August, 1938. As Europe tensed for another cataclysmic war, Ulster poet Louis MacNeice wrote about life on the edge of the abyss. Autumn Journal begins in napping Hampshire, as summer ends, “Ebbing away down ramps of shaven lawn where close-clipped yew / Insulates the lives of retired generals and admirals / And the spyglasses hung in the hall and the prayer-books ready in the pew…” MacNeice opened his great poem of foreboding with scenes of narcotic normality.
“Normalcy bias is very powerful,” says David Betz. “It keeps people in their homes when they’re warned Category 5 hurricanes are coming at them.” Betz is Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London. He’s pretty sure that civil war is coming. Not a civil war that we have been trained to recognise. There will be no ordered forces of uniformed troops, no Edgehill or Gettysburg. He foresees something messier, perhaps even more painful, like an abscessed tooth fragmenting in the mouth.
Betz speaks in calm, measured tones. There is very little umming or ahhhing. He quietly explains why what counts as normal in many Western countries today — the UK, the US, France, to name a few — has created ideal conditions for mass violence, dissolving government authority, and even social collapse. The factors at play are varied. The alarming thing is that they are all present at the same time. “To use the cliché,” Betz says, “it’s kind of a perfect storm.”
Anyone with eyes, no matter their political sympathies, knows that something is badly askew. Perhaps this is why Betz’s recent podcast appearance — 186,000 views, and climbing — received so much attention. So often, it is the little things. Visiting London last December, I noticed that the platform waiting room at Acton Town tube station had been locked. A sign on the door read: “THIS IS NOT A TOILET”. I passed that way again this week, to discover the door still locked and the sign still in place. The sign is wrong, of course. If a waiting room is consistently used as a toilet, then it’s no longer a waiting room. It is a toilet.
Everyone has their own examples of this granular decay. Think of the rats, so plump off Birmingham rubbish they’re now the size of cats; or the metal security tags protecting £4 fish fillets; or the depthless cringe of police officers who dress up as Batman and Robin to catch con artists within spitting distance of Parliament.
Betz works with larger themes. Falling living standards and a dearth of well-paid jobs create an “expectation gap”, seeding resentment and apathy through whole generations. The creeping normalisation of identitarian factionalism across British life, both daily and political, weakens our ability to function as a coherent nation. Unprecedented levels of immigration produce growing anxiety in the majority population, an anxiety that may metastasise into something darker. Finally, and perhaps most damningly, Betz brings up a rising crisis of government legitimacy: “The primary thing to be tested is legitimacy. If you have legitimacy, you have no insurgent problem. If you don’t, you are very likely to have an insurgent problem. It’s as simple as that.”
In his academic work, Betz has described legitimacy as a kind of magic spell. If polls are anything to go by, it’s a spell that has now been well and truly broken: a record 45% of Brits “almost never” trust the government to put the nation first. As the academic says: “There has been a collapse in trust over the course of a generation.” The once awesome magus has been revealed as a syphilitic old soak, his robes stained sacking, his staff a rolled newspaper. Public trust in politicians, then, is at an all-time low (“Journalists aren’t much more trusted,” he adds in a wry aside), but Betz is deeply worried that faith in all kinds of institutions is diminishing rapidly.
There are often very good reasons for this trust deficit, especially in areas like crime and punishment. Take the recent furore over sentencing. “It’s ridiculous to deny that we have a two-tier justice system,” Betz says. “Just last week, the Justice Secretary said the sentencing guidelines are two-tier. Which begs the question of what a Justice Secretary is for… It’s outrageous.” Things are no better at the other end of the justice system. “Our police establishment is not neutral. It’s heavily politically biased,” he says, even as the Met fails to solve any neighbourhood crime across swathes of the capital.
No trust means no legitimacy. And that’s when everything begins to unravel. Central government loses its gravitational pull on the populace, which proceeds to drift off into its constituent parts. If the state ceases to offer stability and justice, then people will do as the Romano-Britons did, and look to their own defence. There have been clues as to what this might mean in the coming years.
A recent video, purportedly from New Eltham, shows a street lined with Union flags. This is a perfectly normal sight in East Belfast, but comes as a surprise in South London. Perhaps it shouldn’t. The “Ulsterisation” of Britain in a purely visual sense — flags, murals, a repertoire of annual events designed to affirm and renew control over territory — might be welcomed by some as a simple acknowledgement of lived reality in many parts of the country. But the term means much more than a few flags snapping in the breeze. MacNeice called Ulster “the limbo lands”, a place unhappily webbed with competing claims and warring histories, never quite one thing and never quite the other. The danger is that this becomes Britain’s future too, with all that fate implies.
Betz thinks that conflict, widespread and devastating enough to qualify as a form of civil war, is now close to inevitable. “I don’t see an off-ramp from this,” he tells me. As MacNeice had it, “The bloody frontier converges on our beds / Like jungle beaters closing in on their destined / Trophy of pelts and heads.” Betz favours the work of another Irish poet. He quotes, as many have before him, W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”. The sickening vertigo of the falcon “turning and turning in the widening gyre”, beyond reason or recall, is a seven-word summary of Betz’s argument.
It is impossible to predict when this war will start, or what the inciting events might be. But Betz is pretty sure how it will be fought. Attacks on key infrastructure, most of it protected by no more than a locked door and a symbolic fence — gas compression stations, electricity substations, telecommunications cables, and the like — will be used to devastate cities and frustrate government attempts to restore order. Another Ulster parallel shows the effectiveness of these tactics. In March and April 1969, Loyalist paramilitaries bombed an electricity substation and a series of water installations, resulting in serious water shortages across Belfast. The Northern Irish prime minister of the time, Terence O’Neill, resigned on 1 May. O’Neill was beset by a great many problems, but he was in no doubt that those assaults on infrastructure dealt the final blow to his premiership. They were “explosions which quite literally blew me out of office”.
“Attacks on key infrastructure will be used to devastate cities”
It doesn’t take a William Gibson to imagine the effect a similar, more prolonged campaign would have on London or Liverpool. “Cities will be dark, cold, rioting and unpoliced,” says Betz. The police barely managed to contain the 2011 London riots, a relatively small blister of disorder compared to the trouble he sees coming. “On any given night in 2011, there were maybe 200 really active rioters. Imagine that but 10 or 20 times worse, several thousand people rioting in a hardcore manner. And not just once, but every two weeks.” Any attempt to impose martial law would fail, given the military’s ever-shrinking manpower: “There’s no potential for the British army to respond to wide-scale civil disorder.”
Life would be desperate in those cold and lightless cities, returning us to earlier epochs but without the knowledge and materials that made such eras bearable. I think about the time I lost my glasses, and had replacements delivered within the week. Or about a friend with diabetes, who monitors her condition using a smartphone app and has an insulin pen in her handbag. All that would go, along with the cucumbers and the buses, the postmen and the bars of soap. The preppers would be all right for a time, until cold and hungry people discovered what they had, and took it from them. Betz observes that it wouldn’t be long before people start trying to heat their houses and flats with whatever they have to hand — and once that starts, buildings will go up in flames. “Imagine,” he says, “half a dozen Grenfell Towers in a single winter.”
If Betz is correct in his analysis, then why aren’t preparations being made by the Government? The logical answer is that politicians lack both the ability and the desire to do their jobs. But there are some conscientious people in the British state. Betz has spoken to individuals within the security services who have reached similar conclusions to him, but “they’re embedded within a system that makes it practically impossible to address it openly… They’re very leery of thinking out loud, let alone planning for those contingencies, without a civil directive. It would take a very brave — morally brave — senior British police officer or military figure [to start planning], and it would probably be career-ending.”
Naturally, many in power simply don’t believe that prolonged mass violence is probable. The UK Government’s resilience website lists hazards ranging from severe weather to terrorism, but makes no mention of civil unrest, while Libération reports that a forthcoming French preparedness booklet will be primarily concerned with natural disasters. Perhaps politicians realise that any mention of civil war in an official publication would be a PR catastrophe. Or maybe they view Western citizens as simply too cosseted, too biddable. People raised amid relative plenty and security are simply not likely to erupt in significant numbers.
Some might argue that this is especially true of Britain. The historian Robert Tombs writes that “as long as its present civilisation lasts, England will not have a violent revolution, or a military coup, or a religious civil war”. The institutions and peoples of Britain, so the thinking goes, have profited from an English genius for innovation, adaptation, and compromise. In consequence, our island has been unusually stable for a thousand years. The key words, of course, are as long as its present civilisation lasts. While it’s true that we have inherited a well of cool water, it’s not clear that we’ve continued to draw from it in recent times. It is also true, as Tombs himself points out, that the English are given to “a complacent and often apathetic assumption bred by a fortunate history that nothing seriously bad can happen”. This is one quintessentially Anglo characteristic that appears to be in rude health.
And if the prophets of eternal stability are proved wrong, there’s still room for hope. In How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, Professor Barbara F. Walter offers a number of strategies for pulling fragmented and unstable societies back from the brink. Leaders should seek compromise. Quality of governance should be improved, and be seen to be improving. Extremism should be combatted, particularly where it has taken root in the state’s security apparatus. Efforts should be made to move towards “a truly multiethnic democracy”. Social media should be controlled in order to prevent pernicious factionalism: “Take away the social media bullhorn and you turn down the volume on bullies, conspiracy theorists, bots, trolls…” It all sounds very sensible. The problem, I suppose, is that countries on the brink of civil war don’t tend to be very sensible places.
Whether or not you find Betz’s arguments convincing, the chilling fact is that he doesn’t need to be wholly right. It seems to me that if even 20% of what he predicts does happen, then our lives will change, utterly and for the worse. For most of us, that would mean a smaller and more brutal world. There are so many variables that it’s a future almost impossible to plan for. Even so, Betz does have one piece of advice. “I’m a late middle-aged university professor, not a prepper,” he concedes. “I’m not sitting around planning my apocalyptic endgames… but for what it’s worth, I think anybody living in big cities — anybody in, say, London or Birmingham — should leave.”
It is difficult to consider a world so devoid of hope. Walking to Tesco’s in the spring sunshine, I feel my own normalcy bias bite. Do I really believe any of this? Surely things can’t be as bad as all that? Yet this uncritical faith in endless stability is precisely why we have arrived at a point where so many people are so angry, an anger that seems to be building by the month. I go home and open Autumn Journal again: “And so to my flat with the trees outside the window / And the dahlia shapes of the lights on Primrose Hill / Whose summit once was used for a gun emplacement / And very likely will / Be used that way again…”
