Dominic's Dreams of Civil War

Why has Johnson's one-time aide started to peddle the far right's Sorelian myth?

[The Strategic Defence Review comes out tomorrow - I will be live-blogging it at some point in the afternoon. In the meantime…for subscribers only…let’s talk about our cities potentially going up in flames…]

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Palestine protesters clash with police outside King’s College London

It is summer in Britain, so naturally everyone is talking about civil war. This week we’ve seen Dominic Cummings predict one, and the Kings College London professor David Betz amplify his warning that much of the West is about to be engulfed in civil conflict.

According to Jason Cowley at the Times even the government is worried, with Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy telling him:

“So widespread is the mood of disaffection in Labour’s old post-industrial heartlands that the north of England ‘could go up in flames’. One spark could ignite a conflagration comparable to last summer’s riots provoked by the Southport murders”.

In this edition of Conflict & Democracy I will discuss this flurry of concern over civil strife in Britain and suggest how progressives – indeed everyone who wants to avoid it – should mitigate the risk.

Betz made his first prediction of civil war in the April edition of Military Strategy Magazine. His argument is: the UK, along with other Western societies, can no longer deliver prosperity and welfare to match the expectations of its population; politicians are hated, with widespread disbelief that the political system can sort things out; meanwhile “identity politics” has turned formerly peaceful relationships between minority ethnic communities and the white majority into a position of enmity:

“It is not simply that the conditions are present in the West; it is, rather, that the conditions are nearing the ideal. The relative wealth, social stability and related lack of demographic factionalism…that once made the West seem immune to civil war are now no longer valid. In fact, in each of these categories the direction of pull is towards civil conflict.”

He believes both Britain and France, with their large Muslim minorities, are prime candidates for disintegration, and that when the first domino falls it will probably spread across the continent.

In the second part of his essay Betz spells out what a civil war in Britain would look like: cities would go “feral”; there would be a clash between the urbanites and rural dwellers in which the latter would likely disable key parts of the critical national infrastructure; and government would need to create secure zones while protecting both CNI and fissile nuclear material.

He ends with a list of 15 “credible national political or academic figures” who have predicted civil war in their countries.

And that list sort of gives the game away.

It includes Nigel Farage, French far-right leader Éric Zemmour, Swedish fascist leader Jimmie Akeson, Dutch far right leader Geert Wilders and the authoritarian Putin-loving president of Hungary, Victor Orban - plus other numerous far-right politicians.

In short, most far right politicians in Europe are predicting civil war between white and migrant populations and that’s evidence enough for Professor Betz that it’s likely to happen.

I share Betz’ fear that Western democracies could fail. But let’s be clear about what is going on when far-right politicians speculate about civil war. They are stoking a Sorelian myth.

Georges Sorel, the anarchist turned French nationalist, wrote that, when enough people believe something is going to happen, it doesn’t matter that it never will: it animates their existence and allows them to be led. With Sorel, in his left wing phase, it was the myth of the general strike that drove French revolutionary syndicalism.

Today, for the far right - from the outright street thugs like Tommy Robinson to genteel figures like Farage - the “coming civil war” is the Sorelian myth they use to animate their supporters.

Belief in it creates a continuum between the extremists and those playing by the parliamentary rules. The street fighters go out and try to provoke the civil war, using symbolic violence; the politicians claim that only by enacting their programme - ending migration and reversing out of multiculturalism - can it be avoided.

And if you want an example of someone sliding rapidly towards the extreme end of this continuum, look no further than Dominic Cummings.

This week he published an article predicting a Whitehall coup against a Farage led government, and accused the Labour government – which he calls a “regime” - of being in “deep-surrender-mode against pro-Holocaust marchers, rape gangs and criminals generally”.

People, ideas, machines XII: Theories of regime change and civil war

In the Substack post, amplified in a Sky News interview, Cummings predicted that the UK democratic system will inevitably collapse. He has previously predicted there will be serious violence by the year 2032. In a typically cryptic note in February he said:

“Why do I think violence will become harder to avoid? Crudely… We have roughly a division of force plus special capabilities. There are something like 4-5 ‘divisions’ supposedly on one or another watch list plus many more thousands extremely hostile and not under surveillance…How easy has integration been with people from Ireland and Scotland? Do you think it will be easier and quicker with Taliban country and Somalia?”

He never says it outright, but these hostile ‘divisions’ can only be Britain’s Muslim community - otherwise why does he link their hostility to lack of border control, to “rape gang scandals” and to Afghanistan and Somalia?

Given the seniority of the role he once held, these comments must be treated as more than the outpourings of a swivel-eyed political failure.

I agree with Cummings that the risk of civil conflict is higher than for two decades. The fundamental reason is that politics is not delivering to people, and there is widespread discontent at the level of “getting away with it” when it comes to petty crime and anti-social behaviour by people whose lifestyles involve flouting the rules.

Overlaying that, the far right has adopted a “strategy of tension” on social media, whereby every crime that might possibly have been committed by an asylum seeker is sent viral, from a mixture of anonymous far-right accounts, MAGA and Russian bots, fuelling expectations of a repeat of the Southport riots.

But here’s the difference between me and Dom. I think those who wish to stop such an event have to (a) say so and (b) cease stoking expectations that it is inevitable. Unfortunately, Cummings is doing the opposite. He begins:

“Inside the intelligence services, special forces … bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is 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, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently.”

What is this milieu? The intelligence services and special forces obviously talk to each other, and (in the case of the former) are mandated to guard us against insurrectionary violence and hybrid warfare. But what “bits of Whitehall”, and what “discussions away from Westminster”?

If I had to guess, he is talking about parts of the Home Office, DCMS, FCDO and Cabinet Office whose job it is to monitor hybrid and extremist threats, plus a bunch of retired military and intelligence professionals who live an active political life in various private London clubs.

It is no mystery why they might be worried about “racial/ethnic mob/gang violence” because, as I have written here before: that’s what we experienced last August.

Those jailed for the far-right inspired riots included the hapless (for example the now beatified Lucy Connolly, who called for asylum seekers to be burned to death), the politically motivated far right, plus the Neds who deal drugs in provincial towns on a Saturday night.

The white-vs-Muslim clash Cummings is speculating about actually almost happened in Stoke-on-Trent last summer: during the far-right riots there Muslim youths went onto the streets and defended themselves against attack, and escalation was only avoided by deft policing.

Cummings, like much of the far right, is obsessed with the idea that Britain’s Muslim communities, already incensed by the crimes being perpetrated by Netanyahu in Gaza, will at some point take to the streets and engage white racists in an incipient civil war. He writes:

“We can see on the streets that various forces have already realised the regime will not stop them. What if this spreads? Whitehall’s pathology has pushed it to the brink of this psychological barrier and many of them know it.”

Cummings accuses the “regime” of enacting a 30-year project that is “destroying border control and sane immigration policies”; of actively “prioritising [immigrants] from the most barbaric places on earth” and “funding the spread of those barbaric ideas”. But he insouciant about the far right threat. In fact, for Dom, it’s not a threat but an opportunity:

“In parallel, they’ve started propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’).”

This is hyperbole, false and a slur on millions of non-white Brits.

But to those of us who study the far right, it is evidence that Cummings himself is a long way down the radicalisation pipeline. The hallucinatory picture of UK reality he paints has a lot in common with that portrayed on the Twitter feeds of right-wing extremists.

Aris Roussinos at Unherd, who is sympathetic to some of Cummings’ argument, points out that this right/far-right obsession with talking about and predicting civil war is creating an echo chamber. Much of the panic, he writes

“…derives from the circular reasoning of the Right, a handful of people referencing each other, talking themselves into an unnecessary disaster.”

Who makes security strategy?

Professor Betz’ essays are addressed to three sets of people: “statesmen”, the public and Britain’s military commanders, who he warns - on the eve of an SDR that will name the primary threat as Russia:

“Everything that the general staffs and ministries of defence are doing is secondary to the primary danger.”

He wants them to demand from the politicians a “civilian directive” on how to contain the coming civil war.

Cummings, too, is quite keen on the military entering the fray. He is seemingly obsessed with the current judicial inquiry into alleged SAS murders in Afghanistan, resentment against which, he predicts, is about to become a “tidal wave with potential to be a huge crisis. He also wants the SAS to be tasked with “targeting” the people smugglers (how, in what jurisdiction, with what effect?)

He then turns his fire on the part of government that is supposed to co-ordinate counter-extremism – the National Security Secretariat of the Cabinet Office. I have very few sightlines into how that body works, but Cummings has first-hand knowledge. Based on that he asserts that the NSS has:

“…acquired power from the rest of the security/intelligence system and runs a failing empire within a failing empire”.

He wanted it to become more amenable to control by ministers and advisers, and more “legible” – and says when he asked for this, he was told the independence of the NSS is akin to a constitutional principle.

I have argued for years that the problem with UK security policymaking is not the absence of a professional cadre but of a political cadre who understand it - in particular in the Labour Party, where few people come into politics to think about war, espionage or counter-insurgency. One of the reasons I write this newsletter is to encourage the creation of a security and resilience “cadre” on the progressive side of politics.

But one of the advantages of having national security primarily run by professionals is they can mitigate the risk of idiots like Johnson and Cummings trying to launch bizarre, evidence-free gambits like the ill-fated “Indo-Pacific Tilt” of the 2021 Integrated Review, or Cummings’ attempt to rip up the governance of the MOD and start scratching units arbitrarily from the order of battle, on the eve of the collapse in Afghanistan and the Ukraine war.

What Cummings appears to want, by contrast, is what Trump is getting in the USA – a politicised national security apparatus, where the “friends and family” of right-wing ideologues are allowed to override the experts.

He believes the Whitehall machine is in a state of systemic denial about the dysfunctions of government and the fractured nature of UK society. He says politicians and the senior police officers are scared about law and order breaking down, and with it the mystique of the state.

The point is, what does Dom want to do about it? What, indeed, would be the responsible thing to do if you were invested in the survival of UK democracy?