The Quiet Civil War Has Already Started
When the Government stops listening, people stop obeying. That’s when the real trouble starts.
David Betz isn’t some bloke in the pub ranting about revolution. He’s a Professor of War Studies at King’s College London. In his essay, ‘Civil War Comes to the West‘, he outlines the precursors to societal collapse. Collapsing trust in institutions, a gulf between rulers and ruled, policy failure and a public that no longer believes lawful change is possible.
Sound far-fetched?
This week in Essex, a public meeting about a migrant hotel descended into chaos. Protesters and counter-protesters squared off, police were called, and the locals, those living with the consequences, were ignored. They usually are.
Meanwhile, doctors are striking as the NHS buckles under its own weight. Seven million on waiting lists. A&Es in meltdown. GP appointments cancelled before they’re even booked.
Birmingham Council went bust, after blowing millions on mismanagement and diversity consultants, while bin collections and libraries vanished. Thames Water dumps sewage into rivers by the ton, drowns in debt, and still pays out bonuses.
No resignations. No prosecutions. Just more slogans and ‘action plans’.
This isn’t governance. It’s theatre. A slow-motion farce in which the audience pays, the actors lie, and critics are told to mind their tone.
We’re not in civil war yet, but we are in slow decline. The institutions still stand, but few believe in them. Politicians. Civil servants. The BBC. The Bishops. Sacked football commentators turned podcasters. Sanctimonious actors. All spouting the same Orwellian doublethink: ‘Diversity is strength’, while reinforcing security at migrant hotels and telling police not to take sides. When they clearly do, nothing happens.
Betz calls it the death of trust. And once trust dies, peaceful consensus dies with it.
The Warning Signs Are Flashing
Don’t take my word for it. Look at the data:
- Just 9% of Brits trust politicians to tell the truth (Ipsos, 2024).
- Fewer than one in five trust the BBC — numbers halve outside London (YouGov, 2023).
- Only 34% believe democracy works well in the UK, down from 62% a decade ago (British Social Attitudes, 2023).
- 72% say immigration is too high, yet ministers still mumble “the system is broken” as if someone else broke it.
- National debt now exceeds 100% of GDP, with 20 years of consecutive deficits (ONS, 2024).
Meanwhile, knife crime nears record highs. School standards drop. Public services strain. Home ownership collapses. Mental health crumbles. Life expectancy stagnates.
In the poorest areas of England, male life expectancy is now under 73. Two decades behind affluent areas. Blackpool could be mistaken for post-Soviet decay.
Young people, drowning in rent, debt and hopelessness, are told to be grateful for a Netflix subscription and a mental health app.
The Establishment swears blind it sees the rot. It promises reform. Nothing changes. Only taxpayers are ever held accountable, footing the bill while public sector leaders cash in, without a word of regret or a hint of shame.
The Problem Isn’t Just Incompetence. It’s Impunity
It’s not that the system fails. It’s that no one pays for it.
- The Post Office scandal: Hundreds of innocent lives ruined. No exec jailed.
- Covid: Families banned from funerals. Politicians partied. No resignations.
- Thames Water: 1.3 million hours of sewage dumped. Bonuses paid.
- Net Zero: £28 billion a year to leave you cold while ministers fly to climate summits.
- Grooming gangs: Thousands abused. Officials turned blind eyes. No accountability.
- HS2: Over £100 billion incinerated. Scrapped halfway. Nobody fired.
- Windrush: British citizens wrongly deported. Apologies offered. No one sacked.
- Grenfell: 72 dead. Safety failures known for years. Still no prison time.
- Illegal immigration: Record boat crossings. £8 million a day on asylum hotels. Complain, and you’re labelled a bigot.
Other Nations Faced the Cliff, And Swerved
Denial has a shelf life. Eventually, even the most ideological governments hit the wall. And when they do, reality bites hard.
Sweden used to be the progressive paradise. Open borders, generous welfare, soft integration. Then came the bombings, the gang crime, the ghettos. In 2023, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson declared:
Segregation has gone too far. Sweden is too weak to protect itself. … We will turn every stone to restore safety.
It now enforces mandatory integration, language testing and relocation from ethnic enclaves. Not Nigel Farage. Not Marine Le Pen. That’s Sweden’s centre-Right.
Argentina spent decades on ‘social justice’, printing money and bloating the state. Along came Javier Milei, a libertarian with a chainsaw who promised to slash government, abolish the central bank and dollarise the economy.
The elites laughed. The people elected him.
Within months, he cut spending by 5% of GDP and eliminated the deficit. Poverty is still high, but there’s a plan, not platitudes.
They Swapped Platitudes for Principles
Sweden and Argentina bowed to progressive orthodoxy. Open borders, moral grandstanding, endless handouts. Then reality crashed the party.
They didn’t hold a vigil. They changed course. Swapped slogans for action. Started governing like it mattered.
Meanwhile, Britain hums along to ‘equity’ and ‘sustainability’ while the lights flicker, the bills climb and the postcode riots inch closer.
Maybe it’s time to stop voting for the same polished halfwits in different rosettes? The house is on fire. It might be worth letting someone other than the arsonists hold the hose.
This Isn’t Left vs Right. It’s the Ruled vs the Ruling
Some of the clearest voices now come from across the old divides.
Toby Young, founder of tte Daily Sceptic, now sits in the House of Lords. Alongside him: Claire Fox, former revolutionary communist turned free speech advocate. Two former enemies, united in scepticism.
The real battle isn’t Tory vs Labour. It’s between the rule-makers and the rule-followers. The architects of failure and the people made to live with it.
So What Do We Do? Revolt?
Not yet. But we need noise. Relentless, dinner-party-ruining noise. Because polite silence and voter apathy is what let this rot take hold.
Here’s how to start:
- Vote like you mean it. No more ‘lesser evils’.’ Choose someone who’ll fire civil servants and tear up the script.
- Turn up. At council meetings, school boards, planning hearings. Ask calm questions. They hate that.
- Support the plain-speakers. Journalists, podcasters, comedians, councillors.
- Don’t conform. If your bank or university asks for pronouns, ask for theirs.
- Call out cognitive dissonance, the polite word for ‘we know it’s nonsense, but we say it anyway’.
- Defend free speech. Back groups like the Free Speech Union with your voice and your wallet.
One Final Warning
Betz says it best. When people lose faith in peaceful change, they don’t stay peaceful.
We’re not at the cliff’s edge, but we’re running out of road. Britain won’t collapse with a bang. It will rot politely, in boardrooms, in press releases and in taxpayer-funded failure.
Ignore it, and we won’t get revolution. We’ll get risk assessments on how to manage the decay without offending anyone.
So stand up. Speak out. Because they’re betting you won’t.
As Churchill said: “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
Now would be a very good time to stand.
Clive Pinder writes from the awkward space between common sense and treason. Lapsed executive, writer, broadcaster and equal opportunity offender, you can find him on Substack.
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What an excellent article, should be plastered everywhere!!
Well yes but it is Left vs Right, at least my version of “Right”. Almost all of the destruction being wrought seems fundamentally left wing in nature to me.
“Just 9% of Brits trust politicians to tell the truth (Ipsos, 2024).” That’s a good start – but at the last election, 80% of those who voted, voted for established parties with a record of supporting lies and failure.
The left-wing story, more so since the advent of Marxism, is that the world is bad and must be revolutionized, that is, destroyed and rebuilt¹, to be improved to a tolerable level.
¹ Build back better is really a not-so-coded reference to The Revolution.
Indeed. The world IS bad but I think the “right wing story” is that we work with flawed human nature rather than in order to reshape it, we use pragmatic solutions that have stood the test of time, we default to changing slowly or not at all, everything is a tradeoff. I think it’s less ideologically driven, though I suppose belief in private property and free markets is kind of ideological. Finally for me the key thing is that the right believe that individuals should make decisions and solve problems for themselves or in free association with others, and the role of the state should usually be as an enabler or providing a framework. But I am probably putting my own spin on this.
By origin and tradition, right vs left is monarchy vs republic, or, more generally, rule by natural leaders selected in some way vs rule by intelligently and carefully designed institutions. The Anglo-Saxon tradition, both in Britain and the USA, is part of the left-wing politcal spectrum and originally referred to as (soul- and valueless) “liberalism.”
The conventional understanding is that the term “right versus left” arose from the French Revolution. The modern interpretation varies.
Sitting order in the French revolutionary assembly, right — people who wanted to keep a constitutional monarchy, left — people who wanted a (somehow democratic) republic. I’m not aware of any usage in the 19th century but the political left/right split definitely resurfaced in the Weimar republic where the left-wing parties were the former majority parties of the imperial Reichstag which wanted to keep the republic established by the coup of the SPD¹ in concert with the communist uprisings organized by the USPD and the right-wing parties those which were opposed to it. Notably, the chancellor Joseph Wirth closed its eulogy of the murdered Walter Rathenau with the words Da steht der Feind […]: Dieser Feind steht rechts! [There stands the enemy […]: This enemy stands on right!, referring to the DNVP MPs in parliament, in particular, Karl Helferrich] Modern usage is more diffuse as proper right-wing parties, that is, parties opposed to parliamentary rule, don’t really exist anymore and would be illegal in many countries (espescially in Germany and Austria). Generally, some people who more-or-less stand in the Marxist tradition are still calling themselves left and call whatever other parties are opposed to them right as derogatory term, even… Read more »
Nice read. But in my opinion, the permanent state of emergency everything’s claimed to be in¹ is a trick so-called ‘democrats’ employ to cause the population to engage mentally with their sham democracy where voters are asked to tick boxes every couple of years but have no real influence on anything beyond that. “You must tick the right box, otherwise, the world will go under!” (and you must believe that this box ticking actually accomplishes something despite all evidence is to the contrary).
I’d seriously welcome a return to less hysterical times.
¹ The others do that, too, only their story is the planet is boiling to death because of human-emitted CO₂ and Nazis forever engineering genocides are everywhere and only barely kept at bay by the forces of good and light which are severely weakened because of the evil internet enabling evil people to publish evil things.
We’re not in civil war yet,
But we are at war in that our rulers are waging war on us. When we start fighting back, then the war will be civil (and not at all civil, of course).
Starmer and others insist on calling illegal invaders “irregular”. A formal definition of this word denotes a soldier who does not belong to the regular army.
Yes War it definitely is & it’s more effective than if Germany had actually invaded us !
“The institutions still stand, but few believe in them. Politicians. Civil servants. The BBC. The Bishops.”
Yes they do, infiltrated and colonised by those who embrace Marxist-Socialist ideas, which means the destruction of capitalist economies, Western culture, national identity, and societies conditioned to believe material gain, consumption is desirable – so-called false consciousness – and a global population of equals united and ruled as one, International Socialism nowadays called International Law.
The “Long March through the institutions” a slogan coined by socialist student activist Rudi Dutschke around 1967 to describe his strategy to create radical change in government by becoming part of it, is complete.
An awful lot of people, mostly those in more influential circumstances are in denial.
To date it is only white van man class that has understood what is going on.
I fear that it will be years before the centrist dad’s catch on.
And what will be left? Can we get back? Maybe.
Damn close run thing though.
The “March”was coined earlier than 67 I think , I’ll check 👍
Gramsci & Marcuse started the ball rolling & as you say ,Dutschke picked up the Baton , done a good job haven’t they 😵💫🤯
Choose someone who will… that’s like saying just as the bus has gone over the cliff edge, change the driver to someone who will use the brakes.
You are suggesting to use the system which is rotten and broken to fix it. It cannot be fixed The means no longer exist. Odd it appeared at the start of the article that was understood, then the nonsense about we just need to do stuff… then something wonderful happens.
Our current “democratic” system is broken beyond repair which is why I consistently post this…
Our salvation will not arrive via the ballot box.
I’m not sure what to make of other things in the article when you say that male life expectancy in some areas is below 72, ‘two decades behind’ more affluent areas. I really don’t think that’s so. By ‘below 72’ presumably you mean 71.something. Show us the stats that say male life expectancy in some areas is 91 – I can’t find anything.
Fair point on the 91—no one’s jogging to that in the Shires just yet. But the broader claim stands. In parts of Glasgow like Calton, male life expectancy has dipped to 67–68, while places like East Dorset or Wokingham enjoy 85+. That’s a 17-year gap—and if we’re talking healthy life expectancy, the gulf stretches to nearly two decades.
So yes, “below 72” is accurate. And “two decades behind” isn’t hyperbole—it’s the postcode lottery playing God with your final innings. The data’s all there. Grim, but there.
Is there round the clock protection for Marx’s tomb in Highgate?
What to do?
Prayer changes things.
Always has. Always will.
Look at this lying toad. ”We’ve had free speech for a very long time and we’re very proud of that.” Trump isn’t stupid and he has the measure of Starmer, he knows about the political prisoners jailed for tweets and the latest online censorship act. I’d like to think a thought bubble from Trump’s head in this clip would read: ”You’re a barefaced, lying, slippery jackass and everybody, including my administration, really hate you!” lol
”I wonder if Starmer knows nobody standing there or watching at home believes him.
12,000 people a year are arrested for speech.
The Home Office has a police unit monitoring posts for “anti-migrant sentiment.”
He’s smiling because he’s nervous. It just makes us hate him more.”
https://x.com/Con_Tomlinson/status/1949809632702066828
Good! The man is a devious, two-faced worm and London is a dangerous shit hole because of him;
”President Trump says to the British press ‘I’m not a big fan of your Mayor, he’s done a terrible job in London !’
Goodness he’s saying all the things we do.” Linda A.
Reminds me of the Aesop Fable about the cold wind failing to force a man to take off his coat, while the sun succeeds by simply being warm. How Starmer loves talking about those irregular soldiers – sorry – migrants.
This is the clip with Trump, here. I love how plain-speaking Trump is, and to pot with what anybody thinks, lol;
”Trump: “I’m not a fan of your mayor [Sadiq Khan], a nasty person…He’s done a terrible job, the mayor of London.”
Starmer: “He’s actually a friend of mine.”
Trump: “I think he’s done a terrible job.”
So awkward and yet so right and hilarious!”
https://x.com/ArchRose90/status/1949827911516860621
I watched it live on GB News. Lucky Americans, poor UK.
Fortunately I missed him smiling. In the tiny clip I saw he looked like a bewildered stuffed dummy, totally clueless.
Have to feel sorry for the victorious Lionesses who have to meet this halfwit. At least they have something to smile about unlike all those unfortunate employees made to line up behind him [and others] to listen to mendacious drivel.
“Choose someone who’ll fire Civil Servants and tear up the script” How on earth are people meeting this description ever going to get on a ballot paper? How could there be such a candidate in every constituency? Where I live central office imposed their choice above local candidates the local association wanted. I have never voted for her.
Easier with a Presidential system. Trump and Milei have shut down quite a lot.
Excellent article, I would suggest that if sufficient numbers stopped paying council tax or better still the sum they believe they actually receive services for, in my case council tax 5k per annum, I live in a remote rural area, no street lighting, not gritting or snow clearing, pot holed roads, my bins are collected every three weeks. So my theory is that I actually should pay no more than around a thousand pounds per annum and that is very generous,
Then I would suggest be tardy in income tax returns, VAT returns, such that the Government actually starts to value the money they receive and spend it wisely as opposed to spaffing it on net zero, migrants, the anxious , the public sector fat pensions.
Your council tax pays for things you probably don’t use, like adult social care. That’s socialism for you.