The right’s obsession with ‘civil war’ in Britain

The culture wars have felt a little bit subdued in Britain of late. Sure, there’s been the steady rumble of discontent over immigration and the odd flare-up over flags or free speech, but given that net migration is down by almost half according to the latest figures — with small boat crossings down 43 per cent compared with the same period last year — there hasn’t been quite so much to get worked up about. With a fairly popular new prime minister in place, and parties on the more extreme ends of the political spectrum falling in the polls, it’s all felt a bit meh out there in the online trenches.

So you can only imagine the excitement that legions of armchair culture warriors would have felt when they saw scenes of violence and destruction unfolding in France over the past week or so. Here was evidence, once again, that western civilisation was under threat from nefarious forces that could only be explained by mass immigration and “creeping Islamisation”. Here was a chance to fantasise about what might happen not just in France, but in the UK too.

“France is burning. Britain is next,” enthused — sorry, warned — the British historian and Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley on Monday in a follow-up to a column last year in which he argued that “Britain is lurching towards civil war and nobody knows how to stop it”. This time around, he wrote: “It’s going to happen. We are all on the same fast path towards fiscal and societal breakdown, and, as others have joked, any British pleasure at seeing France fall is reduced by the creeping fear that we are next.”

Funny, because one can get the sense that “creeping fear” is actually rather titillating for some of these prophets of ostensible doom. Finally a break from the “enshittification” that defines our age; finally something to care about. And I don’t mean to pick on Stanley — he is far from the only person on the right to issue such a warning to Britain.

Strikingly, many of those who appear most enthusiastic and convinced about the prospect of the first civil war in the UK for almost four centuries are people who not only do not live here, but seldom even visit.

“You guys are hurtling towards a civil war — I don’t think there’s a doubt about it,” Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to Donald Trump, told me in July. He also told me that he has a better grip on British politics than the FT and that the British media is so “class-structured” that we don’t see what’s going on. “Look at your street demonstrations, the fighting and things like that. It’s the third world.”

Most infamous among these soothsayers is, of course, Elon Musk, supporter of the far-right Restore Britain, who doubled down on his 2024 claim that “civil war is inevitable” during an interview with The Economist earlier this year (while also saying that the last time he even set foot in the UK was “literally a few years ago”, with the “literally” there to emphasise how recent that is). “If you have a large and . . . rapidly growing group of people whose beliefs are antithetical to western beliefs, at some point you will have a reckoning,” Musk declared. “They will try to implement their views and those who oppose it will oppose it, and that’s what you call civil war.”

Er, it’s not, actually. There might be some slight variations among the definitions given by military historians about what precisely constitutes civil war, but funnily enough Musk’s is not one of them. The British historian John Keegan, author of The American Civil War, says there are three conditions on which it depends: “The violence must be ‘civil’, it must be ‘war’, and its aim must be either the exercise or the acquisition of national authority.” The “war” part covers the scale on which a disturbance or fighting takes place: Stanford scholar James Fearon, for instance, suggests that there should be a minimum of 1,000 fatalities.

At the risk of sounding complacent: we are nowhere near this happening. A generation of young men who would rather watch videos on YouTube than go out and socialise, and who are more familiar with porn than with real sex, is hardly going to bother to take up arms for the sake of defending the values of a civilisation they take for granted.

No, Britain is far too comfortable, stable, socially cohesive and well-functioning to descend into internecine conflict, sadly for the civil war fantasists. Do they themselves really believe it is going to happen? I doubt it.

It is in the political interests of the leaders of anti-immigration parties to persuade people that they are under imminent and severe threat from outsiders, and it is in the financial interests of owners of social media hellsites to stoke division. But the nice thing about being an armchair warrior is that you get all the thrill of the fantasy with none of the risks. And when the shots are (metaphorically) being fired, you can just log off.

jemima.kelly@ft.com