18
Speaker
There are lots, but the main the main thing is with respect to the the literature on civil war causation, which is very well developed, and there have been many, many civil wars in human history.
00:16:34
Speaker
So it's no surprise that there might be lots of parallel examples to draw on. But if I
Cultural Fractures and Historical Parallels
00:16:40
Speaker
can summarize, what the civil wars civil wars literature tends to focus on when it comes to causation of civil wars are one of two major factors.
00:16:51
Speaker
The first I've already met mentioned, which are expectation gaps. An expectation gap is when you have a situation situation where people have become accustomed or ah come to believe that they people have an expectation about the quality of life, the material conditions, the kind of kinds of things that they will be able to do with their lives.
00:17:16
Speaker
In the West, For much of the 20th century, because it had always been an economic, real economic growth for much of the 20th century, one of the strong expectations is that young people will do will be more prosperous than their parents.
00:17:31
Speaker
This is just sort of an an expectation that is built up in the very strong Western mind over the last century, probably the last two centuries, frankly. but is no longer the case, right?
00:17:44
Speaker
And across a range of measures, people will marry later, they will have less children, they have less likelihood of owning their own home, they will probably have less satisfying careers, they enter into work later, their work life is more tenuous, their average level of pay is lower. Okay, so overall, what you have here is a situation where people have and have an expectation,
00:18:09
Speaker
of a certain level of ah prosperity, well-being, and ah achievement of personal life goals, notably having family and um for um
Likelihood of Civil Conflict in the West
00:18:20
Speaker
hearth and home and all that all of that ah business, is increasingly frustrated.
00:18:26
Speaker
And that's a very powerful cause of radicalization and of civil conflict. it's particularly But it's particularly a cause which is associated with youth, for obvious reasons.
00:18:39
Speaker
The second major cause that Civil War literature often points to is downgrading. Downgrading is ah phenomenon which is observable in popular in societies where you have a formerly dominant majority is becoming a minority within that ah within that society.
00:19:07
Speaker
And here is there is an important factor to draw out, is that You might think, so it's intuitively, i think, fairly obvious to people that very homogenous societies are not terribly prone to civil wars because they're they quite good at coming to consensus decisions on on on things. When people more or less come from the same background, have the same ideals but and belief systems and the like.
00:19:39
Speaker
And that is the case. So highly homogenous societies take take, for example, Sweden of 25 years ago is a very safe, very um but very unlikely place for civil war.
00:19:55
Speaker
ah to be experienced. Paradoxically, though, highly heterogeneous
Conclusion: Addressing Issues to Avoid Conflict
00:20:00
Speaker
societies are also relatively relatively safe from civil war. so And the reason there is when you have a population which is fractured into many, many small groups,
00:20:14
Speaker
the possibility for any one group to mobilize and to become a mass movement is quite small, right? So they don't have the wherewithal to revolt on all on their own.
00:20:25
Speaker
They need to join up with other groups to create 50 plus 1% situation, for example, where which is why downgrading is so important because the downgraded former majority or majority seeing that it is likely to become a minority, possesses both still possesses the wherewithal to create a mass movement, and it also increasingly convinces itself of the urgency of action to prevent its to prevent its downgrading.
00:20:58
Speaker
right Now, don downgrading is not just you know a bit of bad fortune. This is a permanent alteration of the societal status quo. but So when it ah when it seems to be occurring, that that can have the effect essentially of propelling a large number of formerly normal people in in inverted commas, peaceful, successful, otherwise content people to perform actions which would be very, very bizarre and normal in normal times.
00:21:33
Speaker
ah it it It can take normal people and compel them to do very seriously abnormal things, which is essentially what is occurring and in the case of civil war or civil conflict.
00:21:45
Speaker
That's really interesting and I think anyone who hears that concept of downgrading would be able to see that happening in the United Kingdom at the moment really clearly. That's also a good segue into painting a picture of what this would actually look like in in practice.
00:22:00
Speaker
So we've already seen some examples of civil unrest, which have been responses to the conditions that you've laid out, Southport being the most obvious example in the last year.
00:22:12
Speaker
But that obviously doesn't reach the threshold, I imagine, of ah of a civil war. What would this actually look like? Paint a picture for for me as to how this would start, what it would look like, and then we can we can drill deeper on the specific aspects of it.
00:22:25
Speaker
Well, it may help to start out with a bit of structure. and So to try to talk about in civil war an insurgent model, for example, first. The most common model of of civil war is actually drawn from Zedong, who is both one of the most prominent pract practitioners of this, but also one of the most someone who wrote very very ah ah a lot about it and systematized the process.
00:22:54
Speaker
And since Mao, scholars of in in this area and practitioners in this area have tended to refer to the Maoist model. The Maoist model is essentially three phases. The first phase is usually referred to as the strategic defensive.
00:23:11
Speaker
And that's a situation in which the insurgent actor or the the you know the the the non-state anti-status quo incipient belligerent is essentially doing political organization.
00:23:24
Speaker
They're building up their networks. They're finding other adherents. They're creating handful of structures. They're building up their own bonding capital and trust to try and put together an organization. What they're not doing in phase one really is conducting much overt actions.
00:23:46
Speaker
There might be ah ah a few things, a few attacks, protests are going to be very common. But in phase one, you're going to rarely go very obviously beyond the law or in a very serious way because of the material the material weakness of the anti-status quo actor during this phase.
00:24:08
Speaker
Phase two ah comes up is often referred to as the strategic stalemate, and it is in phase two where you see the anti-status quo actor becomes begins to conduct overt actions to go beyond the law in a fairly serious and belligerent manner.
00:24:27
Speaker
So these are increasingly violent protests, ah for example, but also things like assassinations, political kidnappings, terror acts of ving varying types.
00:24:39
Speaker
mean, there's a lot of potential ah gradations of discrimination in a bombing attack, for example. you bomb a police station or a high school? Do you hit a political figure or do you hit hit random people? So even with a bombing campaign, there can be level levels of discer ah levels of discernment. So in phase two, you begin to see violent direct action.
00:25:01
Speaker
In this phase, the insurgent actor or the anti-status quo actor is not yet sufficiently materially powerful to challenge the security services in a direct manner.
00:25:14
Speaker
So it's still essential when when people think of guerrilla warfare, for example, or tit for tat tactics and the like, what they're thinking about usually is what we would describe as phase two of an insurgent campaign.
00:25:26
Speaker
Phase three is when the belligerents, the anti-status quo actor has become sufficiently materially powerful and organized that they can contest with the security services on their own terms.
00:25:38
Speaker
And that looks pretty much like a regularular a regular war. So that's that's pretty simply, crudely, the the theory of what it looks like. The reality is that most civil wars don't go all the way to phase three.
00:25:52
Speaker
Usually they're resolved in phase two. The regime collapses or it either the the regime collapses or the insurgency is ah is beaten is beaten down.
00:26:04
Speaker
I think that that the UK at the moment has both phase one and phase two actors. With the ah Islamic groups, we have, as is well known, there are probably somewhere but around 40,000 people are on the security services terror watch group at any one time.
00:26:24
Speaker
These are pretty organized groups. They've demonstrated the ability to act, which is why we've had multiple terror campaigns, which is why our city streets are now very heavily guarded, both by police as well as by changes in the physical physical infrastructure to prevent things like ramming attacks or create standoff distance around important buildings in case of to mitigate the effect, potential effect of car bombings and the like.
00:26:53
Speaker
So within one part one part of The potential belligerents in a larger conflict were already in phase two. the they're They're organized. they've There are already significant no-go areas in the country.
00:27:09
Speaker
I'll come back to specifically what I mean by no-go area, if you wish. But essentially, these are areas where policing is either absent or negotiated. With the indigenous or nativist movement, this is nowhere near phase two. I would say it's somewhere in phase, ah probably mid phase one at this stage.
00:27:32
Speaker
But the difference, though, is that where with with the latter group, they have significant mass potential because they're talking about there speaking to ah much larger potential audience.
00:27:47
Speaker
and one which is increasingly open to an insurgent narrative that says, you're losing your country, it is time to act now, there's no time to wait, politics doesn't work. You've heard all of these arguments. I mean, if you just walk into a pub or look in a newspaper, for example.
00:28:05
Speaker
So you've heard all of these sorts of words. Now, what's going on when you hear those sorts of words is I think that that's reflecting phase one level within a budding insurgency a society where the primary animus or the primary motivating factor is the perception of downgrading.
00:28:31
Speaker
And that's a very plausible that's very plausible narrative. So what does it look like? I think when it gets to phase two with the native groups, what you're going to see is Firstly, it's going to look something like a Latin American style dirty war.
00:28:52
Speaker
That's where you get attacks on what's called them influencers. to use a pretty typical term, right? I mean, podcasters, for example.
00:29:03
Speaker
That's company. Influencers, politicians, public figures, judges very particularly. So you'll get attacks on people like that. In many respects, I think it will look quite a lot like Northern Ireland, for example.
00:29:18
Speaker
So if you're or a public official, you know, a judge who has made controversial rulings or or um ah ah a figure like that, then you may have a policeman sleeping in your kitchen on a regular basis because of the need the perceived need for 24-hour protection, right? So, that all that was very typical of of Northern Ireland, for example.
00:29:41
Speaker
for a good part of the 30 years of the troubles. So it'll start off with looking, I think, like what a lot like what people describe as sturdy war, which is kind of low level, violent, but low level.
00:29:57
Speaker
I don't think it's going to stay like that for for very long, however. but That will be awful, certainly. But I don't think it's going to stay like that. I think what will it will metastasize into is something like, well, there'll be a a secondary phase, a a second phase um after that.
00:30:15
Speaker
And here I would advise people to think of the 2011 London for example, which was a situation where the police effectively lost control of the city.
00:30:31
Speaker
but I don't want to overempize overemphasize it, but I think that's a reasonable characterization of it. The police were struggling very, very difficult very hard to control the city.
00:30:44
Speaker
And eventually they did, but it took something like a week before things cooled off. On any given night, it was there might have been 3,000, 3,000, 4,000 people out on the street, but on any given night, there ah amongst those, there were probably 200 or 300 who were really kind of serious.
00:31:06
Speaker
Imagine, though, so imagine the London riots, but with 10 times more people involved. Moreover, imagine this is occurring not you know not once in ah generation effectively every, you know, ah a couple of times a month.
00:31:25
Speaker
And how is this going to, how is this going to occur? Or why is this going to occur? It might occur just ah organically, spasmodically in the way that the London riots occurred.
00:31:38
Speaker
But, and some of that, some of that may be the case, but a lot of it I think is actually going to be propelled and it will be propelled by infrastructural attack. The bottom line is that the cities, as people who do urban studies have observed now for well over a generation, cities are essentially a very impressive balancing act.
00:32:01
Speaker
They're highly unstable. in their natural in their natural state. The big metropolises like but like London are just an astonishing balancing act when you think of how it is that they operate.
00:32:15
Speaker
They need to be fed, powered, cleaned, policed, so on and so forth, all of these things. It's actually but really astonishingly difficult to do.
00:32:26
Speaker
And in their natural state, they're vulnerable to disruption. Now we have a situation where most of the infrastructure that supports our cities Actually, effectively, all of the infrastructure that supports the cities, if you think of power generation, electrical power, gas, food, water, sewage, all of the important infrastructure of that is located outside of the cities.
00:32:53
Speaker
The life support system his support is located outside of the cities in rural or peri-urban areas. So if you have a situation where the native population considers that but its major cities, including its capital cities, are now effectively under foreign occupation, I think that there will they will the the strategy which they will adopt and which is widely talked about in in, if you lurk on various places on the internet, you can hear people talking and thinking in this manner, is they'll attack the critical infrastructure. They'll hit things like the electrical distribution network, the gas network, which is effectively unguarded and almost unguardable, frankly,
00:33:42
Speaker
You know, the gas network, for example, is comprised of what are called major accident hazard pipelines. The clue is in the name. These are about a meter in diameter pipelines.
00:33:56
Speaker
And everybody knows where they are. You have to know where they are because they're so dangerous. And so if you're going to dig in a place, you have to be able to. ensure that you don't hit one of these things. So it'd be relatively easy to go after infrastructure with a view to causing the cities to implode effectively, causing a series of cascading crises that lead to acceleration of economic string stringency that lead to riots and the like, which then contribute even further towards flight from the cities and various assortative
00:34:38
Speaker
ah population flows that increase the divisions and make it very it make it all the more clear, make the division between populations all the more clear. So I think that's essentially how it's going to ah going to go. Dirty wars we with the first bit and then metastasizing into ah attacks on critical infrastructure with a view to causing cascading crises that will lead to state failure, essentially.
00:35:11
Speaker
You referred to commentary in the darker corners of the web there. And I know that as part of your research, you've looked at some of it you've looked at that area. Have you seen evidence of this sort of discussion taking place amongst groups at the moment, this sort of phase one commentary taking place on the internet at the moment?
00:35:32
Speaker
Not at the moment, no. and but And much of it is, much of what I've just described is a bit hard to, you know, it's it it's it's quite hard to, when you're reading this stuff, to to tell whether these are posers, people sitting in their basements just having wild fever dreams or if it's, or if it's you know, serious stuff.
00:35:54
Speaker
I haven't seen anything that I would describe as planning, but there's quite a lot of what you might describe as brainstorming. So, for example, we just had that this signal gate leak of american senior senior American cabinet figures discussing attacks on on Yemen and other strategic aspects of strategic affairs.
00:36:16
Speaker
That wasn't really wasn't really operational planning, but you can see a lot you can read a lot into what's going on there. So in short, the answer to your question is is no, i can't say that I've seen ah specific you know operational plans or things like that.
00:36:31
Speaker
It would be over-egging it. What is clear, though, is that the strategy as described of the attack on city ah infrastructure, for example, is talked very openly about on both in both left and right extreme groups.
00:36:51
Speaker
So on the left, for example, you know i would direct interested listeners to a book called The Coming Insurrection, which was published originally in French in 2007, if I'm correct, which describes a sense exactly what I've just laid out as a technique.
00:37:12
Speaker
and So that's a leftist group. And in fact, what they're talking about are ideas that had been moving around in leftist radical circles for quite a long time. On the right, moreover, it's also a fairly old idea.
00:37:27
Speaker
goes but you know you would have British nationalist figures talking about this sort of thing, particularly the attack on communications networks and media networks going back to the early 1990s. Now, that was broken up i mean those groups were broken up by the security services, and they never really became politically popular.
00:37:52
Speaker
um But the ideas that they were expressing even then were very similar to this. So what I'm describing essentially is not a ah really, I'm not trying to say this is a novel observation, or in fact that it's it's a and a new a new idea.
00:38:11
Speaker
It's actually been going around for at least 30 years, both on the right and on the left. There is simply reason to think, for example, that it is more pertinent now and more obvious and probably more plausible on account of the way that our society is now more connected and more vulnerable.
00:38:31
Speaker
Finally, last week or yeah last week, we had the um the burning up of the ah electrical substation providing main power to Heathrow Airport.
00:38:44
Speaker
which, you know, who knows what what caused that, whether that was accident or or or or not. I have no ah particular and and information ah about that, though I'm interested to see what goes up in flames next.
00:38:57
Speaker
But as and an example, as an illustration of the potentially of the potential multiplication effect of these sorts of attacks, it's a very good one.
00:39:09
Speaker
For the economic the damage of just an attack on simply one substation was very, very large. We had, what, some 1,300 flights canceled. Who knows how much the how much damage done to the national budget sheet.
00:39:25
Speaker
But, you know, a significant number, millions of pounds would have been lost by a few days disruption of a but of a key node. Those nodes are not hard to find.
00:39:36
Speaker
In fact, there's a whole completely open academic literature, which is devoted to understanding what are actually the critical critical nodes in in ah in our society, whether electrical, transport, communications and the like.
00:39:50
Speaker
The installations are not guarded. They're not hard to deal with. So the strategy is, it kind of writes itself. The interesting thing about the way that you've framed this potential conflict is that it's not two parties. So it's not like a peasants' revolt where peasants and then you have a government or a ruling establishment.
00:40:13
Speaker
There are, and I'm speaking quite, I'm oversimplifying, but three parties here. You have two insurgency parties. You have a more nativist party. element, and then you have a religiously motivated, potentially Islamic element.
00:40:27
Speaker
And then for different reasons, they both have problems with an establishment that includes a government, a judiciary, all those different pieces. So you have three parties, the two counterins the two insurgency parties, which both don't like each other, both have problems with an establishment class.
00:40:43
Speaker
Talk me through how a tripartite civil conflict would work and how that those dynamics yeah impact how we should think about this? Well, I think your characterization is entirely right. So one parallel which you might draw, and often people do, is they say, oh, well, this is not a civil war. In fact, what we're talking about is a revolt. what we And indeed, what we need is a revolt. That's what people are increasingly, you know, you you hear people saying,
00:41:11
Speaker
increasingly And so you might say, well, the parallel here is to the English of the 1381, which by nature, in fact, was a conservative revolt.
00:41:24
Speaker
In recent times, in in modern times, if we think ah over the last century or so, there's been a strong core association in people's minds between revolution and the political left.
00:41:39
Speaker
But actually, in the longer view, most revolts, and specifically peasant revolts, are conservative in nature. I mean, small c conservative here, obviously. Essentially, that they're they're animated by the perception of the peasantry, not simply that, oh, they're being repressed or, you know, people are poor and peasants, you know,
00:42:00
Speaker
People are poor and they feel put upon by that small fraction of the population that enjoys the privilege of governing, but that they perceive that they're that the elite has changed the rules of the game in some way.
00:42:15
Speaker
and So that's what I mean by conservative kind of peasant revolt. So in many ways, I think you could say that the situation in Britain and in other places looks a bit like that. It's, it's you know, it's the way people talk is as though they are animated by a real sense of betrayal by their political and economic establishment.
00:42:39
Speaker
So that's going on. Secondarily, though, you get lots of people who, on the other hand, are particularly animated by the intercommunal conflicts.
00:42:50
Speaker
So, you know, the Southport, for example, was a very clear example of clear example of this. And it's pretty obvious what the government was frightened of. The government was frightened of essentially the situation that look might look something a bit like, you know, Bosnia circa 1993, where you have a formerly not integrated, but formerly peaceful multivalent society that suddenly splits.
00:43:22
Speaker
And people started to attack each other, not for what they have done per se, but for who they are. And matt that's another pattern of of civil conflict that people are very familiar with.
00:43:36
Speaker
So I mentioned Bosnia, but also Iraq, for example, post-invasion Iraq blitz along Sunni-Shia lines in this way. And if you think about it, the problem here is pretty obvious, that it's frankly...
00:43:51
Speaker
It's practically impossible to conduct normal politics in a situation in which communities are making war on each other when you're kidnapping each other's children and drilling their kneecaps out.
00:44:05
Speaker
Or, you know, you're well, as in Southport, you're you're getting girl children chopped up at dance classes, random bombings, you know, people regularly plowing heavy vehicles through people at Christmas markets or, you know, what what what have you.
00:44:22
Speaker
All of that sort of stuff essentially, you know, perfectly obviously radicalizes people and makes normal politics almost impossible to conduct.
00:44:36
Speaker
The two, I think, those two things and why I think the situation in the West is is not just that there is the potential for civil war, but that in many ways the the potentialities are ideal is because you have the interaction of these two types simultaneously.
00:44:55
Speaker
It's not just one, it's both at the same time. And they drive each other. they drive each other So the perception that one's political establishment, which is post-national in its orientation, is ah is in fact pushing this ah downgrading agenda narrative or downgrading agenda means that it makes the situation even more serious and and perilous. So the two types interact with each other to make the situation worse than it might be if you were just talking about a peasant revolt, because we had a homogenous society that was
00:45:34
Speaker
pissed off with its elite, or if we had a situation which was a society that was fractured and downgrading, but had a coherent national elite. We have both sets of problems simultaneously.
00:45:49
Speaker
According to the the best guess of the extant literature on so on civil war, says you know that civil war is not inevitable. You have conditions that make it possible.
00:46:02
Speaker
And so at any given time where the conditions are possible in a given year, yeah might ah there's about 4% chance of it occurring. And you might say, okay, well, that that's good, right? That means there's a 96% chance of it not occurring this year.
00:46:22
Speaker
If you go out over five years, then the chances, if you think, work out the details, it comes just over 18% over five years. On the other hand, if you consider that this isn't just this isn't just Britain by any means.
00:46:38
Speaker
Everything I've just described could be said about France, about Germany, about Italy, about Spain, about Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, others. And we we we can say this with some authority because in each of those countries, at least one and often many established political figures have said, look, we also are on the verge of civil conflict.
00:47:04
Speaker
Probably France is most obvious, but Germany ah germany also. So if you say, okay, well, there's an 18% chance over the five years in any given country, but we live in a very connected enacted connected world So there's an 18% chance in 10 of those, let's say, and a 50% chance that if it kicks off in France, it'll spread to Germany and to and or to Britain.
00:47:33
Speaker
Then you're getting somewhere like, yeah and if you think about it that way, then you're getting something to a statistical probability of about 60% over five years, assuming that it's 4% likelihood and not 8%. right.
00:47:49
Speaker
right So assuming the best the best case and not the worst case, and assuming just a 50% transmission rate. So, you know, my best guess is over five over the next five years you're looking at best case, 60% probability.
00:48:07
Speaker
don't know if listeners could pick up on the sirens blaring in the background there, David, but they certainly add a sinister foreboding tone to what is already a sinister and foreboding conversation.
00:48:20
Speaker
You actually answered what was going to be my final question, which is how inevitable is this? And you answered it very comprehensively. it is There is no doubt this is a a bracing conversation. I think anyone who has listened to your analysis today would I think, leave this thinking much more seriously about those conditions that we discussed at the outset and potentially how can we address those issues through what we described as good, proper political channels, hopefully before it gets to the point of conflict.
00:48:49
Speaker
Only time will tell. David, thank you very much for your efforts, both in terms of your scholarly work on this and then how you are spreading the word. And moreover, thank you for coming on the show today.
00:49:00
Speaker
Thank you for inviting me. Thanks.