All Betz Are Off

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/all-betz-are-off/


A man dressed as a crusader holds up a sword during an anti-Islam protest in Prague in 2016. © Matej Divizna/Getty

“Everywhere we look the war is on our own doorstep”, Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Britain, we have heard all summer, is a tinderbox. “Across the country,” warned the Telegraph, “there are protests against asylum seeker hotels, public fury about crimes committed by illegal immigrants, and a growing sense [that the country] would need just the tiniest spark to go up in flames.” In May, former government adviser Dominic Cummings said that among Britain’s political and military establishment there is a “growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence.” Matthew Goodwin, an academic analyst of the far right and adviser to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, has also repeatedly predicted violence, seeing a “rapidly deteriorating and darkening mood in Britain,” marked by a growing sense “of just how quickly the social contract is breaking down.” Even Elon Musk has joined in, recently tweeting that “Civil war in Britain is inevitable. Just a question of when.”

Discussions like this have long been common on the more extreme fringes of the right, which prophesy not so much civil war—a war between fellow citizens that paradoxically signals commonality even amid conflict—but a far darker vision of race war, a seemingly inevitable conflict between rival ethnic blocs. Yet we can see shades of this same dark vision in the now mainstream predictions of Britain’s slide toward civil conflict. What was once whispered in hushed tones in the smoky backrooms of pubs, or in coded messages on extremist websites, is now proclaimed in TV studios and newspaper columns. Race war is mainstream news.

Chatter about Britain’s imminent explosion into civil war has been a feature in the fetid soup of the online right since the riots of summer 2024, which were sparked by the killing of three young girls at a dance class in Southport and the false rumors that the perpetrator was a Muslim or had arrived in the UK on a small boat. That week featured some of the worst acts of racist violence seen on British soil, verging in places on a pogromist reaction against Muslims and refugees. Hundreds of rioters in Rotherham attempted to set fire to a hotel housing asylum seekers, while in Middlesbrough makeshift roadblocks were constructed by far-right activists to check the ethnicity of passing motorists.

That excited murmur became a deafening racket in February this year, when David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at Kings College London, appeared on the podcast of the writer and journalist Louise Perry to discuss two previously obscure essays charting Britain’s descent into civil war published two years earlier in the magazine Military Strategy. The podcast soon racked up hundreds of thousands of listens, and led to a string of further podcast appearances and profiles. In the months since, Betz has appeared on the Spectator podcast, Heretics with Andrew Gold, the UnHerd podcast, the podcast of the New Culture Forum, and TRIGGERnometry, among others; while his work has been profiled in UnHerd, the Spectator, and the Telegraph, and internationally by Rod Dreher in the European Conservative and Ross Douthat in the New York Times.

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