March 14, 2025 | Civil War in the UK?

I just watched a disturbingly plausible video about the rising odds of a UK civil war.

The source is David Betz, a professor of “war in the modern world” at King’s College, London. He recently published an article titled Civil War Comes to the West in Military Strategy Magazine, in which he claimed that multiculturalism and mass immigration are feeding factionalism and polarization in the UK, leading to outcomes that range from a Latin American-style “dirty war” all the way out to full-on civil war.

Here’s the video, followed by a partial, lightly edited transcript:

Partial Transcript

The primary security threat in the UK is not external but internal. I’ve arrived at this calculation through analysis of official statistics of the British government itself on social attitudes as well as long-established theories of Civil War causation. I’m not inventing theories. Those things which civil war literature views as being causal are obviously manifest in British society today.

This coming Civil War will initially have the qualities of a Latin American style Dirty War, which is characterized by chronic low-level violence. But it will increasingly take on a strongly rural versus urban dynamic where the primary anti-status quo strategy is to collapse the major cities through infrastructural attack causing systemic failure and a period of mass chaos which they hope to wait out from the relative security of the rural provinces.

The plausible effectiveness of this strategy should not be dismissed. It’s simple and relatively straightforward to aim at targets that are effectively unguarded. It builds upon the tenuousness of the urban condition, which urban studies people have been talking about for 50 years. Imagine what London might be like if you switch the power off for a week, and you do that five or six times in a winter.

So if we were to take a list of attributes of a society on the precipice of civil war, it might look something like this:

Elite overreach. Britain’s leaders have exceeded the boundaries of their own legitimate capability in ways that undermine faith in the coherence and validity of the status quo. Last year we had these extraordinary sentences handed out to people during the civil disorder of Southport. The indigenous population feels that it is being downgraded. The government is extremely clear on these divisions that are being written into regulations.

Expectation gap. Economic pressure leads to expectation gaps, particularly on the part of the youth population, which is locked out of things that were very reasonable expectations of their parents, like home ownership and permanent employment.

Collapse of trust. People are no longer disagreeing specifically over issues themselves but are disagreeing on the basis of what they think is the consensus view within their own identity community. There is no shared cultural identity.

Military setback. A significant defeat in a major external war (is likely over the next year).

Radicalization. Small factions within the various groups are highly radicalized and intent on violence. There is already a fairly active anti-status quo violent movement within the Muslim community in Britain. That’s why we’ve got 50,000 people on the terror watch list. Meanwhile, within the majority white community there is the potential for mass mobilization.

All of this together makes for an extremely volatile situation that puts us right on the edge.

Watch the rest of the video here.

John Rubino March 14th, 2025

Posted In: John Rubino Substack

Next: US Deficit Surpassed $1 Trillion in February »