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Britain’s descent into civil war is not accidental, but rather a result of the country’s embrace of liberal dogma and the actions of its self-anointed managerial and political elite, Professor Michael Rainsborough writes.
The elite’s actions, which began as the Labour government’s policy of demographic transformation under Tony Blair, demonstrate a deliberate strategy to fracture society and rule by division.
The aim of imperial governance, Prof. Rainsborough says, “is to rule by division: to fracture society into communities, reward loyal in-groups and discriminate against the majority through a two-tier system of justice, policing and social policy. The new imperialists are ‘diversity coordinators’, anti-racism activists, curriculum de-colonisers, climate campaigners and their mission is unchanged: to manage society by division.”
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Britain’s Descent Towards Civil War is No Accident
The following was originally published by The Daily Sceptic.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Having lived in Australia for the past three years, I sense that this country is the least advanced down the road towards the multicultural dystopia confronting much of Europe. That is not to say there is room for complacency: Australia has its own canaries in the coal mine, echoing trends observable across the Western world. Yet relative prosperity, firm immigration policies, a distinct welfare regime (mandatory health insurance, means-tested pensions), a robust federal system and above all a unique electoral framework of three-year cycles and compulsory voting all help, willy-nilly, to keep politicians on a short leash and broadly tethered to the popular will.
The greatest safeguard against social fracture and disintegration in Australia, however, is not institutional design but rather watching Britain implode in real time. Many Australians, still bound by ties of kinship and tradition to the old country, see in the United Kingdom both a cautionary tale and an anti-role model: a once-settled, relatively harmonious state busily teaching the world how to dismantle itself through the enthusiastic embrace of liberal dogma.
As an observer no longer resident in Britain, I am reluctant to pontificate on the fate of my homeland. Yet it is a sight to behold: an establishment seemingly bent on self-destruction, clinging to an incontinent immigration system and an almost devotional attachment to international and human rights laws that disadvantage its own citizens. The Epping hotel protests – complete with the Home Office’s recourse to legal appeals – illustrate the point. No doubt the legal complexities are real, as David McGrogan rightly pointed out in these pages, but such manoeuvres only pour petrol on an already combustible national mood.
One is left to wonder whether Britain’s Labour Party, now so hopelessly enthralled by socially progressive ideology, will ever rediscover the ability to represent anything resembling national sentiment – or whether it will, like the Conservatives, simply perfect the art of political self-evisceration.
On Civil Strife and Academic Exile
It should surprise no one that talk of civil strife and even civil war has been in the air for months. Into this debate I enter only on the edges, sitting in the cheap seats, offering a few side notes alongside far more insightful voices.
My former colleague at King’s College London, David Betz, has recently emerged as the primus inter pares in the debate about the possibility of civil war in Britain. Back in early 2019, we co-authored an essay examining the grim prospects for British democracy and the road to internal conflict that already loomed on the horizon.
That essay, ‘The British Road to Dirty War’, explored the hollowing out of British democratic institutions – a long-running process that had by then left politics little more than a façade. The Brexit psychodrama exposed the extent of the rot. The political class, determined to thwart the referendum result, behaved with a deranged mixture of denial and contempt for the electorate. We saw in this not merely a passing convulsion but the symptom of a chronic condition – one destined, sooner or later, to end badly, Brexit or no Brexit.
For me, the article was merely the latest offence in a long career of thought criminality – though until then I had usually managed to get away with it, courtesy of the last tattered vestiges of pluralism in British universities. This time was different. The arraignment came swiftly. Confronted with unwelcome facts, several so-called colleagues – fluent in sanctimony, illiterate in reality – filed their denunciations, East German–style. Readers may recall that I recounted the episode in The Daily Sceptic under the title ‘What I Learned from My College Stasi File‘.
This was, in the end, the proximate cause of my ousting as head of the Department of War Studies and my departure for Australia. Yet distance brings a certain clarity. It exposed, with brutal simplicity, not just the barren and increasingly authoritarian nature of British higher education, but the slow unravelling of a once-settled nation – methodically dismantling the very foundations on which its stability once rested.
Enter the Civil Wars Debate
Viewing Britain from afar is sobering: the decline of a nation under the stewardship of its self-anointed managerial and political elite – a class long sustained by illusions of mastery, even as the evidence mounts to the contrary. Into this breach, David Betz took up the “civil wars” thesis and carried it forward. He did the heavy lifting: assembling the scholarly scaffolding, laying out the nuts and bolts of the argument, and presenting it with a careful authority that is both brave and necessary. His work is rightly receiving the attention it deserves, recognition for both intellectual rigour and the courage to say what the political classes would prefer unsaid.
The prospect of civil conflict is no longer whispered in private but debated openly. This is a healthy development. Britain and Europe are grappling with the results of elite overreach – economic stagnation, political paralysis, social fragmentation – and the question is no longer whether such conditions exist, but what their long-term trajectory will be. Far better, then, that the discussion takes place in public than festers underground, smothered by nervous institutions. Thanks to outlets such as the excellent Military Strategy Magazine and the unruly but indispensable independent podcasters, the necessary debate has been given air and light.
More recently, James Alexander has added his voice in The Daily Sceptic, drawing a distinction between the writings of David Betz and those of David A. Hughes. He discerns a contrast between what he sees as Betz’s view – that the country is stumbling toward civil war through elite incompetence and mismanagement – and Hughes’s contention that the road to conflict is intentional, a deliberate course imposed upon society.
I confess I have not yet encountered Hughes’s work, but Alexander suggests he is among the vanishingly small number of truly dissenting academics. If so, that alone marks him out as worth reading: in the present climate, dissent is the rarest form of intellectual courage.
On Dichotomies and Deliberate Designs
Alexander’s treatment is thoughtful and nuanced, and he is right to insist that both vantage points deserve consideration, particularly Hughes’s radical reframing of political reality. Yet his depiction of the dichotomy is flawed. To suggest that Betz’s survival within academia implies he is not fundamentally challenging its ideology is, frankly, a misreading. Survival in that system is not comfort or acceptance; it is endurance at the margins. David and I both narrowly survived our purging after publishing ‘The British Road to Dirty War’. In my case, “survival” amounted to a kind of neo-transportation – admittedly more gilded than the original, but no less real for that.
Nor is it accurate to claim that Betz merely observes elites ignoring the breakdown of civilisation while Hughes contends they actively intend it. That is too neat, too binary. Having written extensively with David Betz, I can say our position has never been that elites are simply incompetent – though many, of course, demonstrably are. Rather, their actions form a discernible pattern, and patterns imply purpose. Whether or not the chaos we now endure is consciously engineered at every turn is almost beside the point: the consequences are here, and we must all live with them.
The record of intentionality, in fact, is undeniable. Under Tony Blair, the Labour government pursued a policy of demographic transformation. As Andrew Neather – then a speechwriter and adviser to Blair – acknowledged in the Evening Standard in 2009, that immigration policy was shaped in part by the desire “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity.“ That was no accident, no bureaucratic mishap. It was an explicit goal, and its consequences are now written across Britain’s social fabric. Likewise, the current Labour leadership under Sir Keir Starmer operates from a post-nationalist outlook, one that treats the very idea of nationhood as negotiable, even alien, to the political class.
David and I set out this argument in 2020 in a short article, ‘Empires of “Progress”‘, where we identified a clear elite strategy of re-importing techniques of imperial governance into the domestic realm. The aim was to rule by division: to fracture society into communities, reward loyal in-groups and discriminate against the majority through a two-tier system of justice, policing and social policy. In other words, to adapt the colonial logic of “divide and rule” for use at home. This was not incompetence. It was contrivance.
Meet the New Imperialists
Who are these new imperialists? They appear under fresh guises – “diversity coordinators,” anti-racism activists, curriculum de-colonisers, climate campaigners – but their mission is unchanged: to manage society by division. Their worldview is relentlessly categorical: race, religion, identity. Favoured minorities and immigrant groups, often not oppressed in any meaningful sense, are elevated into protected castes, while the majority is relegated to second-class status. This is not progress; it is imperial management in modern dress. Like their predecessors, they are buoyed by moral certainty and a conviction of their right to rule.
Meet the new imperialists: same as the old imperialists.
Western societies have not, therefore, polarised by chance. A movement – most visible on the progressive left – embraces a radical perspectivism that seeks to manufacture conflict and destabilise once-stable societies. This is no startling discovery. Peter Collier and David Horowitz documented it decades ago: the student radicals of the 1960s sought revolution, not reform. They demanded constitutional rights even as they denounced the constitutional order, exploiting democracy’s tolerance to undermine it. When they tired of being outsiders, they burrowed into the institutions – universities, bureaucracies – and entrenched themselves. It was, as Collier and Horowitz observed, a deeply cynical strategy: use democracy’s freedoms to dissolve democracy itself.
Today, with the maturation of the boomer generation, those same radicals – or their intellectual heirs – occupy positions of power. They are the imperial managers of our age. To call this the product of bumbling incompetence is naïve. It was strategy, not accident.
Where it may yet unravel is in the arrogance of the new imperium. They imagine themselves clever enough – and the public credulous enough – that such policies can be pursued without provoking resistance. But arrogance is no substitute for foresight. Once matters tip into open conflict, escalation takes on its own momentum. Anger is already stirring – and anger, once roused, is the fuse of history.
The Shadow of Dirty War
How this will ultimately unfold is impossible to foresee. In our first exploration of this terrain, David and I sketched the prospect of Britain’s descent into what we termed “dirty war.”
Dirty war refers to a pattern of internal repression, most notoriously in Latin America during the 1970s: years of vicious but low-intensity strife in which regimes and insurgents alike turned their weapons on segments of their own people. Such struggles are rarely declared openly, nor bound by convention. They are fought in the shadows. The boundary between combatant and civilian dissolves; violence becomes selective, targeted, concealed.
On the surface, life may appear undisturbed – whole regions untouched. Yet beneath the façade, a subterranean struggle rages: militias manipulated, opponents assassinated, hostages taken, clandestine detentions and disappearances. Almost inevitably, this is accompanied by crackdowns on free speech and civil liberties – the indispensable handmaidens of dirty war. To deny that the architecture for such measures is already taking shape in Western democracies, Britain included, is wilful blindness.
Over time, brutality becomes ordinary; the “unspeakable” seeps into common knowledge. Secrets circulate, perpetrators protest innocence, but rumour, testimony and leakage of truth expose what everyone already suspects.
Whether Britain is embarked upon such a path is speculation. Betz has outlined scenarios ranging from an urban-rural clash to targeted strikes on critical infrastructure. These are hypotheses, not predictions. Yet precedent is sobering. Argentina’s dirty war was prefigured by deep fissures within Peronism itself, as conservative and radical factions – most notably the Montoneros – splintered, then unleashed assassination and counter-assassination, spawning death squads that soon engulfed the state.
At present, it is difficult to imagine such violence in Britain, cushioned as it is by democratic traditions and institutional inertia. But “difficult to imagine” is not the same as ‘impossible’. Already, the taste for direct action is evident in extreme-left circles, and politically motivated violence has re-emerged across the Atlantic. In North America, radicals steeped in progressive dogma have attempted to assassinate Presidential candidates, murdered local politicians and carried out school shootings in the name of ideological crusades. To assume Britain is immune to such contagion is to mistake habit for destiny.
On Shifting Ground
If Britain does not slide into a dirty war outright, a more plausible prospect is Balkanisation – or, in the local idiom, Ulsterisation. We need not speculate abstractly: within living memory, the United Kingdom has already endured its own version in Northern Ireland.
The signs are visible. The recent flag protests in England reflect a deeper hostility toward the political class, which has systematically negated English self-expression and indulged in a ritual of national self-abnegation that contrasts sharply with the celebration of every other identity. Public spaces are festooned with Pride flags, Palestinian flags, Ukrainian flags – anything, it seems, but the Cross of St George.
The message is unmistakable. The majority population, already disregarded on questions such as immigration, is told that its own symbols of belonging must be hidden, while the emblems of others are to be privileged and extolled. The protests are not simply a reaction to hypocrisy, but the eruption of a resentment long bred by neglect, exclusion and the steady withering of a people’s right to recognise themselves.
And once flags become tribal markers of territory and ideology, they also become precursors of deeper division, escalating tensions, and – if the authorities persist in denying the causes – violence of an infernal kind. Northern Ireland has already shown us where such dynamics lead: bombings, assassinations, even Latin American-style disappearances (this time carried out not by the state but by the IRA and other republican groups).
Let us assume, for the moment, that Britain is still some way off from such an outcome, and that the system retains just enough vitality to adapt, however fitfully, to the popular will. Even so, faith in system stability – the belief that traditions of peaceful, constitutional change can mediate deep divisions – has been badly undermined. That corrosion has been accelerated, intentionally, by the outsourcing of sovereignty to supranational bodies: human rights courts, international bureaucracies, institutions whose rulings dilute and often override domestic consent.
Of course, political commentary is littered with failed prophecies, and one should resist the temptation to indulge in historical clairvoyance. History rarely moves in straight lines; contingency rules. As with earthquakes, we cannot predict the exact timing of the rupture. What we can do – what Betz and others are attempting to do – is map the tectonics. And Britain’s political ground is not solid rock. It is fault lines all the way down.
About the Author
Michael Rainsborough is a writer and academic. After losing his position as head of King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, he decided to leave the UK and now lives in Australia. Currently, he serves as Professor of Strategic Theory and Academic Principal at the Australian War College in Canberra. He has also written under the pen name M.L.R. Smith.
Featured image: A lone man draped in the Union Jack, cut off from the rest of his crowd stands eye to eye with thousands of left-wing activists, with just a handful of police between him and the mob. Source: God Save Great Britain on Twitter
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