It is a darkly dystopian vision of Britain’s future, in which tens of thousands die in a bitter civil war in just a few years time.
Yet such forecasts are no longer limited to niche corners of the internet or the X feed of Elon Musk, condemned by Downing Street for claiming that war in Britain was inevitable after the post-Southport rioting.
What remains a rallying cry for the extreme right can now be found across a far broader cross-section of public discussion, appearing everywhere from the opinion pages of the Daily Telegraph to neighbourhood Facebook groups and the speeches of MPs such as Nigel Farage.
Less prominent, but increasingly influential, has been the role of some in academia quietly arguing that civil war is coming to a “culturally fractured” Britain amid economic stagnation and a collapse of trust in politics.
“I think you will see something like Belfast during the Troubles, or Baghdad circa 2008 and 2010, in largely urban areas where people are essentially fortifying their neighbourhood for protection,” said David Betz, a professor of war in the modern world at Kings College London, in one of a plethora of interviews over recent months to right-leaning podcasts where he has found an eager and sympathetic audience.
A former government adviser on counter-insurgency, he envisages a messy asymmetrical conflict breaking down along urban and rural, but ultimately ethnic lines. Three “sides” will emerge, he claims: a Muslim population barricaded into urban enclaves, a white British one that regards government as illegitimate and “captured” by elites, and the increasingly beleaguered vestiges of the state.
Betz, a softly spoken Canadian, speculates that as many as 23,000 deaths a year can be expected. He admits to feeling uneasy about suddenly becoming a public figure, and struggling to keep up with what he describes as the “torrent of interest” from the public, thinktanks and journalists at home and abroad.
“What was once whispered on the margins is now increasingly discussed,” he wrote with Prof MLR Smith in one of two articles for Military Strategy Magazine, a peer-reviewed journal.
He also draws on the writings of an anonymous online writer known as El Inglés, who has sketched out a UK civil war scenario involving the “crescent, crown and pitchfork” on the Gates of Vienna blog, a far-right website described as a training manual for anti-Muslim paramilitaries. Such works are dismissed as tainted by association with the “far right” and ignored by academia, argue Betz and Smith, “rather than treated as they should be in scholarly terms as gateways” into the thinking of a plurality of western Europeans.
Ethnic cleansing would become a reality in Britain’s coming war, Betz claims. He describes himself as a “civic nationalist” who believes in shared identities based on values, but he says that it is not safe to assume those values would withstand the stress of a conflict. “It’s not going to be durable once people get to the situation where they are kidnapping each others’ children and drilling their kneecaps out,” he said.
Wildly fantastical as this scenario may seen, there is a meaningful minority in the UK that relates to it. As many as 33% of British adults polled by YouGov last year believed a civil war would occur in the next decade.
Others weighing in include Boris Johnson’s former chief aide, Dominic Cummings, who has claimed intelligence services are already discussing the risk for “racial/ethnic/mob/gang violence”.
The issue is now on the edge of the mainstream political agenda, to the extent that Keir Starmer felt compelled in September to reject those who he accused of prompting ideas of “a coming struggle, a defining struggle for the nation”. It was part of a strategy to force a choice between “globalists and nationalists” by portraying places like London as a “wasteland”.
Suggestions that a war is coming get short shrift from experts such as Prof Dominic Abrams, an adviser on social cohesion for government and public bodies, who argues UK is well set up to absorb conflicts, citing the NHS, universities, trade unions and other entities.
“It’s not a stretch to state that there will be increasing levels of conflicts over different issues among different people,” he said. “But I think it’s stretch that we would be moving towards a civil war, because it it fails to recognise the constant adaptation operating both at national level and among local communities.”
Jitters beyond rightwing silos are evident, but usually stop short of the idea of a sectarian conflict killing thousands. Betz’s arguments have attracted interest in “Blue Labour” – the party’s socially conservative wing – and eyebrows were raised in May when the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, said she was so worried about public disaffection that she believed the north of England “could go up in flames”.
A thinktank report published in July described the UK as a “powder keg” of social tensions, with a third of people rarely meeting anyone from different backgrounds. The research by British Future and the social cohesion group Belong Network found that a year on from last summer’s riots, there was a risk of unrest being reignited without urgent action to address polarisation.
