Civil War Is Coming To Britain

By now you might have seen a video clip circulating on social media of a defiant and terrified young Scottish girl wielding a knife and a hatchet to fend off the advances of a migrant man who allegedly had been harassing her and her younger sister. You can hear the fear and anger in their voices, a mix of desperation and rage and confusion. You can also hear the man’s voice, taunting them. At one point one of the girls cries out, “Don’t touch my little sister, she’s only twelve!”

You might also have heard how the story ended: the police arrested the girl for possession of a bladed weapon. They didn’t detain or even investigate the migrant man.

The entire sordid history of Britain’s civic collapse — stretching back decades to the Rotherham rape gangs scandal and forward to today — is in some ways contained in the striking image of this wisp of a girl with knife and hatchet in hand, facing down a predatory migrant. She is clearly desperate, abandoned by the adults who were supposed to protect her, sold out by the political leaders who were supposed to maintain the cohesion and safety of her city, reduced at last to brandishing crude weapons to defend herself from foreign men brought to her native land against her will.

It’s a scene that encapsulates the total loss of legitimacy of the British government and a portent of what comes next: civil war.

This isn’t hyperbole. Britain right now shows all the signs of descending into sustained civil conflict and eventually open civil war. The ruling elites have broken the social compact by importing mass numbers of foreigners who are hostile to the native population. The government has repeatedly and consistently signaled to the ethnic white majority that there is indeed a two-tiered system of justice — and that they are on the lower tier. Political leaders and public officials have criminalized dissent from their agenda and sent police to harass and arrest people in their homes for criticizing the government.

Worst and most stomach-turning of all, the British ruling class has failed to adequately acknowledge or take appropriate action in response to the Pakistani rape gangs scandal — a scandal which is ongoing, a festering wound in the British body politic. Just this week, Rupert Lowe, a member of Parliament and the chair of the Rape Gang Inquiry, released a statement saying the inquiry had identified 85 local authorities “in which the gang-based sexual exploitation of children is taking place, or has historically done so.” The inquiry, says Lowe, has identified “patterns of targeted exploitation by predominantly Pakistani males, combined with gross negligence from public bodies.”

Most telling, however, was the map that Lowe released with his statement, showing exactly where these rape gangs are. It should come as no surprise that they are mostly in working class, economically downscale regions of Britain, where de-industrialization has gutted entire communities, created high unemployment, high rates of child poverty, and left young British girls vulnerable to predation by Pakistani rape gangs.

One of the really stomach-churning aspects of all this is how the maps confirm that class division plays a major role in the perpetuation of these rape gangs. The ruling class of British society has let this happen because the migrant gangs target working class girls, whom the establishment elites see as expendable. From the political leadership in Parliament down to the police precinct level, the response to the mass rape of British girls by Pakistani migrants was to do nothing, say almost nothing, turn a blind eye for the sake of “community relations,” avoid anything that might seem racist — even as foreign predators were raping and abusing white girls, en masse, for decades.

As it happens, the Scottish girl in the viral video clip is from Dundee, one of those post-industrial, impoverished British cities struggling with pervasive unemployment, youth poverty, and social decay. It’s also one of the red areas on Lowe’s map that show where rape gangs operate. What happened there is happening all over the country. Girls who have had to endure constant harassment — and worse — from migrant men are beginning to speak out, and they are all saying the same thing: I am not safe, I am in distress, I am being hunted. Embedded in their plea is a damning question: Why will no one protect me?

All of this is intolerable, it is too much, and it will lead inexorably to rebellion and bloodshed and war. You don’t have to take my word for it. Back in February, Louise Perry posted a much-discussed podcast with David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London. Betz is not a kook. He’s a specialist in the study of insurgency and counterinsurgency, information warfare, cyberwarfare, and propaganda, who has advised the British government and military over the course of a long career.

Their conversation stemmed from Betz’s 2023 article in Military Strategy Magazine, “Civil War Comes to the West,” in which he argues that “civil war is likely to dominate the military and strategic affairs of the West in the coming years, contrary to the typical expectations of the future war literature, and generally the strategic logic which shall underpin such wars.” In his conversation with Perry he is blunt, saying that it’s not a question of if civil war breaks out in Britain, but when.

Part of the reason Betz decided to write the piece and speak out, he says, is because to him the signs of impending civil war in Britain are obvious and need to be taken seriously. In Betz’s area of academic study it was long thought that the conditions for civil war — the loss of social cohesion, high levels of social distrust, growing intertribal conflict, dwindling economic prospects — simply didn’t exist in the West, or at least not sufficiently to bring about widespread civil conflict.

That’s no longer the case, and nowhere is it more apparent than in Britain, where the political establishment, both Labour and Tory, have broken the social compact by imposing mass immigration on a native population that doesn’t want it. Moreover, the immigrants in question come from predominantly Muslim and Hindu countries with cultures and customs fundamentally alien to Britain. Native Britons, especially the majority ethnic English, have taken notice of what is effectively an alliance, arrayed against them, of the political elite and Third-World immigrants.

In England, a resistance to this alliance is taking shape in the form of a battle over national symbols that presages a larger conflict to come. “Operation Raise the Colours,” as it’s called, is a campaign to plant the distinctive red-and-white St. George’s Cross flag and the Union Jack in as many public places as possible. It’s an act of national solidarity and patriotism directed, unmistakably, at a hostile government that’s obviously trying to erase the ethnic English majority. For the past week or so, images and videos on social media have shown Englishmen tying St. George’s Cross flags to lampposts, painting it on buildings and roundabouts, hanging it from bridges all across England, and marching in the streets holding their banners high.

The political establishment has predictably responded by branding such displays “racist,” tearing the flags down, and throwing the book at anyone caught in the act.

This state of affairs will not go on forever. There will come a flashpoint, likely in the near future, where everything will change. Maybe it will be another incident like the standoff between the migrant man and the girl in Dundee. Maybe it will be a mass stabbing by a migrant targeting young girls like the Southport stabbing last year, which triggered a riot. Whatever it is, Britain will not return from the brink once it happens. War will be joined in earnest, and it will be a contest to the bitter end. Either the regime will be overthrown or the native population will be subdued.

And here’s the important thing for us to understand here in America, the British people will be in the right. When their rebellion comes, they will find themselves on the same side as the American revolutionaries vis-à-vis Great Britain, rejecting a corrupt regime that has lost all legitimacy and all right to rule them. American policymakers and political leaders on the right need to be prepared to see the situation in Britain clearly as it unfolds, and understand it for what it really is: a justified revolution of the people against a tyrannical government.

If our leaders do perceive it clearly, and America comes to the aide of the British people in their hour of need, then Winston’s Churchill’s famous line from June 1940 will take on a new and profound significance, as “the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.”

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.