Are We Headed for Civil War? - David Betz

0:02 There is a gigantic ball of political energy that is building up. The spark is just intrinsically unpredictable. If we had to list uh factors in order, multiculturalism would be at the top and if we were to put some kind of ranking on them, it's like 90%. people who uh either express the view or nod at the view that we want our country back and the people who want you to shut the up. So there's this sense on the part of the formerly dominant majority that they are losing this status which impels them as fear usually does to act up. David Beth, welcome to trigonometry.

0:47 Thank you. uh you have been on a number of our favorite podcasts recently talking about the risks of civil war, unrest uh in Western societies, particularly in Europe, in a very persuasive way. There are many people who shout these slogans online without really having anything to say or back it up. But you you you're someone who researches this. So before we get into that, just tell everybody a little bit about who you are and what your career is about uh so that we can talk about this issue. Okay. Uh my name's David Betts. I'm a professor in the war studies department at King's College London. Uh which is a uh which is the biggest and best war studies uh department in in in the world. Uh I've been there for uh 20 about 25 years now. My area of specialism is fundamentally contemporary

1:32 strategy, contemporary military affairs. I've written on a wide range of things, but probably most pertinent to uh the dis discussion we're about to have. I've been particularly interested over many years in the topic of insurgency and counterinsurgency, which is essentially the study of how countries are torn apart from the inside and sometimes put back uh put back together. for the most part that uh research has concerned uh uh internal wars in foreign countries in hot dusty places abroad uh and not so much at home. But it began to occur to me actually going back as far as a decade ago particularly heightening in the post um post-rexit vote

2:18 parliamentary shenanigans um to subvert that vote. It particularly began to dawn on me that the conditions uh that we generally under understood to be contributo to the emergence and the persistence of insurgency in other countries of internal conflict in other countries was more and more apparent in our own uh countries. In that case particularly the the the the the quality that of a country that is particularly pertinent is the perception of legitimacy which is a huge issue in the study of of insurgency and counterinsurgency. And my feeling was that uh British governments amongst other western governments were essentially doing things in a rather

3:04 textbook manner that seemed designed to um to diminish their own perception of political legitimacy and that that was a dangerous thing for our societies. So I wrote I continued to uh uh uh research and to write on this and did a couple of papers um uh uh now many many years back but one of which was picked up by your uh friend and colleague um Louise from the maiden mother matriarch Luis Perry who picked up a paper that I probably wrote in 2022 uh published in 23 with the title civil war comes to the West. And uh so she contacted me out of the blue and said uh

3:51 for reasons of her own, she'd been brooding on this subject and looked online if anybody had said anything uh had said anything about it and lo and behold, she found me. M that led to to a discussion and uh with her uh which then put um put that uh paper and the things that I'd been writing um and talking about in an academic sphere which is not terribly noticeable to be perfectly honest into um much more into the mainstream of the public sphere. And one thing I would just say as as an observer, we've obviously had, you know, hundreds of people sitting in your chair at this point. Uh, and most people that come on our show, they usually have a thing they want to say and they're desperate to say

4:36 it. You almost seem quite reluctant to be talking about this in this public way. Yeah, I'm reluctant to be talking about it. Uh, for reasons that are probably pretty obvious. It's rather uncomfortable. I'm not a public figure uh for for one thing. Uh so it's a bit unusual for me to be sitting at a table with a camera pointed at me in a bright light. Feels a little bit you know uh feels a bit Anyway, it's new uh for me and uh slightly awkward at that. The subject matter matter moreover is extremely unpleasant. Um and the climate the the political and social climate is such that um it's it it can be rather painful to talk about these things. you you make enemies whom you don't want to make. You alienate people uh friends, family uh who you

5:25 would wish to alienate. So, you know, I'm not here to You're you're correct. I'm I'm I'm not um jumping at the bit uh to talk about this. Uh I feel it compelled uh to do so by by my own conscience, I guess. um and my own calculation of the state uh that that we're in and people are interested but frankly no I'm not trying to sell anything and it is uh I am a bit of the proverbial fish out of water I'll admit it's it's a detour but I think it's worth exploring I'm curious because I I what is the nature of the criticism from

6:10 friends I understand online people say stupid things all the time about everyone who has any opinion but in terms of your own personal life, friends, colleagues, etc. What's the nature of their concern about what you're doing? I think people feel that when you speak about things that you actualize it. Ah, I see people often do that. They confuse predicting that something will happen if we continue down the current path with like wanting it to happen or making it happen. Yes, that's the common thing. I mean you one does try to explain let's let's say for example you know if I was an astronomer and I'm looking through my telescope and I see the I see a meteor uh headed towards the planet and my understanding of celestial mechanics and impact energy of heavy you know like rapidly moving objects as the

6:55 sweet meteor of death is headed towards our planet. I'm not calling for that to occur. I'm simply saying you know my understanding on the basis of my understanding of reality and my uh and on the basis of my observation this is our situation. Um but fundamentally I think the pro the basic problem is that people have an actualization issue uh that people think that words can create situations and there is a fear that that that perhaps it might inflame. Yeah. No, I understand that. I I I don't think they're right. But I do understand the difference between a meteor or a comet coming at the earth and human behavior which can be modified by what

7:41 they're hearing in the media and so on. So I understand even though I don't agree. But anyway, coming back to you kept using the word insurgency and I wanted to ask you to delve into that because when I think of insurgency, I think of a guy who straps a bomb to himself driving into a market in Kabul shouting Allah Akbar. I don't think of modern Britain. So what are you what are the parallels that you're seeing? Right. So the first thing to understand is that imagine insurgency is like an iceberg. Okay. Uh and what you you what everybody knows about an iceberg is that top the the part that sticks above the water is the smallest part right most of the energy the bulk of the iceberg is under the water. the bit that you just

8:27 pointed to the the guy screaming Allah Akbar, you know, strapping a bomb uh to himself and blowing himself and blowing himself up in a market or what have you. That's the shiny bit poking up uh over the surface. The important bit is underneath there, right? So the first thing is to understand that an insurgency is a social movement. Um fundamentally um and social movements are normal in every in in every society, right? If you want to move ideas around, if you want anything to happen in your society. Uh you you have you have to have social movements and a norm a normal society, you know, welcomes the these things, right? Some social movements are more

9:12 contentious than others, right? The civil rights movement, for example, is a highly contentious uh social movement. Uh environmentalism from uh in at various stages, including now um might be seen as a very contentious uh social move. anti- capitalism like likewise insurgency differs from normal social movements uh only in um in the extent that it is a social movement which in some respects goes beyond the law. Nelson Mandela had a famous famous trial early 1960s he's charged by the apartheid regime um um uh with treason I think was what he was charged with. it doesn't matter particularly but he he explained why you

10:00 know what his uh uh what his line of thought was about forming the armed wing of the ANC and uh and and so on and he said that essentially at some point uh given uh some sorts of grievances you have to decide whether you surrender to the situation to the status quo because it can't be changed within the rules of the uh or you go beyond the law. Now how you go beyond the law there's a immense variation in how you might do that. You might you might do sabotage proper or i.e. property destruction you might uh use physical violence rioting are the types or if you do you might conduct uh

10:45 physical attacks but even then you might make calculations about whom you attack. Do you attack uniformed figures or are you less precise? But essentially with with insurgency, what I'm trying to get at here is that you have a a giant ball of energy. Uh that is the important bit but is under the surface. Uh and the bit at the top is the less important. This is the most you know most obvious in a sense but it is less uh the less important. Now to answer your question, you are quite right. We don't have uh whatever like uh uh Britain Britain first gorillas blowing themselves up um on on in Westminster uh at this point in

11:33 time or um doing other uh sorts of things like that. But what you do have is you have an increasing sense of al of uh alienation from normal politics. you have more and more people expressing the view that politics is broken, that politics, politics doesn't work. Um, and if you understand what politics is for, what politics is politics is fundamentally a way of solving collective action problems. And if politics doesn't work to solve collective action problems, then you you uh it has to change, right? Just for people who don't know what is a collective action problem quite any collective action problem is

12:20 uh is a problem which can't be solved through individual effort right uh so a political system it it exists to aggregate people's views on a range of social on a range of social matters uh through a particular mechanism right through the the political system in this case through elections the idea being that we have elections. These people called elected politicians who go into uh parliament and discuss issues of the day and and come to uh decisions or answers about uh problems which exist in in that society. Now you or I as individuals may differ with the decisions taken but in a

13:06 normally function functioning political system i.e. one which is perceived as as legitimate, we accept that the rules of the game uh have been applied fairly. Right? So while we may not agree with the outcome of a particular election and the set of policies which follow from that, we accept that at the end of the day we're all British citizens. We all our our our our essentially our pre-political loyalty is to Britain as a nation and there is a perception that the system itself is legitimate whether or not we we individually agree with with those decisions. In other words, my wife and I had a discussion about where to go for the weekend. She ended up winning that

13:51 discussion. I accept it cuz I care more about the family. you have you have a very little you have a very little political system in in your family that aggregates decisions but at the end of that I don't spend the rest of my time going well you know we should never have made this decision this is a wrong decision we accept that decisions get made because we're a family effectively right so yes actually that's not a bad analogy make this quite small but it's not a bad analogy uh if you think of a family as a as a as a as a social unit which has a natural affinity in which the people have a the members have a natural affinity for each other and a and and a loyalty to the family which precedes their their self their

14:36 their feeling well their their self interest right. So when you have a system like ours in which the data is in it is perfectly clear that uh trust in government is almost in single figures now uh trust in all institutions has been in decline uh in the west uh for a generation slightly more than a generation in fact uh with politics being very much in the lead in terms of rather dismal race to the bottom. So we have a system which is increasingly perceived as illegitimate that doesn't that it that isn't a a functional way of solving collective action problems and moreover in uh we have uh uh

15:22 countries now where on account of things like the triumph of identity politics primarily people don't share the the sense of pre-political loyalty which they once did uh which uh is a I I would suggest the major contributory factor to the perception of uh illegitimacy and the perception that politics is uh no longer functioning as it ought uh to. Moreover, um the the problems are now so severe that the political system is unable to cure itself. Right? So if you if you if you want to change in essence you're

16:09 getting ve we are now getting very close both in Britain uh and many other countries to a situation where people where people in um fairly large numbers are beginning to feel that the problems are uh intolerable and urgent and that they cannot be solved within the existing rules of the game. That is essentially a description of an incipient insurgency. And David, we've used the term civil war and I think it's quite important that we clarify. What do you mean by that? What is the academic description of civil war? Okay. Well, there are many academic descriptions of civil war. So without boring you uh too much on that, I use the term civil war uh in uh uh in the

16:57 sense of referring to a form of war in which the belligerent uh two or more the belligerent parties were both under the same sovereign authority at the outbreak of the war. Now if you take just that as a definitional uh as your um left and right brackets on the definition quite obviously a lot of difference there are a lot of variations in uh that might apply within that uh category of civil war. uh you know all wars are unique and all civil wars are therefore uh unique and uh and messy um even within the same time same historical time there are considerable v

17:45 variation from one place to another if you look at their uh at their civil wars under that uh definition let alone historically so there's a lot of different types that and I think that your question arises from that observation of people well that Well, look, you know, the American Civil War, this is if that's your image of uh Civil War, then David, what are you what are you um what are you talking about? Um in this case, so I use that term, however, civil war as opposed to insurgency as I as I might uh have done. Um I think because primarily because I want to highlight the fact that this is in of its of its origin that it is internal in origin and

18:30 not external uh in origin and that is a fundamental quality of civil war which inclines me to use that term. There are other terms that might apply and and but we perhaps we'll get into this as the discussion uh uh uh uh moves on further that one might apply like revolution or uprising, rebellion uh so on and so forth. uh and I have tended to avoid the use of those terms because at least in my mind that implies something um something more spasmotic and potentially short term right so that you I mean scholars will u u will argue I mean scholars will argue about everything but but I think semantically

19:17 for for me revolution kind of implies something that that uh is uh is explosive right it goes from 0 to 100 and but it's also short in duration. It has a big effect. So with that in mind, the use of those terms I think can uh mislead people from what I want them to understand is that this isn't a short-term thing. Once once you tip into civil war uh um we can talk about when that occurs or indeed whether we have already reached the tipping point. uh uh or the tipping point has been reached all already in the past. Um but once you're in the civil war, they they tend to last for a long time. There is a

20:02 spasmotic quality to them. Um but there is also a a long-term process. There's a prehistory to what leads to them, the building up of the proverbial tinder uh that that explodes. And I so I want to draw people's attentions to these aspects of the coming conflict uh which I've uh described. And for better or worse, I think that civil war does that better than than than other terms. If you're like us, you believe that understanding how freedom actually works is one of the most important things a citizen can do. That's why I think many of you will find this fascinating. Hillsdale College has just released a brand new free online course on the

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21:36 That's hillsdale.edu/trigger. So that's a fantastic description. I thought it was important so everybody's on the right page because obviously when we talk about terms like civil war, everybody's got their own particular idea particularly if you're not a scholar and academic. Now we're looking at let's look at the UK. So we've already talked about lack of faith in the institutions uh lack of faith in in government and politics. How much of a role does multiculturalism and the in my opinion and a lot of people would share this that the idea that it's not working and in fact it's actually detrimental to society. How much of a factor does that play in to your thesis? Might be worth you saying what you mean

22:22 by multiculturalism because a lot of people misunderstand that term. Yeah. So multiculturalism is there's lots of different cultures and different religions with different values and different ways of being existing different social mores etc. And by the way if that is rubbish please push back. No I think uh I mean I I think I'm fine with that uh as an understanding of multiculturalism. Um I don't think we need to ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar arggue that uh point. Well, we could if you want, but I don't I don't really see the the only thing I would add to that. I think that really does matter to this discussion is the way I see is exactly as Francis described but it's the promotion of that worldview that that is the right way to organize society as opposed to the idea that while people

23:07 have their own religions and have their own cultures their job is to integrate into the central dominant culture of the nation in which they live and that's where I would a multi I would make the distinction between a multithnic society in which people from different backgrounds come together to be one thing and a multiple multicultural society in which you're kind of told you don't need to be one thing, just be who you are and just live in the same economic area and that's kind of it. That's where I think a lot of people's concerns are about this issue. Yeah, I agree with that. Uh that's perfectly logical uh to my mind. Uh but your question was how how uh how important I see this and I think it's the most important factor. If if if we had to list uh factors in order, multiculturalism would be at the top.

23:53 And if we were to put some kind of ranking on them, it's like 90%. Wow. And why why do you think it's 90%. It comes back to what I was when earlier I used the term pre-political loyalty. Uh pre-political loyalty is a necessary attribute of a of a normally functioning political system. without the without a without a unified um a unified and single pre-political loyalty, then uh then you you can't have a a normally functioning democratic system. When I say normally functioning, I mean one that's perceived as actually legitimate. This legitimate is different from legality. We get into that too, but but essentially the the main the main uh

24:41 uh effect is it's uh that it completely erodess the idea of pre-political loyalty which means that you can't you you don't get the same effect where people say well I don't agree with this decision but I accept how it was arrived at. I accept the process by which it is arrived at because we're all part of the same family. Okay. A nation as a big think of a nation as a big extended uh extended family. Uh and in fact this is the genius of the nation state. The genius of the nation state is it allows it allows human beings which are which evolved which which is a species that evolved

25:28 psychologically in small groups right to have you know intense loyalty intense personal connections. It's actually a rather small number of people. There's a famous number called the Dunbar number which I think is about 150 if I remember it correctly. And this is the number basic number basically of stable personal connections that a normal human being is able to uh to maintain. uh nation state is a genius idea for uh expanding the Dunar number like very very very large. So, you know, um uh um moving to a multicultural postnational

26:14 model is uh is incredibly destructive to the way that most western states have governed themselves uh since modern times since or since uh well late modernity anyway. And that's that's happened effectively in uh well in Europe effectively in the last 30 30 years or so uh at a at a absolutely historically frantic and unprecedented pace and I say it's the biggest thing you know and actually that shouldn't be all that controversial. I mean Angela Merkel said the same thing in Germany. uh one could question her motives in saying it but she said it o over over 10 years ago that multiculturalism was a

27:00 disaster for Germany. Um 3 4 months later, David Cameron gives almost exactly the same speech, you know, in which he said that multiculturalism uh results in ghettoized communities living basically in their all their their silos unable to u so in short multiculturalism is uh the killer app for destroying um what has been the nation model. So we're talking about multiculturism, but to me a large part of multiculturism as well is the issue of religion. So if you have lots of different cultures, but they all share, for instance, the same religion, there's far less likely. Now, of course, there's

27:47 always fractions in religions and whatever else, and we see this with Sunni and Shia, etc., etc., but it's far less likely to happen, isn't it? if you import every for instance people who are all Christian as opposed to Muslims, Christians etc. So um I feel that there's a separate line of argument here around um the around integration and the potential for integration and our understanding of identity and so on and so forth which would be interesting but maybe as a slight digression from what I'm uh what I think I'm here uh to do which is to explain to you why or explain to your listeners why you're in actually quite immediate peril from this thing called civil war And why I say

28:33 multiculturalism is is a a big uh part of that. It relates to uh one of the core ideas in the theories around civil war causation that is about that looks at the makeup of the essentially the ethnic usually the ethnic but could be the confessional makeup of of society. But you you have to imagine a bell curve. You know what a bell curve looks like. And on one end you have very heterogeneous societies. Mhm. And on the other end you have very homogeneous societies. At both of these ends the potential for civil war is actually quite low. uh very homogeneous societies have low potential for a civil

29:19 war because on account of the uh homogeneity of that society they're relatively able to arrive at consensus decisions even when they're quite painful. So, you know, in times of economic decline or natural disaster or war or so on, if you have a, you know, any of the kind of big pressures that might be um uh felt by a given society, whether internal or external in in in origin, natural or artificial in origin, a highly homogeneous society is usually able to weather that because they could say, "We need to pull together, right? We need to get through this. We're all We're all in the same uh what's the metaphor? We're all in the same boat.

30:04 Okay. Very heterogeneous societies are also relatively stable because uh it's very difficult for any one group to uh generate mass prod. So if you if you've got a country that is broken say into 20 groups each with 5% of the population then it's very hard for any one or even most manageable coalitions to dominate all of the others. Mhm. So there's this paradox. Now the most vulnerable state is at the top of that curve where you are uh uh where you have a uh formerly dominant majority which is

30:54 in fear of losing its status. And in that case there uh uh the and this is a danger for two reasons. First because of that fear of losing status. So in the past it was your language, it was your culture, it was your um sort of ideals uh and beliefs which uh essentially set the pattern set the rules of how that society operates. Right? So uh there is a fear that you are losing that status. So your language is not going to be the dominant uh one anymore. your cultural preferences will not dominate in in that in that society. So this might be in in

31:41 the current context might refer to attitudes towards women or um um well in the news recently had been uh uh attitudes towards uh uh ritual slaughter of animals for you know like and many many other right so you could say so there's this sense on the part of the formerly dominant majority that they are losing this status uh which impels them as fear usually does uh to act to act out. Uh at the same at the same time because their share of the population is still quite large, they don't face the same coordination costs as a group of 5% of the population. So they still have

32:27 the potential to form uh mass movements. They still have the potential muscle to try. they're not going necessarily going to succeed in this, but they still have the potential muscle to try and reverse the situation. And they and if they feel there is an urgency to do so, anyway, you could see why on this bell curve, what that represents is the propensity to civil conflict. And it's most uh and it's most dangerous in uh exactly the situation faced now in in Britain and throughout Western Europe which is the perception of the indigenous native uh populations of Europe that they are being displaced

33:13 in their own homelands. So what you're saying is that the conditions for civil war they're sort of approaching optimal at the moment in that respect. Yes. Uh and but also in in in other respects they are also optimal. This is the weird thing. Okay. Uh so I'll maybe if I may I'll give a slightly long answer but I'll try to get to the point. If I'm to summarize the some of the big ideas in the Civil Wars literature with respect to causation, one of the one of the big factors I've just talked about, which is the uh essentially status loss by a formerly dominant majority, otherwise known in in the literature is referred to as downgrading, but it's effectively the

34:00 same as the replacement or displacement narrative you hear in uh increasingly in in right and farright circles. Actually, it's not just far right. I I happen to live up in the north of Britain in in uh in strongly left-wing areas where it's a very firmly held uh idea. So, it's not strictly speaking actually best uh understood as a right leftwing. Just just to make this slightly more specific, the idea being that white British people are being replaced by people who don't look like them, who don't share the same culture. To be very specific. Yes. Okay. Or to be even more specific, I mean, so it we're we're recording this uh days after the Glastenbury event, right? So you might say it's between uh if you if you don't want to raise race, if you don't if you

34:47 feel that neuralist neurallinginguistic programming effect of uh that often occurs in people when you when you use the words white population, then you might just say, look, the the coming conflict is between those people who uh either express the view or nod at the view that we want our country back and the people and the people who want you to shut the up. Right. Right. Okay. Okay. So there those two to give an example that people can latch on to uh in the current uh political climate. So there is the uh there is the downgrading effect which is very central. The the other is factionalism. Factionalism is uh uh uh is generally recognized as a as a highly kind of

35:34 corros corrosive uh uh quality for a political system to have. The worst sort of factionalism is Sorry to interrupt David. What do you mean by factionalism? Factionalism is uh of an attribute of a political system in which peop uh you have actors who are um making decisions or acting on the basis of their factional interests rather than the larger national interest. In other words, it's no longer a family, but rather there's a lodger living in the house who only cares about themselves and is not willing to consider the interests of the family as being primary and their own self-interest to be secondary. Right. Yes. Right. Uh if you were to think of it in contemporary British terms, I would say, you know, a good

36:19 example would be the the five independent or effectively the five Gaza MPs currently sitting uh in Westminster. We we we had in fact what was was the thing that caught attention recently was uh you know this faction was effectively lobbying for the building of an airport in Pakistan for the convenience of it wasn't just them. There was quite a few Labor MPs who were part of that as well. But essentially this this is what I mean by faction factionalism. If you're someone who values free inquiry and independent thinking, which let's be honest is why you're probably watching trigonometry, then our sponsor, Venice AI, is the tool for you. Here's a hot take. AI is exploding right now. But seriously, most of the tools out there are just clones with slightly different skins. Venice AI is different. It offers

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37:52 vi.ai/trigonometry and see what you've been missing. And now back to the show. There are different types of factionalism. Uh but uh uh so it could be an ethnic factionalism or confessional factionalism or but uh the probably the the worst sort of u the worst sort of factionalism um is uh known as polar factionalism. Polar factionalism is a situ is a is a term which um uh is is used or I use it to describe a situation where people are not arguing anymore over issues per se like if you take abortion for example or

38:38 the death penalty right you and I may differ on which way we fall on that particular issue and we may have very very strong views often people do on on these issues that could be a kind of factionalism but polar factionalism ism is a situation where we're not arguing about the issue. What we're arguing about is what we perceive to be the consensus uh opinion within our faction. So if my faction is pro abortion, right? uh then I'm going to be pro uh abortion whether leaving aside the the the issues because what I'm looking to I'm looking around me to my to my faction to my tribe as an indicator of what I should believe and how I should act.

39:25 Uh and one only does that in situations of extreme insecurity. Uh uh it's that's an expression of extreme in insecurity where if essentially what you're now doing is you're burying whatever your own conscious cons conscience uh might suggest because you perceive the danger to be so great. You have to be with you you have to be in line with your faction. Right. Okay. Right. So polar factionalism is is highly highly um is the most advanced form of uh factionalism. M we're now in a state increasingly of polarity of polar uh polar factionalism. The next step after polar factionalism is the war. Uh all right. So the other the other uh

40:12 the other factor that is often pointed to beyond factionalism and downgrading is uh loss of faith. uh loss of faith specifically loss of faith in the the the ability of normal politics to solve the problems which I would suggest you can measure um in various ways uh but our own parliament has measured this right so the parliament is some of the most uh most convincing um surveys done on people's sense of the legitimacy of politics are conducted by governments themselves Mhm. They're for obvious reasons intensely interested in this question and the data is perfectly clear. People don't trust

40:57 trust in political institutions is in the seller. Trust in political figures is uh abysmal. So measures of trust across all institutions are just uh in the seller. And my my suggestion here or what I'm trying to do for for those listening closely is to say that measures of trust can be taken as proxies for the measure of legitimacy. And legitimacy is the is like the secret sauce. That's the magic that allows government to work. M if you've got legitimacy then your your cost of government goes way way down because people perceive the the system to be legitimate. Therefore they tend to do what they ought to do without being

41:43 policed all the time. Mhm. Which is why, you know, like British policemen don't have to carry guns or traditionally don't have to carry guns around and British British governance historically speaking for the last few centuries has been a kind of genius for government uh because of this high trust and high legitimacy that we're invested in the system. But that's not there anymore. We know it's not there anymore because we've measured it. And so you have you have all of the uh the pertinances of a high trust high legitimate society. If I walk out of you walk out of this building, you're in the center of London. You can't miss it. But this the spirit's gone. The soul is gone. This is this is just this is just structure.

42:28 Uh and so that when I use the word loss of faith, I'm not talking about religious faith, but I'm I am talking about something that is kind of magical. legitimacy is hard to to point to, but you know when you've got it and you don't. Well, what you're saying is you have all the structures of a high trust society that rely on people to voluntarily not act in a way that's detrimental while you have a society that is increasingly becoming low trust. And that's why the government has to become uh more um muscular about things. There's no other way. It has to police things hard. It has to police people's speech because the things that people never would have said are now increasingly being said and therefore

43:15 the government has to come in and prosecute speech of this kind and speech of that kind and everything else. So take these three factors together uh which are I I would suggest like the three big factors that that tend to be uh accounted for as uh indicators of the potential for civil war. We're right in the sweet spot in all of them. Now that's that's probably strikes people as weird. Undoubtedly it does strike people as uh as weird otherwise I wouldn't be here. You wouldn't have invited me to because you know the the suggestion uh is uh I don't want to say it's controversial because I don't actually think it is controversial in terms of our understanding of reality. But at any rate, the thing is when I say the word

44:01 civil war, you probably think of a of a different time or different places, not your own home. And I'm saying that actually take a step back and look at just what we understand about this and and take a realistic look at your own society. you realize you're in you're you're you are in fact um ideally in the quote unquote ideal uh position. Now that to to finish off uh uh this line of reasoning I think an an objective person and many many people do respond and say well look you know uh traditionally Britain is a country and you know western states don't have uh so there

44:48 are there obviously significant barriers to civil war in western countries and David aren't you exaggerating right you know uh and I would like to make the case uh that I am not exaggerating and in fact I suspect that there what's going on here is a normaly bias a kind of expectation of normality that uh on on uh the part of many people which uh borders on complacency. So one of the chief kind of bull works against uh civil war uh clearly is wealth. Um, right. If you're if you're if you're a wealthy place, you've got lots of money, then you can you can afford to paper over a lot of cracks,

45:37 right? A lot can be done. If you think of money as a lubricant, as a kind of social lubricant, if you've got a lot of money, you can you can make things uh you you can make things work. Bearable. Bearable. Yeah. At least bearable. Anyway, right. They can function. Um, and my my suggestion, I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's an outlandish suggestion, is that as far as the financialization b of the economy goes, most western economies are at the end of the rope. We're just waiting for the hammer to drop uh essentially. So the expectation of the ability of government to continue to pay po paper

46:22 over uh problems in society through essentially financial uh redistri it's not financial redistribution. They're they're creating money out of thin air. They're creating debt to toe to to appease existing problems, but they're going to run out they're already running out of ability the ability to to do that. So the existing problems are just going to emerge. Okay. So the another bull work is a kind of uh kind of say you might describe as a customary uh habit of obedience. Right? So with a if you have if you have a a nation state uh which has been normally

47:09 functioning normally basically well-governed for a long time people have gotten into the people have gotten into the habit of sort of obeying um right and I think that that is that is a factor which is very apparent in in British society for for sure Um, and I think it's one that underpins the observations often of historians who say, "Oh, look, Britain has, relatively speaking, has a has a low tradition of civil wars." Yes, we've had a couple. We had the peasant revolt in the late medieval period. We had the English civil wars, but gen uh but generally speaking, unlike the French, say, or others, the the British are

47:56 basically pretty politically passive. they have a this culture of obedience as I've described it. I feel a little cautiously but I do want to push back on my his colleagues who are historians on on this point because in fact it seems to me that Britain has had a lot of little a lot of rebellions uh in uh through its history a lot of little revolts but what it's generally also had is a is a very unified and rather competent uh governing elite so for example if you look at the British the the British military the British military has performed an aid to the civil power role now for over two

48:41 centuries uh and usually pretty effectively. Um so the British kind of power elite has always been pretty good at heading off uh revolts when they arise. you you know they're that they can um suppress them or subvert them uh or co-opt them and they have done so pretty effectively and there's no denying that there has been a kind of gen British genius for governance uh over time but so I think it's an exaggeration to say that there is you know somehow that that the that the British people uh and uh have this kind of innate habit of just obeying you know, putting up with that other people uh uh don't.

49:27 But uh more to the point, this idea of uh the existence of a unified and competent elite is highly questionable in in you become very British, David, in your understated British act of diplomacy. Okay. I'm glad I've I'm I'm I'm glad I'm you've I'm glad I've integrated that. Right. So, you know, you you both laughed, so I really probably don't need to go into substantiation. No one thinks the elites are well good or skilled or smart or so. So, no no no more said on the matter of competence, but I I think there's something to be said about the idea of the unified elite and the unified elite is um is a very important factor.

50:12 Usually if the elite can stick like when you when when things get tough if the elite can stick together uh they they normally will prevail particularly if they right uh and particularly if they can hold the security forces if they can hold the arm. So if the elite is is competent and unified it can usually weather um uh these periods of uh turmoil. It's not just that there this this elite is not competent. Uh they're also not unified. So you're already beginning to see uh elite defections. Uh and you can see that like in the last week how many political movements have been announced into existence just in the last uh last day. We've got advance

50:58 reform uh restore. Um what are what are these? These are expressions of essentially these are expressions of this feeling that the system is is the system is broken, right? Uh because you wouldn't you you wouldn't name a movement restore or reform or advance if you thought things were more or less hunky dory, but you wanted to change a few things, you know. So you're seeing uh defections from the system and you're seeing also the true allegiances of the of the uh power elite become more and more obvious, right? When people talk about the uni party for example, this is effect effectively what they're talking

51:45 about is like okay we now recognize that most of what you know like what you guys have been arguing about is effectively drama. So Ed Balls and uh uh George Osborne uh recently, for example, had a very congenial uh kind of pausy discussion about how they both had no idea that there was all this uh um uh industrial raping going on. But sorry to interrupt, but actually it's much worse than that. It wasn't that they had no idea. What they actually said, if you listen to that clip, is they didn't think politically it was something to for which there needed to be a discussion effectively. That's what they which is far worse in my opinion not knowing about. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right. I'm I mean, Corbl, I I've just like undersold

52:32 something, right? This wasn't coming across the desks of cabinet ministers. I mean, I don't know whether you ever had any um dealings with it. I didn't. I didn't directly. I mean there was definitely you know there was the emerging prosecutions in places like Rotherham and I guess there was a sense in conservative circles that you know this was embarrassing for labor because these uh areas were run by labor councils that the labor councils often had drew a lot of support from the local Pakistani origin community that they didn't want to kind of call it out there was definitely but we never we never thought that was something that you could sort of politically exploit frankly really um I mean I would have thought if you thought this was something which was embarrassing for Labour you would have thought away too politically I mean I'm

53:21 I think when Karma was going um about this in that period it wasn't really on the political okay so it's neither unified nor uh nor uh competent so you've got elite defections occurring um uh perhaps somewhat less obvious in the British context than in others. The most obvious elite defection is Trump. Uh but one can think of multiple other examples of essentially what I think is occurring is you have a fracturing of of the elite like so it's not hey we're all in the same boat. It's literally they're all looking for their own lifeboats. Uh and one has that uh anyway one has that uh uh that impression which rather suggests

54:08 therefore that what traditionally has been strong bull work against um civil war in a in the form of a unified and and competent elite no longer is quite the barrier that it once was. Can I challenge you on this to stress test this? Because I was about to say, isn't the strongest counterargument to your predictions, the election of Donald Trump and the incredibly rapid rise of the Reform Party, which is currently on on current polling, you know, polling, what does it mean? But on current polling, they're said to win hundreds of seats at the next election. So isn't that exactly the system working as intended, which is things go to share, people will vote for a fairly uh robust challenge to the existing system that will then come in and as we're now

54:53 seeing in America, we'll do quite a lot to try and set to reset the system back to where it might might be perceived as being the right place for it to be. Um that's a fair that's a fair point. uh and but I don't invest uh as much confidence in uh in it as uh you might from your suggestion anyway. Maybe it's just a hypothetical uh you're you're presenting, you know, actually presenting your your own point of view. But let me deal with it on a hypothetical level. Then it depends how you interpret uh uh Trump, either Trump or uh reform. Actually, let's just concentrate on reform. I think reform is actually much more uh my suspicion is it's much more

55:40 uh a very predictable system defense mechanism where uh essentially it's a pressure valve. Uh reform despite the name is unlikely to reform very much. Uh Farage seems to me increasingly a status quo figure. Um what why do you say that? primarily because of his statements and his and Richard Ty's statements around uh the central issue which is multiculturalism around which both men has expressed a kind of uh or actually was not just that was very specifically put to tice in a recent interview um that you know Britain I think it was Matt Goodwin's um

56:27 point that by 2063 uh the white British population would in would be in the in the minority and t and the interviewer asked well you know are you worried about that and you could see he was obviously uncomfortable hesitated for a bit and then said well you know uh um I I'll I'll be dead by then you I'll be dead by then right as though politicians are not supposed to think about 20 30 years in in the future far has already you know made it clear in numerous interviews is that um he's at any rate fair at least publicly very sanguin about about this. Is this oppose I mean you know is he basically posing

57:14 for a degree of political respectability with a view with a view to catching swing voters so that he can be more radical uh in government if he ever gets uh to it? I rather suspect. No, but my understanding of the Farage position uh is effectively that he believes in the end of multiculturalism and the celebration of British identity as the uniting uh world view into which our multithnic society can buy in. Okay. Right. Well, I mean, what else is there? You deport millions of people because they're not white. Like so let's let's park this part forage uh for okay a a moment. By the way, I'm just testing the idea. This is trying. No, I'm happy with uh

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59:35 Take control of your financial future today. There is the matter of the electability of reform. There is the matter of the intention uh of reform. Both of which we could argue. I'm not a political scientist. I'm not a political pundit. And so maybe we've kind of exhausted my potential for commenting not um cogently um on that specifically. But then there there is moreover the ability of reform even if uh even if Farage is is radical in his his intention and does matter it does manage to be uh elected with a decent majority that he'll

1:00:21 probably just be subverted uh by the uh by the state bureaucracy uh which can tangle him up at least for a parliament with I think very little difficulty. what's you know uh that is my biggest concern definitely should it uh should it wish to uh which it by all accounts it probably would wish uh to I think that's a pretty reasonable u uh sus suspicion and we know that there is that there is a a huge potential of bureaucracies to subvert um even quite radical reformers because that's what happened in Trump's uh first first uh administration So it may be that the political system

1:01:07 uh is able to generate uh uh uh reforms reformers rather uh who can take um big potentially very very big decisions and you mentioned exactly the the main one is what do you do with people you know what do you do with how many people have arrived I've since 2013. I don't know. Anyway, like multiple millions. What do you uh what do you do? Um but um the even if they get into so the point is the political system might be able to plausibly be able to generate some kind

1:01:54 of answers to that to that but not at the speed of the development of events. So if you if you if you think about people's sense of urg sense of urgency as I described when I was talking about uh the perception of downgrading that's skyrocketing and the the the pace of political change seems to be you know creeping along right there is no you know one is a ballistic missile and the other is uh a London bus right it is not going to c is not going to catch that. It is not going to catch the problem. It's not going to catch the mood. And that's what it mean that and that difference between

1:02:40 what needs to be done and what is what has the plausible potential to be done within the normal political system is the thing that drives the the the breakdown of the political system. is the very definition of that kind of problem that I described at the beginning. So David, if we accept and I'm inclined unfortunately to accept your hypothesis that the conditions are optimal, what is what what is it? An event that sparks a civil war? Is it a series of events? Could it be like a clip going viral on social media? I mean if we look back at last summer where you had the horrific the horrific

1:03:28 atrocity in Southport is it something like that? Yeah. So the most common metaphor uh when talking about employed when talking about this subject is that of Tinder and the spark. All right. Or sometimes of like a a powder cake. Uh and your question is like what is the spark? But and I I'll try to as best as one can to answer what the spark is. But the important thing is not the spark. The important thing is the cake. The important thing is the tinder. Right? The the you know sparks are not a problem if you are not in a room full of gunpowder. Uh sparks are not a problem if you're not wearing you know plastic

1:04:13 petrol soaked uh you know clothing. You get my line of reasoning. Mhm. And that's what I urge people to concentrate on is what are the policies? What are what are the what are the things that have contributed to the existence of all this Tinder, all of that? Okay, go back to my iceberg metaphor. All that like frustrated political energy in the system. That's the that's the real problem. And that didn't come overnight. that took a long time to build. And whether it was accidental or deliberate, the fact of the matter is there is a gigantic ball of political energy that is uh is

1:05:01 building up. Okay. Now, the spark the spark is just just intrinsically unpredictable. If you think of the Arab Spring, lots of people in uh lots of people might might have predicted that uh and many people did that you know the Arab world was highly politically frustrated you know socially you know very fractured lots of huge uh lots of political economic problems that were kind of building up over long term but no one was going to predict that it that the thing that would set it off was an Algerian uh fruit seller getting so frustrated with the local uh basically licensing uh police that he poured petrol on

1:05:46 himself and set himself on fire in a market. And so yeah, because you can't you you can't just you just can't predict those those lowgrade effects. In prefacing your question, you talked about last summer. So, you know, I would think yes, another another uh attack of that sort might be a a target. people get tend to get upset when uh when their children get slashed apart, you know, like if you you want to make an enemy behead someone's daughter uh or attempt to mean it's probably a pretty egregious example, but that's the literal reality. That is what that is what that is what hurt what happened. It could be uh and I

1:06:34 think the government's main fear is that now is uh it could be just the steady drip of increasingly vile revelations coming out of the gang inquiry. Um which is uh as opposed to terrorism very close in terms of people's perceived offensiveness. Not quite as bad as decapitating your child, but like still pretty offensive to one's person. Um, and on a much larger scale. That's the thing is that it's it whereas terrorism is a frankly a statistical blip in the national death register.

1:07:19 Uh the uh the the the scandal is is gigantic and has touched many many many many many people and many of them still alive. uh although lives probably very basically permanently affected. So it might be just a kind of steady drip of increasingly vile revelations coming out uh of the gang inquiry. Um or it might might be something else that nobody's nobody's predicted. My suspicion or and my feeling is that sorry I would say two further points on on this is

1:08:05 increasingly everyone wants to fight right you know uh is not just on the left or on the right it's you know people are angry in all quarters you saw that in Glastonbury you're not going to get 5,000 people you you know, clapping like seals at someone screaming death to the IDF. um if this is not a a a group of people who are pretty belligerent, right? That is that is an that's just an expression of an underlying mood which I think is is uh inclined uh to fight and the extremists on either on on either side know how to know how to

1:08:52 direct that energy. It's not a mystery how you take u existing fractures in a society like putting on a marble table and and peel them apart. Maybe it hit a you know they hit a dance class and then maybe a kindergarten next or a maternity hospital or or something else or or something else we nobody's nobody's thought of. But we know h the effect of this and the extremists know how to do it and the technology of doing it is not all that difficult. go down to Tesco or go on Amazon, get yourself a big knife. Um, get yourself a panel van, drive down uh there are all kinds of it's not difficult to do. It's more the the will to do it rather than the technical ability uh that technical um the

1:09:39 strength or technical ability to to do it. Uh and uh the second point I I I wish to make on on this with respect to um uh the um the the spark is I think for me the the telling point is going to be when an an avalidly native group that no one's heard about does something um and And I think my my uh my feeling is that this in Britain as in other countries but particularly in Britain uh the where it's first going to

1:10:25 surface on the on the we want our country back side is going to be in a in a pattern that looks a bit like a Latin American dirty war. Uh so it it's likely to be an attack I think a targeted attack on a noteworthy figure or a series of noteworthy figures in the judiciary pro possibly or uh influencer influencers of of uh of some kind uh and you'll see a group that no one's heard about because they've recognized that uh actually if you don't want to get caught because the only thing that the British police really are looking at intensely is online behavior. Just don't blather about it on the internet and the police will have uh no

1:11:12 idea. So, I suspect that there are going to be plenty of sparks uh this summer and continuing on. Any one of which has the potential to set that Tinder uh a light. But the really electrifying moment, the the really kind of oh, you're now in it moment is going to be when someone probably I'm going to guess goes after a judge. Uh, and you can see already people uh they're that that's you know in terms of doxing and briefing on on who these uh uh people are. That's that's been happening over the last 18 months with increasing frequency. I'm I'm really glad that you mentioned social media because that is something that we haven't spoken about but that is

1:12:00 social media particularly Twitter that provides more sparks than any other type doesn't it really yeah there's uh I think that social media has uh we we could we do whole you know a series of uh uh discussions around the effect of social media Um but I think the way in which social media uh both contributes to the fracturing of society as well as the is uh significant. Right? So part of the reason why we have this uh factionation that I uh that I discussed actually relates to um technological developments which allow people to live in uh silos

1:12:48 in a way that was harder to do in in less uh um connected uh uh times. The other thing is that social media does is it allows extremes to find each other. So there's this um you may have heard of the the longtail effect. Mhm. Right. pertinent idea usually in marketing, but basically it says like there's there's it there are there are niche markets for things. is like whatever you know um polka dot socks or like whatever you know or or or very you know u maybe lots of people like pol polka dot socks would

1:13:34 probably pick a better example but uh the long tail basically says you you've got these niche interests and uh that's in interesting to marketers in a connected world because now you can address these without a physical store because they uh because of the connected nature of things. you could you can now provide uh a product to these people and uh despite the fact that they're distributed all over the place in aggregate they they they can market uh and it so basically the weirdos actually I'm loading the term when I say weirdos I just say like the extremes can find each other in ways that um that uh hadn't been the case before although

1:14:21 this figure like uh when it comes down to it any still though the basic point is like I I think is that insurgency which we might say is a form of civil war is a social movement and any social movement depends on having uh essentially you you have uh passive supporters um and social media is great for reaching your passive passive supporters. So you once you've got a kind of viable narrative which states a grievance which indicates a consc a specific the conscience community I a

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