Are We Really Lurching Towards Civil War?

Sallust
The Daily Sceptic

If you thought apocalyptic doom-mongering was the exclusive preserve of the Climate Change lobby, think again. We seem to live in an age when claiming that we’ve passed the point of no turning back and irreversible change is plunging us towards Armageddon is a significant industry, especially in the media. But then it probably always was.

As far as the left is concerned, we’re facing the world being consumed by a conflagration of global warming and flooding, while the right seems increasingly convinced that we’re only a few years, if not months or weeks, from social breakdown and fighting in the streets. But let’s not forget – the Llft thinks that if we don’t all give up meat, live in yurts and forget the words car and aeroplane we’ll get all that anyway.

At the heart of this is “the Malthusian fallacy: forecast of doom predicated on one change that does not take other changes into account” (Social Science Journal 2005). It all goes back to a newspaper revolution in the 19th century that “sparked activists, influencers, disinformation and the Civil War” in an age that couldn’t even have imagined the internet.

Tim Stanley has written an astonishing piece for the Telegraph in which he claims that Britain is lurching towards civil war and that nobody has any idea how to prevent it. It’s a remarkable development that content like this has appeared in the mainstream press:

On one night in Westminster, I met someone who argued for voluntary repatriation, two generations back; a Labour activist told me we must “re-educate” Muslims; and Jacob Rees-Mogg, debating me on GB News, said Britain should take “zero” refugees. I spluttered a reply about the good Samaritan and staggered off to bed, confused and depressed.

For two decades I’ve argued for controlling immigration, and successive governments, including Jacob’s, increased it. Suddenly I’ve woken up in a land where everyone manically wants to reduce or even reverse it, and they’ve leapfrogged me into a pool of dark resentment.

Nigel Farage is mocked as a “dhimmi” for appointing a Muslim to chair his party; he looks nervous of his own supporters. Even Labour has turned on the Sentencing Council, which, for all its faults, was trying to fix a genuine racial disparity (it’s black people who tend to get longer sentences than whites, not the other way around).

On that last saga, so much hinges. It goes to the heart of how a society kills itself with kindness.

Stanley picks up on Louise Perry’s interview with the historian David Betz on YouTube, explaining that:

Betz argues that the conditions for a failed state we ordinarily apply overseas are now found here: frayed social contract, falling trust, polarisation. Into this mix Britain injected multiculturalism, encouraging millions to move here without expecting integration.

If you think “fear of the other” is a human instinct, the policy was mad to begin with. Combine it with economic decline and you invite ethnic competition over services and jobs.

Implicit in the Sentencing Council’s guidance is the belief that when you operate a multicultural society – packed with groups with different values and experiences, advantages and handicaps – the only way to achieve equal outcomes is to treat people differently. In this spirit, says Betz, the modern state acts like an imperial administrator, promoting the interests of preferred minorities while trying to avoid a riot.

Stanley is gravely concerned by how the celebration of diversity has been nothing short of dangerously divisive:

I grew up in a post-colonial world where we said “I don’t see race” and honestly, if naively, meant it. Over the past 30 years, liberal institutions have taught us to see race again – by stressing the wonders of diversity so persistently that some white people feel the State has actively taken a side against them. Ancient, binding concepts, such as “equality before the law” ring hollow. The latest Police Race Action Plan openly rejects the principle of “treating everyone the same” in favour of “equality of police outcomes”.

A situation in which millions believe cops are not impartial public servants but an occupying force is the headline metric of state failure. Mainland Britain has become Ulster.

It isn’t an endorsement of white resentment to acknowledge that it’s real and growing, that beyond the curated Question Time audience, millions have evolved from irony to nihilism to something more disturbing.

Such an article would have surely been unthinkable a few years ago, so why now?

In fact, the low level insurgency has already begun. Ireland has seen arson at asylum hotels. Last year, Britain had riots. Why did No 10 insist that so many be thrown into jail? Betz notes that while Islamist terrorism is more lethal than far-right extremism, there are only four million Muslims whereas there are around 50 million whites.

Were the latter group radicalised, things might go south very fast, hence some in the security forces clearly regard white Britons as the emergent threat.

Well, when “a formerly dominant social majority fears it is in danger of losing that dominance,” to quote Betz, it doesn’t surrender its position quietly – and yet this is what elites constantly tell the white working-class they must do, while refusing to abandon their own privileges.

With democracy abandoning this “formerly dominant social majority”, emigration impossible and aspirations unattainable, Stanley wonders how anyone could be surprised about the very real risks of violence and is perturbed about the state’s possible reaction. He reminds his readers:

Did you ever think the state could imprison us in our homes? And if it can isolate the diseased from the healthy, the vaxed from the unvaxed, do you think it can’t, or won’t, someday separate us based on race or religion?

Worth reading in full.

Meanwhile, Robert Jenrick, Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, argues that everywhere you look Britain has become a two-tier country, and that we have only narrowly just escaped the recommendations of the Sentencing Council which were suspended the other day. These, Jenrick said, “would have discriminated against men, white people and Christians”, had they gone ahead, but form part of a wider culture of a two-tier society:

I recently unearthed the [Sentencing] Council’s immigration guidelines, which water down sentences for immigration offences to below the 12 month threshold for automatic deportation. If enacted, it will mean that hundreds of illegal migrants and foreign offenders will avoid deportation, blowing another hole in our borders.

Last week, the Telegraph uncovered that the Ministry of Justice published new guidance in January which states probation officers must give regard to an offenders “culture” and whether they might have been subjected to “intergenerational trauma” from “historical events” centuries ago. Yes, you read that right. This is bonkers cultural relativism that is not just wrong, but puts the British public at risk.

And it’s spread all the way to frontline police officers, who are being told by the NPCC that they should treat ethnic minorities more leniently, saying that it would be wrong to be “colour blind” and “treat everyone the same”. They are striving for “equity” not “equality”. It comes as no surprise that Labour’s policing minister gave it her endorsement.

The depressing reality is that the two-tier sentencing guidelines were really just the tip of the iceberg. Everywhere you look under Keir Starmer we have a two-tier system, where ethnic and religious minority groups are given special treatment. And instead of getting infrastructure and new homes built, his deputy, Angela Rayner, is wasting her time on a definition of Islamophobia that may afford Islam protections against criticism and satire that no other religions benefit from.

Jenrick claims that a two-tier system is laying the foundations for ‘social unrest’:

The social fabric of our country has frayed because of unprecedented levels of mass migration, coupled with the denigration of British culture. We now see the balkanisation of parts of our major cities and the proliferation of groups lobbying for ethnic and religious interests.

Also worth reading in full.

And if all that seems bad enough, meanwhile William Sitwell warns about the prospect of a summer of chaos at the hands of JSO V.2 aka Youth Demand:

To encourage folk to join their merry dance, they are branding themselves as a veritable Just Stop Oil 2.0, as glittering and tempting as an iPhone upgrade; joining together those two couture lines of protest: pro-Palestine and anti-fossil fuel.

“Young people are resisting,” they declare on their new website, conveniently forgetting to add the words “going to work”.

And then there’s lots of frightfully cross stuff. In fact, they give Dave Spart, that parody of a Left-wing agitator in Private Eye, a run for his money. “The Government is engaging in absolute evil… they are enabling genocide… contributing to the murder of billions to keep the fossil fuel profits flowing.”

Apparently ‘Youth Demand’ is planning:

Daily co-ordinated actions, with plans to “shut down London with swarming road-blocks day after day”. And, doubtless, a lot more. Think the usual soft targets of art galleries and sports venues. Yes, the very same places that offer “real quiet and sanctuary”.

For some, that sanctuary lies in the snooker hall, a diverting contest between two artists of the cue and cloth. For others, it’s a quiet road in London on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Yet this mob, with its fetish for protest and banging drums, frothing at the mouth and countenancing no reasoned argument; no nod, even, to actual reality (the sovereignty of a democratic country, the right to a warm home and hot water, for example), plan to disrupt and harass. And all the while not touching the, albeit phantom, “fossil-fuel elite”. But they will, for sure, annoy the living hell out of everyday folk going about their lives.

Worth reading in full if you’ve nothing better to do.