Loading summary
Transcript125 lines
- [00:00]
Host 1
The world feels increasingly unpredictable. Whether it's inflation, market volatility or global instability, safeguarding your financial future has never been more important. That's why we've partnered with Augusta Precious Metals, a company that stands out for their integrity and expertise in helping people protect their wealth with gold. I've already done that for my family, and Augusta makes the process simple and trustworthy. With Augusta, it's about more than just buying gold. They educate you on why gold matters and how diversifying your savings with a gold diarrh can shield your retirement funds from inflation and economic instability. And they make it simple by offering a free no strings attached info kit to get you started. Text trigger to 35052 to get your free gold IRA info kit. That's an SMS to 35052 and simply quote one word trigger. Protect your wealth and take the first step towards securing your financial future. Today.
- [00:59]
Professor David Betts
There is a gigantic ball of political energy that is building up. The spark is just intrinsically unpredictable. If we had to list factors in order, multiculturalism would be at the top. And if we were to put some kind of ranking on them, it's like 90% people who either express the view or nod at the view that we want our country back and the people who want you to shut the up. So there is this sense on the part of the formerly dominant majority that they are losing this status, which impels them, as fear usually does, to act up.
- [01:43]
Host 1
David Beth, welcome to Trigonometry.
- [01:44]
Professor David Betts
Thank you.
- [01:45]
Host 1
You have been on a number of our favorite podcasts recently, talking about the risks of civil war unrest in Western societies, particularly in Europe, in a very persuasive way. There are many people who shout these slogans online without really having anything to say or back it up. But you're someone who researches this. So before we get into that, just tell everybody a little bit about who you are and what your career is about so that we can talk about this issue.
- [02:10]
Professor David Betts
Okay? My name's David Betts. I'm a professor in the War Studies department at King's College London, which is the biggest and best war studies department in the world. I've been there for about 25 years now. My area of specialism is fundamentally contemporary strategy, contemporary military affairs. I've written on a wide range of things, but probably most pertinent to the discussion we're about to have, I've been particularly interested over many years in the topic of insurgency and counterinsurgency, which is essentially the study of how countries are torn apart from the inside and sometimes Put back together. For the most part, that research has concerned internal wars in foreign countries, in hot, dusty places abroad and not so much at home. But it began to occur to me, actually going back as far as a decade ago, particularly heightening in the post Brexit vote, parliamentary shenanigans to subvert that vote. It particularly began to dawn on me that the conditions that we generally understood to be contributory to the emergence and the persistence of insurgency in other countries, of internal conflict in other countries, was more and more apparent in our own countries. In that case, particularly, the quality of a country that is particularly pertinent is the perception of legitimacy, which is a huge issue in the study of insurgency and counterinsurgency. And my feeling was that British governments, amongst other Western governments, were essentially doing things in a rather textbook manner that seemed designed to diminish their own perception of political legitimacy, and that that was a dangerous thing for our societies. So I wrote, I continued to research and to write on this and did a couple of papers now, many years back, but one of which was picked up by your friend and colleague Louise, from the Maiden Mother matriarch Louise Perry. Louise Perry, who picked up a paper that I probably wrote in 2022, published in 23, with the title Civil War Comes to the West. And so she contacted me out of the blue and said for reasons of her own, she'd been brooding on this subject and looked online if anybody had said anything, had said anything about it, and lo and behold, she. She found me. That led to a discussion with her, which then put that paper and the things that I'd been writing and talking about in an academic sphere, which is not terribly noticeable, to be perfectly honest, much more into the mainstream of the public sphere.
- [05:22]
Host 1
And one thing I would just say, as an observer, we've obviously had, you know, hundreds of people sitting in your chair at this point, and most people that come on our show, they usually have a thing they want to say and they're desperate to say. You almost seem quite reluctant to be talking about this in this public way.
- [05:37]
Professor David Betts
Yeah, I'm reluctant to be talking about it for reasons that are probably pretty obvious. It's rather uncomfortable. I'm not a public figure for. For one thing, so it's a bit unusual for me to be sitting at a table with a camera pointed at me in a bright light. Feels a little bit, you know, feels a bit. Anyway, it's new for me and slightly awkward at that. The subject matter. Matter, moreover, is extremely unpleasant. And the climate, the political and social climate is such that it can be rather painful to talk about these things. You make enemies whom you don't want to make. You alienate people, friends, family, who you would wish to alienate. So, you know, I'm not here to. You're correct. I'm not jumping at the bit to talk about this. I feel compelled to do so by my own conscience, I guess, and my own calculation of the state that we're in and people are interested. But frankly, no, I'm not trying to sell anything. And I am a bit of the proverbial fish out of water.
- [06:59]
Host 1
I'll admit it's a detour, but I think it's worth exploring. I'm curious because what is the nature of the criticism from friends? I understand online people say stupid things all the time about everyone who has any opinion. But. But in terms of your own personal life, friends, colleagues, et cetera, what's the nature of their concern about what you're doing?
- [07:19]
Professor David Betts
I think people feel that when you speak about things that you actualize it.
- [07:23]
Host 1
I see people often do that. They confuse predicting that something will happen if we continue down the current path with wanting it to happen or making it happen.
- [07:31]
Professor David Betts
Yes, that's the common thing one does try to explain. Let's say, for example, if I was an astronomer and I'm looking through my telescope and I see a meteorologist headed towards the planet, my understanding of celestial mechanics and impact energy of heavy, rapidly moving objects as the sweet meteor of death is headed towards our planet. I'm not calling for that to occur. I'm simply saying my understanding of reality and on the basis of my observation, this is our situation. But fundamentally, I think the basic problem is that people have an actualization issue. People think that words can create situations and there is a fear that perhaps it might inflame.
- [08:28]
Host 1
No, I understand that. I don't think they're right. But I do understand the difference between a meteor or a comet coming at the earth and human behavior, which can be modified by what they're hearing in the media and so on. So I understand, even though I don't agree. But anyway, coming back to you kept using the word insurgency, and I wanted to ask you to delve into that, because when I think of insurgency, I think of a guy who straps a bomb to himself driving into a market in Kabul shouting Allah Akbar. I don't think of modern Britain. So what are you. What are the parallels that you're seeing?
- [09:04]
Professor David Betts
Right. So the first thing to understand is that imagine insurgency is like an iceberg, okay? What everybody knows about an Iceberg is that the part that sticks above the water is the smallest part, right. Most of the energy, the bulk of the iceberg, is under the water. The bit that you just pointed to, the guy screaming Allah Akbar, strapping a bomb to himself and blowing himself and blowing himself up in a market or what have you, that's the shiny bit poking up over the surface. The important bit is underneath there. Right? So the first thing is to understand that an insurgency is a social movement, fundamentally. And social movements are normal in every society, right? If you want to move ideas around, if you want anything to happen in your society, you have to have social movements. And a normal society welcomes these things. Some social movements are more contentious than others. The civil rights movement, for example, is a highly contentious social movement. Environmentalism at various stages, including now, might be seen as a very contentious social move. Anti capitalism, likewise, insurgency differs from normal social movements only in the extent that it is a social movement which in some respects goes beyond the law. Nelson Mandela had a famous trial, early 1960s. He's charged by the apartheid regime with treason, I think was what he was charged with. It doesn't matter particularly, but he. He explained what his line of thought was about, forming the armed wing of the ANC and so on. And he said that essentially, at some point, given some sorts of grievances, you have to decide whether you surrender to the situation, to the status quo, because it can't be changed within the rules of the game, or you go beyond the law. Now, how you go beyond the law, there's immense variation in how you might do that. You might do sabotage, property destruction, you might use physical violence, rioting are the types. Or if you do, you might conduct physical attacks, but even then you might make calculations about whom you attack. Do you attack uniform figures, or are you less precise? But essentially with insurgency, what I'm trying to get at here is that you have a giant ball of energy that is the important bit, but is under the surface, and the bit at the top is the less important. This is the most obvious in a sense, but it is the less important. Now, to answer your question, you are quite right. We don't have whatever, like Britain first guerrillas blowing themselves up in Westminster at this point in time, or doing other sorts of things like that. But what you do have is you have an increasing sense of alienation from normal politics. You have more and more people expressing the view that politics is broken, that politics doesn't work. And if you understand what politics is, for what politics is, politics is fundamentally a way of Solving collective action problems. And if politics doesn't work to solve collective action problems, then it has to change, right?
- [13:13]
Host 1
Just for people who don't know what is a collective action problem.
- [13:15]
Professor David Betts
Any collective action problem is a problem which can't be solved through individual effort. So our political system exists to aggregate people's views on a range of social matters through a particular mechanism, through the political system. In this case through elections. The idea being that we have elections, these people called elected politicians who go into Parliament and discuss issues of the day and come to decisions or answers about problems which exist in that society. Now you or I as individuals may differ with the decisions taken, but in a normally functioning political system, that is one which is perceived as legitimate, we accept that the rules of the game have been applied fairly, right? So while we may not agree with the outcome of a particular election and the set of policies which follow from that, we accept that at the end of the day we're all British citizens. Essentially our pre political loyalty is to Britain as a nation. And there is a perception that the system itself is legitimate, whether or not we, we individually agree with, with those decisions.
- [14:42]
Host 1
In other words, my wife and I had a discussion about where to go for the weekend. She ended up winning that discussion. I accept it because I care more about the family, so you care about it.
- [14:52]
Professor David Betts
You have a very little, you have a very little political system in, in your family that aggregates decisions.
- [14:58]
Host 1
But at the end of that I don't spend the rest of my time going, well, you know, we should never have made this decision. This is the wrong decision. We accept the decisions because we are a family, effectively.
- [15:09]
Professor David Betts
So yes, actually that's not a bad analogy. It's quite small, but it's not a bad analogy. If you think of a family as a social unit which has a natural affinity in which the people have, the members have a natural affinity for each other and the loyalty to the family which precedes their feeling, well, their self interest. So when you have a system like ours in which the data is perfectly clear that trust in government is almost in single figures now, trust in all institutions has been in decline in the west for a generation, slightly more than a generation in fact, with politics being very much in the lead in terms of rather dismal race to the bottom, so we have a system which is increasingly perceived as illegitimate, that isn't a functional way of solving collective action problems. And moreover, we have countries now where on account of things like the triumph of identity politics, primarily people don't share the sense of pre political loyalty, which they once did, which is, I would suggest, the major contributory factor to the perception of illegitimacy and the perception that politics is no longer functioning as it ought to. Moreover, the problems are now so severe that the political system is unable to cure itself. So if you want to change, in essence, we are now getting very close, both in Britain and many other countries, to a situation where people in fairly large numbers are beginning to feel that the problems are intolerable and urgent and that they cannot be solved within the existing rules of the game. That is essentially a description of an incipient insurgency.
- [17:36]
Host 2
And David, we've used the term civil war, and I think it's quite important that we clarify. What do you mean by that? What is the academic description of civil war?
- [17:44]
Professor David Betts
Okay, well, there are many academic descriptions of civil war. So without boring you too much on that, I use the term civil war in the sense of referring to a form of war in which the belligerents, two or more the belligerent parties were both under the same sovereign authority at the outbreak of the war. Now, if you take just that as a definitional, as your left and right brackets on the definition, quite obviously a lot of difference. There are a lot of variations that might apply within that category of civil war. You know, all wars are unique and all civil wars are therefore unique and messy. Even within the same time, same historical time, there are considerable variation from one place to another. If you look at their civil wars under that definition, let alone historically. So there's a lot of different types. And I think that your question arises from that observation of people that, well, look, the American Civil War, if that's your image of civil war, then, David, what are you talking about in this case? So I use that term, however, civil war as opposed to insurgency, as I might have done, I think, because, primarily because I want to highlight the fact that this is of its origin, that it is internal in origin and not external in origin. And that is a fundamental quality of civil war which inclines me to use that term. There are other terms that might apply, and perhaps we'll get into this as the discussion moves on further that one might apply like revolution or uprising, rebellion, so on and so forth. And I have tended to avoid the use of those terms because at least in my mind, that implies something, something more spasmodic and potentially short term. Right. So that you, I mean, scholars will, will argue, I mean, scholars will argue about everything. But I think semantically, for, for me, revolution kind of implies something that it, that is, is Explosive, right? It goes from 0 to 100. But it's also short in duration. It has a big effect. So with that in mind, the use of those terms, I think can mislead people from. What I want them to understand is that this isn't a short term thing. Once you tip into civil war, we can talk about when that occurs or indeed whether we have already reached the tipping point or the tipping point has been reached already in the past. But once you're in the Civil war, they tend to last for a long time. There is a spasmodic quality to them, but there is also a long term process. There's a prehistory to what leads to them, the building up of the proverbial tinder that explodes. So I want to draw people's attentions to these aspects of the coming conflict, which I've described. And for better or worse, I think that Civil War does that better than other terms. Black Friday Savings are here at the Home Depot, which means it's time to add new cordless power to your collection. Right now, when you buy a select battery kit from one of our top brands like Ryobi or Milwaukee, you'll get a select tool from that same brand for free. Click into one of our battery best deals of the season and stock up on tools for all your upcoming projects. Get Black Friday Savings happening now at the Home Depot. Limit 1 per transaction exclusions apply. Full eligible tool list in store and online.
- [22:02]
Host 1
If you're like us, you believe that understanding how freedom actually works is one of the most important things a citizen can do. That's why I think many of you will find this fascinating. Hillsdale College has just released a brand new Freedom Online course on the Federalist Papers, the documents that laid the philosophical and constitutional foundation of the United States. Watch it all now for free at Hillsdale Edu Trigger. Even if you're not American, this stuff matters. The Federalist isn't just about one country. It's about how you design a system that protects liberty, limits power, and encourages reasoned debate. And in an age where those things often feel in short supply, this course couldn't be more timely. It breaks down what the founders actually meant, not what modern commentators say they meant. So if you want to deepen your understanding of law, government and liberty from the people who actually thought it through at the beginning, I highly recommend checking it out. Watch it all now for free at Hillsdale Edu Trigger. That's Hillsdale Edu Trigger.
- [23:08]
Host 2
So that's a fantastic description. I thought it was important so everybody's on the right page because obviously when we talk about terms like civil war, everybody's got their own, own particular idea, particularly if you're not a scholar or an academic. Now we're looking at, let's look at the uk. So we've already talked about lack of faith in the institutions, lack of faith in government and politics. How much of a role does multiculturalism and the. In my opinion, and a lot of people would share this, that the idea that it's not working and in fact it's actually detrimental to society. How much of a factor does that play in to your thesis?
- [23:48]
Host 1
Might be worth you saying what you mean by multiculturalism because a lot of people misunderstand that term.
- [23:52]
Professor David Betts
Yeah.
- [23:53]
Host 2
So multiculturalism is. There's lots of different cultures and different religions with different values and different ways of being existing, different social mores, etc and by the way, if that is rubbish, please push back.
- [24:06]
Professor David Betts
No, I think, I mean I, but I think I'm fine with that as an understanding of multiculturalism. I don't think we need to argue that point. Well, we could if you want, but I don't really see.
- [24:19]
Host 1
The only thing I would add to that, I think that really does matter to this discussion is the way I see is exactly as Francis described. But it's the promotion of that worldview that that is the right way to organize society as opposed to the idea that while people have their own religions and have their own cultures, their job is to integrate into the central dominant culture of the nation in which they live. And that's where I would a multi, I would make the distinction between a multi ethnic society in which people from different backgrounds come together to be one thing, and a multiple multicultural society in which you're kind of told you don't need to be one thing, just be who you are and just live in the same economic area. And that's kind of it. That's where I think a lot of people's concerns are about this issue.
- [25:03]
Professor David Betts
Yeah, I agree with that. That's perfectly logical to my mind. But your question was how important I see this and I think it's the most important factor. If we had to list factors in order, multiculturalism would be at the top. And if we were to put some kind of ranking on them, it's like 90%.
- [25:25]
Host 1
Wow.
- [25:26]
Host 2
And why do you think it's 90%?
- [25:28]
Professor David Betts
It comes back to what I was when earlier I used the term pre political loyalty. Pre political loyalty is a necessary attribute of a normally functioning political system. Without a unified and single pre political loyalty, then, then you can't have a normally functioning democratic system. When I say normally functioning, I mean one that's perceived as actually legitimate. This legitimate is different from legality. We get into that too. But essentially the main effect is that it completely erodes the idea of pre political loyalty, which means that you can't, you don't get the same effect where people say, well, I don't agree with this decision, but I accept how it was arrived at. I accept the process by which it is arrived at because we're all part of the same family. Think of a nation as a big extended family. And in fact, this is the genius of the nation state. The genius of the nation state is it allows, it allows human beings, which.
- [26:50]
Host 2
Evolved.
- [26:54]
Professor David Betts
Which is a species that evolved psychologically in small groups, to have intense loyalty, intense personal connections to actually a rather small number of people. There's a famous number called the Dunbar number, which I think is about 150 if I remember correctly. And this is the number basically of stable personal connections that a normal human being is able to maintain. Nation state is a genius idea for expanding the Dunbar number very large. So, you know, moving to a multicultural post national model is incredibly destructive to the way that most Western states have governed themselves since modern times, since, well, late modernity anyway. And that's happened effectively in Europe, effectively In the last 30, 30 years or so, at an absolutely historically frantic and unprecedented pace. And I say it's the biggest thing. And actually that shouldn't be all that controversial. Angela Merkel said the same thing in Germany. One could question her motives in saying it, but she said it over 10 years ago, that multiculturalism was a disaster for Germany. Three, four months later, David Cameron gives almost exactly the same speech in which he said that multiculturalism results in ghettoized communities living basically in their silos, unable to. So in short, multiculturalism is the killer app for destroying what has been the nation.
- [29:00]
Host 2
So we're talking about multiculturalism, but to me, a large part of multiculturalism as well is the issue of religion. So if you have lots of different cultures but they all share, for instance, the same religion, there's far less likely. Now of course, there's always fractions in religions and whatever else, and we see this with Sunny and Shia, etc. Etc. But it's far less likely to happen, isn't it, if you import, for instance, people who are all Christian as opposed to Muslims, Christians, et cetera.
- [29:31]
Professor David Betts
So I feel that there's a separate line of argument here around integration and the potential for integration and our understanding of identity and so on and so forth, which would be interesting, but maybe as a slight digression from what I'm. What I think I'm here to do, which is to explain to you why, or explain to your listeners why you're in actually quite immediate peril from this thing called civil war and why I say multiculturalism is a big part of that. It relates to one of the core ideas in the theories around civil war causation that is about. That looks at the makeup of essentially the ethnic, usually the ethnic, but could be the confessional makeup of society. But you have to imagine a bell curve. We know what a bell curve looks like. And on one end you have very heterogeneous societies, and on the other end you have very homogenous societies. At both of these ends, the potential for civil war is actually quite low. Very homogenous societies have low potential for a civil war because on account of the homogeneity of that society, they're relatively able to arrive at consensus decisions, even when they're quite painful. So in times of economic decline or natural disaster or war or so on, if you have any of the big pressures that might be felt by a given society, whether internal or external in origin, natural or artificial in origin, a highly homogenous society is usually able to weather that because they could say, we need to pull together, right? We need to get through this. We're all in the same. What's the metaphor? We're all in the same boat. Very heterogeneous societies are also relatively stable because it's very difficult for any one group to generate mass potential.
- [31:46]
Host 1
There's no power blocks.
- [31:47]
Professor David Betts
So if you've got a country that is broken, say into 20 groups each with 5% of the population, then it's very hard for anyone or even most manageable coalitions to dominate all of the others. So there's this paradox. Now, the most vulnerable state is at the top of that curve where you have a formerly dominant majority which is in fear of losing its status. And in that case, there. This is a danger for two reasons. First, because of that fear of losing status in the past, it was your language, it was your culture, it was your ideals and beliefs, which essentially set the pattern, set the rules of how that society operates. There is a fear that you are losing that status, so your language is not going to be the dominant one anymore. Your cultural preferences will not dominate in that society. So this might be, in the current context, might refer to attitudes towards women or. Well, in the news recently have been attitudes towards ritual slaughter, of animals for, you know, like. And many, many other. Right, so you could say. So there's this sense on the part of the formerly dominant majority that they are losing this status, which impels them, as fear usually does, to act, to act out at the same time because their share of the population is still quite large, they don't face the same coordination costs as a group of 5% of the population. So they still have the potential to form mass movements. They still have the potential muscle to try. They're not necessarily going to succeed in this, but they still have the potential muscle to try and reverse the situation. And if they feel there is an urgency to do so anyway, you could see why on this bell curve, what that represents is the propensity to civil conflict. And it's most dangerous in exactly the situation faced now in Britain and throughout Western Europe, which is the perception of the indigenous native populations of Europe that they are being displaced in their own homelands.
- [34:43]
Host 2
So what you're saying is that the conditions for civil war, they're sort of approaching optimal at the moment.
- [34:52]
Professor David Betts
In that respect, yes. But also in other respects they are also optimal. This is the weird thing. Okay, so maybe, if I may, I'll give a slightly long answer, but I'll try to get to the point. If I'm to summarize some of the big ideas in the Civil War's literature with respect to causation. One of the big factors I've just talked about, which is essentially status loss by a formerly dominant majority, otherwise known in the literature, is referred to as downgrading. But it's effectively the same as the replacement or displacement narrative you hear increasingly in right and far right circles. Actually it's not just far right. I happen to live up in the north of Britain in strongly left wing areas where that's a very firmly held idea. So it's not strictly speaking actually best understood as a right left thing.
- [35:51]
Host 1
Just to make this slightly more specific, the idea being that white British people are being replaced by people who don't look like them, who don't share the same culture.
- [36:00]
Professor David Betts
To be very specific, yes. Or to be even more specific, I mean. So we're recording this days after the Glastonbury event. Right. So you might say it's between. If you don't want to raise race, if you feel that neuro linguistic programming effect that often occurs in people when you use the words white population, then you might just say, look, the coming conflict is between those people who either express the view or nod at the view that we want our country back.
- [36:34]
Host 1
And the people who want to talk.
- [36:35]
Professor David Betts
About people who want you to shut the fuck up. Okay, so those two, to give an example that people can latch onto in the current political climate, there is the downgrading effect, which is very central. The other is factionalism. Factionalism is generally recognized as a highly corrosive quality for a political system to have. The worst sort of factionalism is.
- [37:08]
Host 2
Sorry to interrupt. David, what do you mean by factionalism?
- [37:11]
Professor David Betts
Factionalism is of an attribute of a political system in which you have actors who are making decisions or acting on the basis of their factional interests rather than the larger national interests.
- [37:27]
Host 1
In other words, it's no longer a family, but rather there's a lodger living in the house who only cares about themselves and is not willing to consider the interests of the family as being primary and their own self interest to be secondary.
- [37:40]
Professor David Betts
Right? Yes. Right. If you were to think of it in contemporary British terms, I would say, you know, a good example would be the five independent or effectively the five Gaza MPs that are currently sitting in Westminster. We had. In fact, what was the thing that caught attention recently was, you know, this faction was effectively lobbying for the building of an airport in Pakistan for the convenience of.
- [38:06]
Host 1
It wasn't just them, there was quite a few Labor MPs who were part of that. Right. As well.
- [38:10]
Professor David Betts
But essentially, this is what I mean by factionalism.
- [38:14]
Host 1
If you're someone who values free inquiry and independent thinking, which, let's be honest, is why you're probably watching trigonometry, then our sponsor, Venice AI, is the tool for you. Here's a hot take. AI is exploding right now. But seriously, most of the tools out there are just clones with slightly different skins. Venice AI is different. It offers uncensored AI chat images and coding. Why should a team of programmers at these leading AI apps be the ones who get to decide what is and isn't okay for you to think? Whether you're researching topics that make other platforms nervous, or you're just sick of being told what you can and can't ask, Venice gives you the freedom to explore without limits. No political filtering, no condescending footnotes. Just powerful AI fast. We've tried it ourselves. And if you're someone who thinks about these things, you'll notice the difference immediately. If you want to use AI without fear of handing over your thoughts, ideas or personal information to a corporation or the government, you can get 20% off a pro plan using our link Venice AI trigonometry, you'll find the link in the description of this episode or type it in V E N I C E A I trigonometry and see what you've been missing. And now back to the show.
- [39:28]
Professor David Betts
There are different types of factionalism, but. So it could be an ethnic factionalism or confessional factionalism. But probably the worst sort of factionalism is known as polar factionalism. Polar factionalism is a term which is used, or I use it to describe a situation where people are not arguing anymore over issues per se. Like if you take abortion, for example, or the death penalty. Right. You and I may differ on which way we fall on that particular issue and we may have very, very strong views. Often people do on these issues. That could be a kind of factionalism. But polar factionalism is a situation where we're not arguing about the issue. What we're arguing about is what we perceive to be the consensus opinion within our faction. So if my faction is pro abortion, Right. Then I'm going to be pro abortion, leaving aside the issues. Because what I'm looking to. I'm looking around me, to my faction, to my tribe, as an indicator of what I should believe and how I should act. And one only does that in situations of extreme insecurity. That's an expression of extreme insecurity where essentially what you're now doing is you're burying whatever your own conscious conscience might.
- [41:09]
Host 1
Suggest because you perceive the danger to be so great.
- [41:12]
Professor David Betts
You have to be with your child. You have to be in line with your faction. Okay?
- [41:18]
Host 1
Right.
- [41:18]
Professor David Betts
So polar factionalism is highly. Highly is the most advanced form of factionalism. We're now in a state increasingly of polar. That's undoubtedly polar factionalism. The next step after polar factionalism is the war. So the other factor that is often pointed to beyond factionalism and downgrading is loss of faith. Loss of faith. Specifically, loss of faith in the ability of normal politics to solve the problems, which I would suggest you can measure in various ways. But our own parliament has measured this Parliament. Some of the most convincing surveys done on people's sense of. Of the legitimacy of politics are conducted by governments themselves. They're, for obvious reasons, intensely interested in this question. And data is perfectly clear. People don't trust. Trust in political institutions is in the cellar. Trust in political figures is abysmal. So measures of trust across all institutions are just in the cellar. And my suggestion here, or what I'm trying to do for those listening closely, is to say that meas trust can be taken as proxies for the measure of legitimacy. And legitimacy is like the secret sauce. That's the magic that allows government to work. If you've got legitimacy, then your cost of government goes way, way down. Because people perceive the system to be legitimate. Therefore, they tend to do what they ought to do without being policed all the time, which is why British policemen don't have to carry guns or traditionally don't have to carry guns around. British governance, historically speaking, for the last few centuries, has been kind of genius for government because of this high trust and high legitimacy that were invested in the system, but that's not there anymore. We know that it's not there anymore because we've measured it. And so you have all of the appurtenances of a high trust, high legitimate society. If I walk out of. You walk out of this building, you're in the center of London, you can't miss it. But the spirit's gone, the soul is gone. This is just structure. So you have that. When I use the word loss of faith, I'm not talking about religious faith, but I am talking about something that is kind of magical. Legitimacy is hard to point to, but you know when you've got it and.
- [44:11]
Host 1
You don't, well, what you're saying is you have all the structures of a high trust society that rely on people to voluntarily not act in a way that's detrimental, while you have a society that is increasingly becoming low trust. And that's why the government has to become more muscular about things.
- [44:33]
Professor David Betts
There's no other way.
- [44:34]
Host 1
It has to police things harder, has to police people's speech, because the things that people never would have said are now increasingly being said. And therefore the government has to come in and prosecute this kind of speech of that kind and everything else.
- [44:47]
Professor David Betts
So take these three factors together, which are, I would suggest, like the three big factors that tend to be accounted for as indicators of the potential for civil war. We're right in the sweet spot in all of them. Now, that probably strikes people as weird. Undoubtedly it does strike people as weird. Otherwise I wouldn't be here, you wouldn't have invited me to. Because the suggestion is, I don't want to say it's controversial, because I don't actually think it is controversial in terms of our understanding of reality. But at any rate, the thing is, when I say the word civil war, you probably think of a different time or different places, not your own home. And I'm saying that actually, take a step back and look at Just what we understand about this and take a realistic look at your own society, you realize you are, in fact, ideally in the quote unquote, ideal position. Now, to finish off this line of reasoning, I think an objective person and many, many people do respond and say, well, look, traditionally Britain is a country and Western states don't have. So there are obviously significant barriers to civil war in Western countries. And David, aren't you exaggerating? Right. And I would like to make the case that I am not exaggerating. And in fact, I suspect that what's going on here is a normalcy bias, a kind of expectation of normality on the part of many people, which borders on complacency. So one of the chief bulwarks against civil war clearly is wealth. If you're a wealthy place, you've got lots of money, then you can afford to paper over a lot of cracks. A lot can be done. If you think of money as a lubricant, as a kind of social lubricant, if you've got a lot of money, you can make things work.
- [47:18]
Host 2
Bearable.
- [47:19]
Professor David Betts
Bearable, yeah, at least bearable. Anyway, they can function. And my suggestion, I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's an outlandish suggestion, is that as far as the financialization of the economy goes, most Western economies are at the end of the rope. We're just waiting for the hammer to drop, essentially. So the expectation of the ability of government to continue to paper over problems in society through essentially financial redistribution. It's not financial redistribution. They're creating money out of thin air. They're creating debt to, To. To appease people, to appease existing problems. But they're going to run out. They're already running out of ability, the ability to, to do that. So the existing problems are just going to emerge. Okay, so the. Another bulwark is kind of, kind of, say, might describe as a customary habit of obedience. So with a. If you have, if you have a nation state which has been normally functioning, normally basically well governed for a long time, people have gotten into. The. People have gotten into the habit of obeying. And I think that that is a factor which is very apparent in British society for sure. And I think it's one that underpins the observations often of historians who say, well, look, Britain, relatively speaking, has a low tradition of civil wars. Yes, we've had a couple. We had the peasant revolt in the late medieval period, we had the English Civil wars. But generally speaking, unlike the French, say, or others, the British are Basically pretty politically passive. They have this culture of obedience as I've described it. I feel a little cautiously, but I do want to push back on my colleagues who are historians on this point because in fact it seems to me that Britain has had a lot of rebellions through its history, a lot of little revolts, but what it's generally also had is a very unified and rather competent governing elite. So for example, if you look at the British military, the British military has performed an aid to the civil power role now for over two centuries and usually pretty effectively. So the British kind of power elite has always been pretty good at heading off revolts. When they arise, they can suppress them or subvert them or co opt them. And they have done so pretty effectively. And there's no denying that there has been a kind of British genius for governance over time. So I think it's an exaggeration to say that there is somehow that the British people and have this kind of innate habit of just obeying, putting up with shit that other people don't. But more to the point, this idea of the existence of a unified and competent elite is highly questionable.
- [51:06]
Host 1
You've become very British, David, in your understated British.
- [51:10]
Professor David Betts
Okay, I'm glad I've, I'm, I'm glad I'm.
- [51:13]
Host 2
You've integrated.
- [51:14]
Professor David Betts
I'm glad I've integrated that. Right. So, you know, you both laughed, so I really probably don't need to go substantiate.
- [51:22]
Host 1
No one thinks the elites are, well, good or skilled or smart or anything.
- [51:27]
Professor David Betts
So no, no, no more said on the matter of competence. But I, I think there's something to be said about the idea of the unified elite. A unified elite is a very important factor. Usually if the elite can stick together, like when things get tough. If the elite can stick together, they normally will prevail, particularly if they. Right. And particularly if they can hold the security forces, if they can hold the arm. So if the elite is competent and unified, it can usually weather these periods of turmoil. It's not just that this elite is not competent, they're also not unified. So you're already beginning to see elite defections. And you can see that in the last week how many political movements have been announced into existence just in the last day We've got advance, reform.
- [52:30]
Host 2
Restore.
- [52:32]
Professor David Betts
What are these? These are expressions of essentially, these are expressions of this feeling that the system is, the system is broken. Right, because you wouldn't name a movement Restore or Reform or advance if you thought things were more or less hunky dory. But you wanted to change a few things. So you're seeing defections from the system and you're seeing also the true allegiances of the power leap become more and more obvious. When people talk about the Uni Party, for example, this is effectively what they're talking about is like, okay, we now recognize that most of what you guys have been arguing about is effectively dramatic. So Ed Balls and George Osborne recently, for example, had a very congenial kind of powsy discussion about how they both had no idea that there was all this industrial raping going on.
- [53:36]
Host 1
Sorry to interrupt, but actually it's much worse than that. It wasn't that they had no idea what they actually said, if you listen to that clip, is they didn't think politically it was something to, for which there needed to be a discussion. Effectively, that's what far worse, in my opinion, not knowing about.
- [53:53]
Professor David Betts
Yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're right. I mean, corblaying, I, I just like undersold something, right? This wasn't coming across the desks of cabinet ministers. I mean, I don't know whether you ever had any dealings with it. I didn't, I didn't directly.
- [54:09]
Host 1
I mean, there was definitely, you know, there was the emerging prosecutions in places like Rotherham and I guess there was.
- [54:16]
Professor David Betts
A sense in conservative circles that, you know, this was embarrassing for Labour because these areas were run by Labor Councils, that the Labor Councils often had drew.
- [54:28]
Host 1
A lot of support from the local.
- [54:30]
Professor David Betts
Pakistani origin community that they didn't want to kind of call it out. There was definitely.
- [54:34]
Host 1
But we never, we never thought that.
- [54:36]
Professor David Betts
Was something that you could sort of politically exploit, frankly. Really. I mean, I would have thought if you thought this was something which was embarrassing Labour, you would have thought.
- [54:44]
Host 1
I thought it was a way to.
- [54:46]
Professor David Betts
Politically, I think when Keir Starmer was going about this in that period, it wasn't really on the political radar. Okay, so it's neither unified nor competent. So you've got elite defections occurring. Perhaps somewhat less obvious in the British context than in others. The most obvious elite defection is Trump. But one can think of multiple other examples of. Essentially what I think is occurring is you have a fracturing of the elite. So it's not, hey, we're all in the same boat. It's literally they're all looking for their own lifeboats. And one has that anyway, one has that impression, which rather suggests therefore that what traditionally has been strong bulwark against civil war in the form of a unified and competent elite no longer is quite the barrier that it once was.
- [55:48]
Host 1
Can I challenge you on this to stress test this? Because I was about to say, isn't the strongest counter argument to your predictions the election of Donald Trump and the incredibly rapid rise of the Reform Party, which is currently. On current polling. Polling, what does it mean? But on current polling, they're set to win hundreds of seats at the next election. So isn't that exactly the system working as intended, which is things go to shit, people will vote for a fairly robust challenge to the existing system that will then come in and as we're now seeing in America, will do quite a lot to try and set to reset the system back to where it might. Might be perceived as being the right place for it to be.
- [56:30]
Professor David Betts
That's a fair. That's a fair point, but I don't invest as much confidence in it as you might from your suggestion anyway. Maybe it's just a hypothetical. You're presenting, actually presenting your own point of view, but let me deal with it on a hypothetical level then. It depends how you interpret either Trump or reform. Actually, let's just concentrate on reform. I think reform is actually much more. My suspicion is it's much more very predictable system defense mechanism, where essentially it's a pressure valve. Reform, despite the name, is unlikely to reform very much. Farage seems to me increasingly a status quo figure.
- [57:29]
Host 1
Why do you say that?
- [57:30]
Professor David Betts
Primarily because of his statements and his and Richard Tice's statements around the central issue, which is multiculturalism, around which both men expressed a kind of. Or actually it was not just. That was very specifically put to Tice in a recent interview that, you know, Britain. I think it was Matt Goodwin's point that by 2063, the white British population would be in. Would be in the. In the minority and tight. And the interviewer asked, well, you know, are you worried about that? And you could see he was obviously uncomfortable, hesitated for a bit and then said, well, you know, I'll be dead by then. I'll be dead by then. As though politicians are not supposed to think about 20, 30 years in the future. Farage has already made it clear in numerous interviews that he's at any rate, at least publicly, very sanguine about this. Is this a pose? Is he basically posing for a degree of political respectability with a view to catching swing voters so that he can be more radical in government if he ever gets to it.
- [58:52]
Host 1
Hold on.
- [58:53]
Professor David Betts
I rather suspect. Hold on.
- [58:54]
Host 1
But my understanding of the Farage position is effectively that he believes in the end of multiculturalism and the celebration of British identity as the uniting world view into which our multi ethnic society can buy in. Okay, right. Well, I mean, what else is there? You deport millions of people because they're not white. Like.
- [59:18]
Professor David Betts
So let's, let's. All right, let's park this. Park Farage for. Okay, a moment.
- [59:25]
Host 1
I'm just testing the idea.
- [59:26]
Professor David Betts
This isn't trying to catch it. No, I'm happy with. I'm happy with your line of questioning. I'm just trying to address it in a systematic manner.
- [59:37]
Host 1
Let me introduce you to the people I work with to protect my family against financial instability, inflation and turmoil. For me, one of the best ways to safeguard your wealth is by investing in gold. And that's why I trust the Pure Gold Company. Here's a tip. If you buy UK minted gold coins like sovereigns, you won't pay VAT when you buy them or capital gains tax when you sell them. All the profit is your to keep. And the best part, gold is completely private investment. It's outside the banking system, so it can't be manipulated by governments or anyone else. Unlike digital assets, it's yours in the truest sense. The Pure Gold Company is trusted by first time investors and seasoned professionals alike. What I really appreciate about them is their knowledgeable, pressure free approach. They explain everything clearly so you feel confident about your decisions and they never push you to buy. Physical gold has stood the test of time as a store of value and it offers peace of mind that other assets can't match. It's reassuring to know that even if the banking system falters, your gold and its value remain safe. Whether you're looking to diversify your investments, protect your savings, or just gain the security of owning a real physical asset, we highly recommend the Pure Gold Coast Company. Click the link in the description or go to Pure Gold Co Trigger to get your free copy of the investor guide. That's Pure Dash Gold Co Trigger. Take control of your financial future today.
- [61:06]
Professor David Betts
Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on PC. I'm going to need the name of everyone that could have a connection.
- [61:19]
Host 2
You don't understand.
- [61:19]
Host 1
It was just the five of us. So this was all planned.
- [61:22]
Professor David Betts
What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other.
- [61:31]
Host 1
All her fault.
- [61:32]
Professor David Betts
A new series. Streaming now only on Peacock. There is the matter of the electability of reform. There is the matter of the intention of reform. Both of which we could argue. I'm not a political scientist, I'm not a political pundit, and so maybe we've kind of exhausted my potential for commenting cogently on that specifically. But then there is, moreover, the ability of reform. Even if Farage is radical in his intention and does matter, it does manage to be elected with a decent majority. That'll probably just be subverted by the. By the state bureaucracy, which can tangle him up, at least for a parliament, with, I think, very little difficulty.
- [62:32]
Host 1
That is my biggest concern, definitely, should.
- [62:35]
Professor David Betts
It wish to which it, by all accounts, it probably would wish to. I think that's a pretty reasonable suspicion. And we know that there is a huge potential of bureaucracies to subvert even quite radical reformers, because that's what happened in Trump's first administration. So it may be that the political system is able to generate. Reforms, reformers rather, who can take big, potentially very, very big decisions. And you mentioned exactly that. The main one is, what do you do with people? You know, what do you do with. How many people have arrived since 2013? I don't know anyway, like, multiple millions. What do you. What. What do you do? But the. Even if they get into. So the point is, the political system might be able to plausibly be able to generate some kind of answers to that, but not at the speed of the development of events. So if you think about people's sense of urgency, as I described when I was talking about the perception of downgrading, that's skyrocketing, and the pace of political change seems to be creeping along. One is a ballistic missile and the other is a London bus. It is not going to catch that. It is not going to catch the problem. It's not going to catch the mood, and that's what it means. And that difference between what needs to be done and what has the plausible potential to be done within the normal political system is the thing that drives the breakdown of the political system, is the very definition of that problem that I described at the beginning.
- [64:57]
Host 2
So, David, if we accept, and I'm inclined, unfortunately, to accept your hypothesis that the conditions are optimal, what is. What is it an event that sparks a civil war? Is it a series of events? Could it be like a clip going viral on social media? I mean, if we look back at last summer, where you had the horrific. The horrific atrocity in Southpaw, is it something like that?
- [65:30]
Professor David Betts
Yeah. So the most common metaphor when talking about. Employed when talking about this subject is that of tinder and the spark. Right. Or sometimes of like a powder keg. And your question is like what is the spark? But, and I'll try to, as best as one can to answer what the spark is. But the important thing is not the spark. Important thing is the keg. Important thing is the tinder. Right? Sparks are not a problem if you are not in a room full of gunpowder. Sparks are not a problem if you're not wearing plastic petrol soaked clothing. You get my line of reasoning and that's what I urge people to concentrate on is what are the policies, what are the things that have contributed to the existence of all this tinder, all of that. Okay, go back to my iceberg metaphor. All that frustrated political energy in the system, that's the real problem. And that didn't come overnight, that took a long time to build. And whether it was accidental or deliberate, the fact of the matter is there is a gigantic ball of political energy that is building up. Okay? Now the spark is just intrinsically unpredictable. If you think of the Arab Spring, lots of people in, lots of people might have predicted that and many people did that the Arab world was highly politically frustrated, socially very fractured, lots of political economic problems that were kind of building up over a long term. But no one was going to predict that the thing that would set it off was an Algerian fruit seller getting so frustrated with the local basically licensing police that he poured petrol on himself and set himself on fire in a market. And so, yeah, because you can't, you can't just, you just can't predict those, those low grade effects in prefacing your question you talked about last summer. So, you know, I would think, yes, another, another attack of that sort might be a target. People get, tend to get upset when, when their children get slashed apart. You know, like if you, you want to make an enemy behead someone's daughter or attempt to. I mean it's probably a pretty egregious example, but that's the literal reality. That is what that is. That is what her. What happened. It could be and I think the government's main fear is that now is it could be just the steady drip of increasingly vile revelations coming out of the rape gang inquiry, which is as opposed to terrorism very close in terms of people's perceived offensiveness. Not quite as bad as decapitating your child, but still pretty offensive to one's person and on a much larger scale. That's the thing, is that it's, it. Whereas terrorism is frankly a statistical blip in the national death register. The, the, the, the rape scandal is, is gigantic. And has touched many, many, many, many, many, many people. And many of them still alive, although lives probably very, almost basically permanently affected. So it might be just a kind of steady drip of increasingly vile revelations coming out of the rape gang inquiry, or it might be something else that nobody's predicted. My suspicion and my feeling is that, sorry, I would say two further points on this is increasingly everyone wants to fight. It's not just on the left or on the right. It's, you know, people are angry in all quarters. You saw that in Glastonbury. You're not going to get 5,000 people, you know, you know, clapping like seals at someone screaming death to the idf. If this is not a. A group of people who are pretty belligerent. Right. That is, that is an, that's just an expression of an underlying mood which I think is. Is inclined to fight. And the extremists on either side know how to direct that energy. It's not a mystery how you take existing fractures in a society. I'm putting on a marble table and peel them apart. Maybe they hit a dance class and maybe a kindergarten next or a maternity hospital or something else. Or something else we. Nobody's, Nobody's thought of. But we know the effect of this and the extremists know how to do it. And the technology of doing it is not all that difficult. Go down to Tesco or go on Amazon, get yourself a big knife, get yourself a panel van, drive down. There are all kinds of it's not difficult to do. It's more the will to do it rather than the technical ability, the strength or technical ability to do it. And the second point I wish to make on this with respect to. The spark, is I think for me, the telling point is going to be when an avowedly native group that no one's heard about does something. And I think my feeling is that this, in Britain, as in other countries, but particularly in Britain, where it's first going to surface on the, on the we want our country backside, is going to be in a pattern that looks a bit like a Latin American dirty war. So it's likely to be an attack, I think a targeted attack on a noteworthy figure or a series of noteworthy figures in the judiciary, possibly, or influencer influencers of, of some kind. And you'll see a group that no one's heard about because they've recognized that actually if you don't want to get caught, because the only thing that the British police really are looking at intensely is online behavior, just don't blather about it on the Internet and the police will have no idea. So I suspect that there are going to be plenty of sparks this summer and continuing on, any one of which has the potential to set that tinder alight. But the really electrifying moment, the really kind of oh shit, you're now in it moment is going to be when someone probably, I'm going to guess, goes after a judge. And you can see already people that, that's, you know, in terms of doxing and briefing on, on who these people are. That's, that's been happening over the last 18 months with increasing frequency.
- [73:51]
Host 2
I'm really glad that you mentioned social media because that is something that we haven't spoken about, but that is social media, particularly Twitter, that provides more sparks than any other type, doesn't it, really?
- [74:07]
Professor David Betts
Yeah, there's. I think that social media has, we do a whole, you know, a series of discussions around the effect of social media. But I think the way in which social media both contributes to the fracturing of society as well as the. Is significant. Right. So part of the reason why we have this fractionation that I discussed actually relates to technological developments which allow people to live in silos in a way that was harder to do in, in less connected times. The other thing is that social media does is it allows extremes to find each other. So there's this. You may have heard of the long tail effect, right? Very kind of pertinent idea usually in marketing, but basically it says like, there's, there's, it, there are, there are niche markets for things. It is like whatever, you know, Polka dot socks or like whatever, you know, or very, you know, maybe lots of people don't. Polka dot socks would probably pick a better example. But the long tail basically says you've got these niche interests. And that's interesting to marketers in a connected world because now you can address these people without a physical store. Because of the connected nature of things, you can now provide a product to these people. And despite the fact that they're distributed all over the place in aggregate, they can market. And so basically the weirdos, actually, I'm loading the term when I say weirdos, I'm just saying like the extremes can find each other in ways that hadn't been the case before. Although this figure, like, when it comes down to it still though the basic point is, I think is that insurgency, which we might say is a form of civil war, is a social movement. And any social movement depends on having essentially you have passive supporters and social media is Great for reaching your passive supporters. Once you've got a, a kind of viable narrative which states a grievance, which indicates a specific conscience community, a particular grievance community states a grievance, states a potential rectification of that grievance, and call for support. So now you begin to animate your group of essentially passive supporters who aren't necessarily doing anything for you except, you know, maybe pressing like, or just listening along, right? Then you've got your active supporters, a subset of that. Your active supporters might be helping to amplify or propagate your message or delivering you information. For example, if you're one of your active supporters happens to be a person who is in a gatekeeping role, that can be very, very important from the, from lots of points of view. But if you're trying to infiltrate an organization, for example, or simply you're just trying to generate an accurate intelligence picture of things, it's very helpful to have people who are active supporters in the system who can do stuff for you, but they're not literally going out and breaking heads for you, right? I mean, you may have a bunch of active supporters who are grandmothers, you know, old men, fat men, you know, whatever, you know, you, you basically, you don't need them for their physical muscle, you need them for their position. And you need your adherents. Your adherents are the, the guys who were, who were. And it's probably mostly guys. The adherents are those who are prepared to, to really go beyond the law, to break stuff or to break people in various ways.
- [78:47]
Host 2
And how many of those do you need?
- [78:52]
Professor David Betts
Surprisingly few. Depends on what you're trying to achieve and what the techniques you apply. If you're trying to do it through street fighting, then you're probably going to need a fairly, you know, fairly substantial, a fairly substantial number. You know, if you're talking about the interwar period in Central Europe and street fighting is the name of the game. That's why the Nazis developed the brown shirts and all of the, you know, and all of the. Right. Because you need that kind of, that kind of physical muscle and you need it in fairly large numbers. I don't think that's our climate is a political climate or social climate is the same. And I don't expect that it is going to, that it's street fighting and rioting that is likely to be the operational technique in use. To get to the point of your question, I think that the most likely technique, certainly the one that is most talked about within anti status quo movements and now, and this is A discussion that they've been talking about this for a long, long time. It's very well established ideas. The idea that the cities themselves are both the locus of the problem, in a sense, so that it's the cities that are perceived as alien. The cities are where you find, where the elite live. And so the, the cities are perceived as essentially the locus of the problem, effectively a kind of occupied territory. But the cities are intrinsically unstable. The most basic and functional definition of a city is a community which is unable to feed itself with its own resources. It has to draw them in from, from outside. So if you think of a city in that sense, then cities are very vulnerable to rejection by their hinterland because the hinterland can cut them off. This has probably always been the case, but people in urban studies now, for many years, going back at least 50 years, have been saying that there is something actually peculiar about the modern city, that is the city of the last hundred years. Given its size and its complexity, that makes it even more like much more vulnerable than it had been even in the past. Because the cities are not just pulling in food, they're pulling in water, they're putting in energy, they're pulling in all of the goods and materials that effectively make a city work, make it function. And moreover, you add on top of that dynamic a social dimension, which is that the cities exist in this kind of balancing act. We're not designed actually to live piled on top of each other in this way, but we're able to do it because of various long standing conventions and ways of handling the urban condition. But the basic point I'm trying to make here is that even under natural circumstances, the urban condition is a balancing act. And in the early part of the 20th, 21st century, given the size and the complexity of cities both materially and socially, that balancing act is, is quite perilous and vulnerable to disruption. That in fact is the technical term for the technique I'm about to describe, which is system disruption is an idea most written about, most capably by an American analyst named John Robb, runs a website called Global Gorillas, very worthwhile looking at, and wrote a book in the early 2000s called Brave New War exploring this topic. Not, it must be said, primarily in Western countries elsewhere, but his logic is still very valid. So system disruption as a technique focuses on the attack upon infrastructure effectively with the view to causing cascading effect within that society, which then unbalance this already kind of fairly unbalanced system, causing it to descend into chaos. By chaos, what I mean for a London listener, or any British Listener, think the 2011 London riots, right? If you were in London at the time, you'd basically a week long period where most normal people were afraid to go onto the streets. Because on any given night, and actually to some degree also in the daytime, but especially at night, there were 2 to 3,000 guys on the street causing mayhem. Of those 2 to 3,000, maybe 2 to 300 were seriously violent people. Most were just opportunists, right, that completely overstretched, almost completely overstretched, rather the ability of the government to. It took a week to shut this down. That was at a point where the British police were stronger than they are today. And the kind of chaos that I'm suggesting is going to occur when you switch off the gas and electricity to London, not just once, but every couple of weeks through a winter, you're going to see 25, 35,000 people on the street. And moreover, a substantial proportion of these people now are actually young and just naturally angry and up for a fight that then is going to cause all kinds of effects. For one thing, perfectly obviously it's going to make the place completely economically unviable.
- [85:24]
Host 1
Okay, before we head on over to questions from our audience, I'm going to have one more go at disagreeing with you from a naive and positive and optimistic perspective because I come back to this Trump and reform point, okay, which is that what I see with Trump's second term as so far, we don't know how it's going to wrap up, but effectively he is addressing many, many of the concerns that people had and sometimes, you know, almost finding out where actually the consensus in America is on some issues. For example, on illegal immigration. He kind of went too far in the perception of many Americans with like just randomly turning up to workplaces and rounding people up. There is no appetite across American society for that. But they are nonetheless dealing with the problem of legal immigration. Pretty, pretty full on. Right? You saw after, prior to Brexit, there was a massive buildup of anti immigration sentiment. The moment Brexit happened, it actually held off until people realized nothing changed. And then concerns about immigration rose again. So if you get a Farage prime minister and the reform majority and a significant majority, I mean, we had Zia Yousef on the show a few weeks ago talking about the fact they would need a significant majority. And I agree with that. Let's say that happens. They are in a position, yes, the civil service will try and subvert and yes, and the media will go ape and all of that. But if they actually see that through. They close the border, they deal with illegal immigration, they deal with the boats, they institute perfectly reasonable and rational policies on mass immigration, such as we want people to come, but they've got to be qualified, they've got to speak the language, they got to do this, they got to do that. I'm pretty persuaded that in that situation, the vast majority of people will just say, thank God, finally we've got a government that's trying to deal with these things. Look, things may not be exactly the way I wanted, but, you know, they're scrapping net zero, they're doing this, they're doing that. We, we kind of, we got what we voted for. And that sentiment that you're talking about building up will be channeled into that. And, you know, my big concern is how effectively they can deliver the things they're promising. That that is the genuine concern, particularly on things like benefits and things like that. But overall, wouldn't you say that a democratically elected, very strong mandate party of that nature would address many of the concerns that people inherently feel and therefore make people feel like their voice has been heard? The government does have legitimacy and they are attempting to deliver some of the things that they want.
- [87:58]
Professor David Betts
Well, I would say I've been very gloomy for the last hour or 70 minutes or so, so power to your bow. I hope you're right.
- [88:14]
Host 1
Why am I not right? That's what I'm asking you.
- [88:16]
Professor David Betts
Okay, Because I don't think. Well, for the reasons I've already suggested, I think they'll be.
- [88:24]
Host 1
I think that they won't be able to deliver.
- [88:27]
Professor David Betts
They won't be able to deliver, but for another reason. And that is one that is a bit hard to get one's head round, but might call it but the peril of the reformer. The peril of the reformer is best understood if you look at a figure like Mikhail Gorbachev, who we all know, actually it's quite a long time ago now, so maybe not everybody knows, but Mikhail Gorbachev was the last general secretary of this Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a great reformer, not elected, but comes to power with the intent to reform Soviet society, which had become both economically and socially and just generally sclerotic and non functioning. What was his fate? The short answer is the country fell apart. He was removed by the August. The August coup. In fact, the August coup itself failed and he shortly came back into power. But the game was over at that point. The peril of the reformer is that essentially you acknowledge the problem in a way, so you say, dear, dear Britain, dear citizen. Yes, we're very sorry we made this mistake.
- [90:06]
Host 1
No, they made this mistake and we're here to fix it.
- [90:10]
Professor David Betts
Yes, this mistake was made by other people, by another Prime Minister, another immigration minister, other, whatever. These mistakes were made in our country. They are very severe. They are in fact so severe that we've arrived to do this quite radical thing. Now people want change and you can't change fast enough to satisfy them. And this too can be a bit paradoxical. But the peril of the reformer is that when you acknowledge and you begin to try to reform that people's expectations again rise more quickly than your ability to deliver on them. Which in the case of Gorbachev, terminates, didn't quite terminate, but terminated his career as a political figure, if not as an individual, which in fact was also part of the kind of light motif of the lead up to the Russian Revolution, the first revolution of 1917, which occurred, which have been building for a long time. You had the Russian state essentially acknowledging the problem, attempting to reform economically. Up to the First World War, it was improving, arguably politically also. But people's expectations, once acknowledged, often skyrocket, skyrocket. And again you get to this problem of the inability of the political system to keep pace with the mood of the population. Fundamentally, I think your argument is one that says the system has the ability to cure itself. Still, there is still this potential in this.
- [92:12]
Host 1
If we knew more about our sleep, what would we do differently? Would we go to bed at a consistent time or take steps to reduce interruptions to our sleep? With the all new sleep score, Apple Watch measures your bedtime consistency, interruptions and sleep duration. Then every morning it combines these factors into an easy to understand score from 1 to 100. So you'll know how to take the quality of your sleep from good to excellent. Introducing the new sleep score on Apple Watch. IPhone 11 or later required. It depends on what you mean by the system, because I would regard both Trump and Farage and Reform as not part of their league. Even though they are. The people at the top are always part of this is inevitable. Right. But the movement behind them is fundamentally an anti elite movement and therefore they have the legitimacy as being seen as the outsider coming in to fix a problem created by that elite over there who are wrong and evil and bad.
- [93:11]
Professor David Betts
Okay, well, I guess that's my argument. No, I, I, I understand it and I hope you're correct.
- [93:22]
Host 1
So do I. Yeah, the things. By the way, I think it's important to restate what we said at the beginning, which is, I know that in describing many of the terrible potential outcomes, there was no part of you that wishes any of that to manifest. And for that to happen, I live.
- [93:38]
Professor David Betts
In this country, I have young adult children are trying to fake, you know, to make their way in the world. This is, this is. And it feels pretty bad to hand over the proverbial sandwich. So I'm not call, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not calling for it. I'm just trying to be realistic about what is there and explain to people. Explain to people, many of whom are in fact listening now and saying, I've been thinking this for ages. Well, duh, like, who is this guy, who is this professor telling me stuff that, you know, I've known for ages? And I do wish to address those people and say, no, you're right, I acknowledge that, that you saw it, you're not crazy. Amongst others I wish to address, however, are people, many people, many no doubt cleverer than myself, who might conceive of other ways out, other avenues to the future besides the one that I've painted. This might undoubtedly is a limitation of my point of view. I'm a war studies professor, after all. I probably, you know, I probably do have a kind of baseline tendency to the war, to the, to the conflictual. So I really do hope that we, we avoid this. But in all honesty, and in the best conscience, I can't claim that there is very obvious potential for it.
- [95:37]
Host 1
I understand. The reason I'm disagreeing with you is twofold. Number one is I believe in probabilities of things rather than inevitable outcomes. And I'm on record as saying, I think on the current trajectory, we're heading in the direction that you described. But there's no question about that. And that's why I think millions of people now are aware of the severity of the situation. But for the reasons I think that I don't need to restate, I've already outlined, I think there's also the possibility that that energy can be rightly channeled through the democratic process into a vehicle that is genuinely perceived as being anti the current system and willing to attempt to fix it. And I think that's a far preferable outcome. And that's the one that certainly I would push for. And I'm sure you would too.
- [96:19]
Professor David Betts
Absolutely. I think every, every. Literally, I mean, there's a lot riding on that hypothesis.
- [96:26]
Host 1
Yeah, I think it's very important. We're going to head on over to substack in a second. But before we do, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
- [96:34]
Host 2
Could you make it positive?
- [96:39]
Professor David Betts
No, I think I can. I think I can. I think that the, that what we're not talking about or I haven't been talking about, and therefore this conversation with me has not been about what happens after. What kind of country do we want to be? Yes, I do believe we are headed into a period of really serious turmoil that will be painful and maybe that's necessary, in fact, but it's not going to last forever. And what kind of country do we want to be afterwards? There are a range of potentials for this. Many of them are in fact rather unpleasant, but not all of them. And I think that some time spent now thinking seriously in a way that probably the country hasn't really done very well since 1945. A little bit earlier about what kind of country it wants to be would be quite useful to talk about. At least then we could put a positive future on the end of this period of disruption of normal service to euphormize. So I'd like to talk about that, I think, or I'd like to hear other people talk about that and contribute to such a conversation.
- [98:19]
Host 2
David, thank you for coming on the show. If you want to follow the conversation, head over to our substack. Looking at Europe as a whole, can Professor Betts comment on which nations seem particularly susceptible to civil war War in the next decades? Am I right to think France is in an even worse position than the uk?
- [98:54]
Host 1
The holidays are about giving something truly special. I'm Martha Stewart and I believe the best gifts aren't just beautiful, they're useful every single day. Lennox has brought timeless beauty and lasting quality to our tables for generations. And their Lenox Spice Village is the perfect holiday gift for someone you love or for yourself. It's more than a spice rack. It's a charming collection of hand painted houses that turn ordinary spices into extraordinary experiences. Imagine cinnamon from a tiny Victorian cottage or oregano from a pastel townhouse. Suddenly, a simple meal becomes a moment to savor. Because spices can be more than ingredients. They can inspire memories, warmth and joy all year long. Give a gift that lasts beyond the holidays. Discover the collection@lenox.com SpiceVillage.