Islamism in the U.K.: A Looming Civil War? with David Betz

0:00 I'm not trying to claim a dated prophecy here. I'm trying to describe a trajectory with an end point. Absent a change of course that is both large and early, the direction of travel is toward sustained internal conflict. [music] Good afternoon and welcome to the Middle East Forums weekly podcast. I thank you all for joining us this afternoon and for your continued support of our important work made even more critical during these historic and volatile times. I'm pleased to introduce today's guest, David Betts, a professor of war in the modern world in the department of war studies at King's College London, as well as a researcher and author specializing in modern warfare, counterinsurgency, civil conflict, and strategic communications. Uh David has also written several books including most recently the guarded age fortification in the 21st century. David is joining us today to discuss Islamism in the UK and whether a civil war is looming. Welcome David. Thank you for

1:02 joining us this afternoon and I hand the floor over to you. Oh thank you very much. I'm really uh pleased to have been asked and glad we could finally put this together. Um the title of the session I must admit is not quite the argument I want to make. So I just want to correct one thing or give a bit of course guidance. The truth is my thesis is not about Islamism and I I don't really use the term. What I've written is an analysis of the structural conditions for civil conflict inside highincome western states with Britain as the clearest case. uh Islam enters that analysis as one serious and in my view insoluble problem of compatibility on issues like law, the status of non-believers, gender, the permissible range of speech.

1:53 Uh but it's not as the driver. The driver is the post-national elite that has pursued rapid demographic against the repeated preference of the historical population while denying that the preference was legitimate. Migration here is the primary aggravation between what David Goodhart called the anywares and the somewares. The non-native populations are participants in the resulting contest, but I don't really see them as the authors of that con of that contest.

2:30 The conflict I describe has two vectors. One of those is a what I would describe as a 21st century peasants revolt where substantial sections of the native uh rise against a postnational elite that they experience as having broken the social contract. In that sense, it's restorative rather than utopian. The other vector of conflict is intertribal between native majorities and parallel communities that have achieved enough density and organization to act as distinct political actors inside the same sovereign territory.

3:11 These two vectors reinforce each other. Elite failure in the face of communal disorder has the effect of radicalizing natives against both the parallel societies and the authorities that allowed their creation. Communal disorder further destroys elite legitimacy. So I call the resulting dynamics convex politics. Under sufficient stress, the center becomes the least stable position to be in. which is why many of your listeners probably feel it's harder and harder to hold a centrist viewpoint.

3:46 And that is because neutrality grows expensive under convex political conditions. People are forced faster than they expect to affiliate and to affiliate tribally. There are six interlocking factors that I think have brought Britain and to varying degrees the rest of the high-income West into the range where this is no longer really a remote theoretical risk. The first of these is Ordinary political disagreement [clears throat] has hardened into identitydriven polarization across a swath of countries, but particularly strongly here uh in in Britain. The 2024 summer riots showed how quickly residual civic restraint can fail.

4:35 More enduring here, I think, is the res is the rise of explicitly communal political organization and block voting. In a significant number of constituencies now in the UK, the Muslim vote is decisive for lab for the Labor Party, which elevates its weight well beyond its share of the population. specifically London. London's electoral electoral arithmetic now is such that the mayoralty is effectively unlosable for the current incumbent under present boundaries and turnout patterns. Places just down the road such as tower hamlets are not merely socially but are politically Bangladeshi.

5:22 That's not ordinary diversity of opinion. That's the emergence of parallel communities inside one state and it's happened very rapidly. The second factor is downgrading. The matter is that large parts of the historic population have experienced a steady loss of state of uh status of safety and of territorial familiarity. White flight from the inner cities is measurable in the housing markets of provincial towns. any place with good rail links into London, for example. The sudden implantation of large numbers of migrant men into villages and small towns uh that have expressly said that they cannot absorb them has uh further increased tensions, converting what is a what has been a statistical trend increasingly into a daily experience of of lived powerlessness.

6:19 Uh the Batley school teacher uh is a famous figure probably to many of you your listeners uh remains in hiding years after having shown a cartoon of Muhammad in a religious studies class. Local and national voices however continued to frame the dominant problem as rising Islamophobia. Fact is that status and safety are not allocated equally in this society. Barbara Walter's term for this is downgrading. Uh by which she means a a situation in which a once dominant group is losing political weight and demographic centrality and that is not a temporary loss. It's a permanent loss.

7:01 The French philosopher Reno Camu called the same process the great replacement. The academic word and the popular word describe one change. They describe effectively the same thing. The flinch that I imagine some listeners uh experience at hearing the great replacement is self censorship. It's not The third factor is the legitimacy The fact is that the British state has been destroying its own legitimacy in plain view. The laws are enforced or not according to the identity of the offender. Speech is policed where it's native and awkward and indulged where it is not. Inquiries are announced into scandals that the institutions of uh state spent years declining to name or investigate. In fact, in some cases were complicit and then failed to count the victims or to treat them ser at at seriously. Uh voting of course we still vote. It's preserved as a ritual. While

8:05 the largest demographic decisions are taken against the repeated preference of the electorate and defended essentially as the ordinary working of democracy, this is hypocritical and it destroys The preparedness to double down on the part of our elites is now pretty explicit. Um uh in the day in the last few days news we've realized that the same politics which lost the referendum on EU membership is preparing in some quarters to reverse the result by an [clears throat] ordinary parliamentary Proposals uh circulate to require identity in order to speak on social media while removing the requirement of identification in order to vote. This is curious. Uh at at the very least it suggests to me uh the acts of a governing class that has decided that the mandate is an obstacle to what it wishes to do.

9:05 The fourth is economic procarity which I understand less as absolute poverty than as expectation gaps uh arising within that society. Particularly amongst the youth uh who find their economic and social ambitions are are frustrated by um in in such ways as the inability to own a home and with consequent uh knock-on effects on the ability to start families to maintain permanent relationships and the like. Bear in mind that the French Revolution was driven by rising bourgeoa expectations amid aristocratic contempt, not by the most destitute people. In Britain, the [clears throat] provision of subsidized comfort, the debtfueled consumption that has driven our um GDP debt to GDP ratio now to up over 100%. as well as things like algorith algorithmic entertainment whether Netflix or Pornhub basically functions as a latter-day bread and

10:09 circus circuses trust has collapsed under these conditions what's happening is elite that elites are signaling often without quite saying so but sometimes coming out that citizens are too comfortable or too incompetent to warrant a genuine voice on matters of the day particularly on the composition of their country. People will tolerate material tradeoffs when they are afforded dignity. Uh cohesive national entities will sacrifice under certain conditions. But they see when the bargain frames them as a boine material, a problem to be class incidents of the costs of elite policies also aggravate and sharpen the grievance. Wages, wage and housing pressures are felt most acutely at the bottom, whereas at the top you get cheaper services and higher returns on To my mind, that's already a sketch of a

11:15 revolt against an elite that benefits from the status quo, which is disempowering and dassinating uh the mass beneath them. The fifth is the diminishing culture of obedience or put differently the rising propensity to I think with the British population of 1997, which is when I came to Britain from Canada, it would have been ridiculous to speak of civil war. In 2026, it is not. Uh the historian David Starky has made the point very sharply to my mind. He says basically since 1997 that the country and the people have been transformed.

11:56 Which means that the old habits of deference or of assuming that the state would eventually correct itself or of treating politics as a sufficient sufficient instrument for solving collective action problems of the day have thinned. Those habits are are very very uh eroded in public consciousness. What's replaced them is not yet organized insurgency, but it is a widening willingness to treat official instruction as optional, to organize and increasingly to copy tactics that other causes have shown will be tolerated until they are used for a native claim and to speak in the register of rupture. Just yesterday, Major General Julian Thompson, arguably best post Second World War British general who commanded Third Commando Brigade in the Faullands, told an interviewer that the channel boats could be stopped tomorrow, if we really had the guts, uh, to quote him precisely,

12:59 that he would shoot, clarif clarifying that he meant the vessels and that if the government did not stop them, there would be quote a revolution. The public response to this so far is largely recognition. You know, a kind of collective well duh. Um the institutional response is to look elsewhere. And that pattern is very very uh recurrent which brings me to the sixth and final factor that I want to highlight and that is elite incompetence and disunityity. The contemporary elite is aworked political, corporate, cultural, administrative complex. That is the way to understand it. Most of its member, so it's very large, right? It's not a small group, but most of its members are managers of a script rather than the originators of that script. The script itself is postnational in its ideological viewpoint. It is post-modern in its suspicion of inherited loyalty, and it's neoliberal in its treatment of

14:03 populations as effectively mobile factors of production. It's also very brittle uh within the elite. You have uh splits between hard managerialists who I think will remain committed through the end, institutional career careerists who I uh would predict will [clears throat] favor continuity and their own personal security come what may. And then there is an exit oriented layer uh that is hedging against the future by obtaining second uh uh uh offshore assets and increasingly actually leaving most most actively towards the uh until recently to the Gulf States.

14:49 The default posture is containment and delay or what I call managerial containment of a trajectory that the elite no longer believe can be reversed without costs that they're unprepared to Elite over production as the American uh scholar Peter Turchin uh has described it supplies the other side of this equation as well. The leadership cadre of these anti- status quo movements is already emerging from the ranks of frustrated over often overcredentialed young people who can see that the settlement that their parents uh received is not available to them.

15:34 So I think when people ask where the leaders of a native revolt will come from, the answer to me is from inside the elitees own unfinished and unsatisfied children. [snorts] These six factors do not produce a single organization or a conventional front. Don't wait for Gettysburg or Antidum. It's not going to look like that. What it'll look like or what it will produce in my estimation are the conditions for a dual vector conflict which is fought initially below the threshold of what most observers will agree to call a civil war. But the methods are already visible and already theorized. These are things like systems disruption of ordinary infrastructure, selective violence calibrated for strategic narrative effect, the forced demographic sorting already uh being seen as I've mentioned earlier, as well as continuousformational operations that are below the level of violence but are clearly in the area of contested and

16:39 increasingly polarized politics. Some concrete examples as I come towards the end would be things like the German Day X networks which were broken up in 2018 but are have not yet uh resulted in convictions. the British cases of certain security service radicalization, but also things like the adoption of masking and uh uh street protest repertoire by native organizers uh and the selective rule changes that have followed um which I see as early partial prototypes uh of what is to come rather than as uh aber operations. The point here I'm trying to make is that the underlying logistical, tactical and organizational problems of uh revolt are not insoluble in western countries for competent people with residual professional skills and access to open technical uh

17:43 literature and [snorts] a grievance that is sufficiently animating to compel them uh to behave abnormally. I'm not trying to claim a dated prophecy here. I'm uh I'm trying to describe a trajectory with an end point. Absent a change of course that I that is both large uh and early. The direction of travel is toward sustained internal conflict. And I I'm afraid I can see no political off-ramp here that is both plausible and peaceful. A halt or a reversal that is sharp enough to matter would be resisted by those who now hold what has been gained. Whereas a continuation would be resisted by those who believe it represents the eraser of their country.

18:33 So every route that alters the trajectory enough to change the outcome is already inside the conflict zone. And put simply, that's a hopson choice between a bad outcome and a range of worse ones. Uh this is not a claim on my part that there is no clever scheme that can be conceived. It's just an admission that I am not clever enough to come up uh with that uh with that solution if there is one. I don't see a way out that escapes uh the violence.

19:10 So for this audience in conclusion I think the implication is straightforward. If you treat the problem primarily as one of Islamist terror or of a failure to integrate integrate uh a fundamentally compatible population, you mislocate the driver of the conflict. The compatibility problem is real and won't be negotiated away by moderate spokesmen in my opinion once convex politics really takes hold, which I believe it has. And that's because maximalist voices already out compete the centrist ones.

19:48 Uh but the force that has made the really insol insoluble at this scale is the elite decision in the first place to import it to deny its character and to punish the native noticing of the existence of the problem. The native reaction is what's going to determine the form and the duration of what follows. Uh I don't think that reaction is uh uh latent anymore. It's beginning to emerge uh and on the record.

20:23 Thanks. That's all I got. Fire away. Thank you. No, no, thank you, David. That was that was great. Um very informative and I have a million questions of my own. I am there's a number of good questions in the queue. I am going to take the liberty of asking the first one. Um, just last week in the UK, there were numerous anti-Jewish protests. Two Iranian nationals who were there illegally were charged with plotting a massive attack against Jews in Manchester. There was a Kuwaiti man who was also there illegally sentenced for attempting to break into the Israeli embassy with a knife. Um, the Green Party voted to call Zionism racism with the intent of destroying the state of Israel and called for Zionists to be basically hunted in synagogues to be protested. And that's just in one week in the UK. Um, what role does anti-semitism play in all of this? And you know, we know the sayings that what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews and the Jews are the canary in the coal mine. So, you know, when you look back historically, when anti-semitism begins to flourish, it's a sign tends to be a sign of a culture in decline. I is the anti-semitism that we're seeing

21:25 flourishing part of this whole framework that you've that you've set out. And I am going to tie in a question that one of the audience members asked wondering why when his synagogue was attacked on Yam Kipper um you know the security forces had to deal with it and why isn't [clears throat] this country screening the immigrants that it's bringing in right um well I don't think that I think what I'm what I'm describing is uh the emergence of a of a larger conflict that that um uh will will affect Jews uh and already is in many ways as you I I fully agree that actually for uh reasons that are surely very obvious to nearly all your listeners um uh the levels of anti-semitism of anti-is specifically anti-Israeli uh animists are very very high in the UK these are widely ly held but also very

22:30 deeply held um and particularly in the Muslim Muslim community which feels I think little um reason to hide that um so and the open kind of um threat um often verbal but sometimes much more than that is uh is is increasingly common um anyway so I don't need to tell your listeners things that they that they already know perhaps from their own experience or that from that of their extended families.

23:05 And I'm not trying to uh separate uh separate the two issues. I I I accept actually the the apherism about um canary in the canary in the mine. Um and I think that um what we're seeing in terms of the kind of intertribal uh dynamic here is one which will met metastasize and become more uh become more generalized. Um, so Sam Westrop of uh MEF, he's he heads up our Islamist watch. Um, has asked what you believe is most likely to happen in the United States and as did uh Dexter Vanzal also with MEF asked, "What should Americans learn from this?" So, if you can address what's going on in the US.

23:54 Well, I'm really hesitant to to tell Americans what to understand about their own country from uh a separate one. I mean, uh, the truth matter is I'm I'm British. I live in London. Uh, I don't live in the United States, and I don't follow American politics, uh, as closely um, as I'm sure many of your listeners do. Um, I have the strong impression, however, that all of the six factors that I mentioned will be to some degree resonant with American audiences. Um certainly the idea of factionalism of and polarization that will not be that will not be uh new. The perception of downgrading, I think, is in in some ways uh accelerated in the American in the American case. Uh um uh while at the same time being um perhaps alleviated because of the nature

24:58 of the bulk of inward American uh migration to the United States is not chiefly Muslim. I think it if you're talking about uh it's talking about uh migration from places which I suspect uh easier to uh assimilate and moreover uh the United States has um perhaps um an advantage in the existing of uh creedle understanding of itself. That is not typical um in that is not the case in Europe where Europeans perceive what is occurring demographically to be um um nationally existential in a way that I sense might be a bit different in in the United States economic procarity.

25:51 However, sorry. Um, just to continue though, the loss of faith in the legitimacy of politics and the idea that this this is a functioning way to solve collective action problems. I can see you're nodding. Um, you know, so I think an American listener probably thinks that's that's a problem. Also, um, economic procarity is certainly uh is certainly there. I'm not an economist, but even I can sense that having um your national debt sail through 40 trillion is probably a bad idea. Um and that there is significant anxiety around the place of the dollar as the global reserve currency. Uh now in ways that would have struck people as very odd even just 5 years ago now seem a perfectly rational concern. Uh and that would be a a big deal. Um, the United States obviously is a well-armed population and has a a a historical tradition, you might say, of

26:54 revolution. Uh, um, so that factor applies and uh I I certainly don't look at American elites and say, well, this is a group of people who simply [clears throat] exude uh an image of competence and uh and unity. So I think for all those reasons that that United States is in the frame but with with differences that are probably more perceptible and explicable to Americans than me. But from an outsers's uh that's the way it looks to me. I guess I would say in answer to the question about what to do, I think Americans also need to do to look at their infrastructure.

27:42 You have to look to mitigation of the effects of what is likely to come and to look at your infrastructure uh not only as u as something which needs to be guarded against um external attack. Almost all of the literature on uh critical infrastructure protect protection relates to cyber attack or external attack and not to uh internal attack which quite obviously I suppose is in fact the dominant threat um um or the dominant origin of of of threat. And so I think that serious people should be looking at maps of um infrastructure, of bridges, of transport networks, of the basically the life support systems with a view to how those might be um [clears throat] uh operationalized in the context of of a serious domestic conflict because you don't want to find out uh u uh in a surprise that the city in which you live

28:48 um has a 3-day food supply and is dependent on two artiller arterial networks that are very vulnerable to disruption and the bridges have just fallen into the river and now everybody well that would be a a bad time to panic. Um I I I want to just take this question a step further because in one of an article that you wrote that I was reading not too long ago, you you stated that it must be assumed that if a civil war breaks out in one place, it's likely to spread elsewhere. I assume you were talking about through Europe. Is is do do you see other European countries in the same situation as the UK?

29:23 Yes. Uh I think it's a very tight race honestly. Uh one of the most common questions I've been asked is where is it going to happen first? Um and uh very often I've said Ireland first for complex of reasons. All of the things that I've just mentioned are the case, but also Ireland has a more recent history of um of civil conflict and a higher as a result a a greater kind of uh residue or reservoir of uh of people with appropriate skills and mentality and temperament.

29:57 Um so it could be there. Uh Britain, I've just explained my feelings on that. France, of course. I mean, I mean, I might have picked France, but I suppose I'm sitting in London, so um that might have influenced my decision on on that matter, but nobody can look at uh scenes of France over the last uh over the last week and think, well, this is all going fine. Um this is quite obvious to put things mildly. Um so, it could be a range of countries. And in in essence, my argument that it is that it it doesn't really matter in which one it kicks off first because the demonstration effects uh and the connectedness of these countries is is such and this and the commonality of the base problems is such that I would expect that they that they transmit pretty quickly.

30:51 Um thank you David. Uh there's so many questions that are that are coming in and I I hope that you're okay staying for a couple extra minutes because I'd like to continue asking you. Um somebody asked well Sam actually asked who will uh the belligerent be in a British civil war and how will the Brit Britain's military and police react? And there was actually somebody else who asked a similar question about um the limited capabilities of the British military in a civil war situation. Okay, good question. Um the u the the belligerance can be conveniently uh uh grouped into three major categories. Those are um uh your post the postnational elite which I uh just described the native ma uh much of the native mass and the non-native um fraction.

31:48 These groups are not equal in size and they're not equal uh in in potential uh but they all uh for they all have uh why under conditions of stress as they are already um uh appearing will converge on on each other. So uh I would say it's basically these three uh these three major categories of um of uh which then if you think about it is what informs this u uh picture of a dual vector conflict which I uh described earlier in which essentially the native mass is simultaneously uh in revolt against its own elite which it seeks to punish for effectively uh 30 coming on actually longer but let's say 30 years of uh policies which that mass perceives to be h to have been uh thrust upon them uh without uh appropriate democratic

32:56 uh while at the same time they are in uh a more conventional intertribal conflict something like say Northern Ireland or Lebanon on the Balkans with the um more recent non-native um non-native And that will that's it's this kind of three-part structure which I think will inform the logic of how the the conflict is conducted. This the the second factor is essentially through a 21st century variant of siege warfare in which uh cities are uh attacked not not directly with mass uh forces but by uh severing their life support infrastructure essentially creating conditions that within the the urban zones that make them unlivable. Um you can easily imagine what happens and this is not just theorized but actually

34:01 uh quite well well proven empirically what happens to a city particularly a divided city when you switch the power and the heat off for any uh length of time. Um so that's the logic of the the the second the intertribal the logic of the um more kind of populist um peasant revolt is what I would describe as a dirt what basically as a dirty war to use the appropriate term. This is a kind of chronic conflict which is conducted through things like um assassination, kidnapping, um targeted targeted attacks essentially designed to produce both fear but more importantly anformational uh anformational effect and to provoke the state into overreaction.

34:50 Um, which brings me to the the question part of the question about the reaction of the police and and security military in uh potential in a conflict such as I'm describing and they need to be taken in in order. The most important uh one is the police. Uh, and what's most important to understand about the police the contemporary policing scene in the UK is that it's very chronically undermanned. It's undertrained and it lacks uh cap it lacks certain domestic which people accept people expect that it would have because historically the British police has been very capable in the domestic security sphere most most uh most importantly through an instit institution known as special uh which had a domestic intelligence and security u uh function of a policing nature. Sure. Uh special branch was closed down um well over a decade ago.

35:52 that unique capab almost unique capability which was the key ingredient that kept the minor strike in the mid1 1980s from blowing up into something larger and which was the key uh way in which the British kind of far right or uh British nationalist movement was uh broken up in the 19 early 1990s doesn't exist anymore that function that capability is not one that the state has anymore Uh what the state has is a lot of capability to mon monitor social media uh to see things online, but if you're not blathering about your plans online, the police probably don't know much about what you're getting up to.

36:38 Um turning to to the military, the military also um uh this what I'm about to say is controversial with respect to the literature because as far as the literature is concerned when it comes to revolt one probably the most decisive factor on whether the result revolt uh succeeds or fails is which way the army breaks. If the army stays loyal to the government then generally the government will survive. Um so what's controversial is that I think that actually in the British case and probably in other western cases the army is not likely to be very important. Um and that's because uh its numbers are actually rather too small. Uh it's also divided. Um and in the case of the UK, I think it's quite important that at the same time successive governments have been uh doing the things which have led to the situation I've described. We have a current government which is

37:39 essentially conducting lawfare uh exercise against the the most against the um our special forces the special air service particularly. Uh so essentially the that part of the army which would be most vital in terms of uh regime support there's a lot of reasons to question whether these people would would would show up. Now I I'm not being naive here. actually professional soldiers and particularly in that in those roles are uh can be quite mercenary in their mentality. But I think there's perfectly good reason to suspect and a number of uh British generals have have have warned uh that the that the strong expectation of British military loyalty is is probably um uh shouldn't be so strong. It should be uh questioned. So I think for reasons of the police uh inadequacy, the military's small size, its dubious um

38:45 um affection for the government, the most likely scenario is that the the military fractures and parts of it remain sufficiently loyal to the uh remaining elite that it can do things like secure the most probably central parts of London and other places uh but will not be able to exert much positive uh effect beyond beyond that. Um so we are running out of time and there's a lot of questions. I'm going to combine two I'm not in a rush if you wanted to go.

39:21 So I I'm well if the audience is okay to stay I'm going to try to combine a couple and we'll maybe do two more questions. So, um, a couple people have asked about the elite and they're trying to understand what the goal of the elite is and what have they gained from these Uh, okay. So, I believe that the goal of the of the elite is essentially um is essentially the service of postnational ideals. The the irony is throughout the western world with the arguable exception of the United States under the current president uh current uh is composed composed of countries where in in which the national leaders actually don't believe in uh national interest. These are people who are of what I referred to goodart goodart's idea of the anywhere class. These are globally mobile people um who uh share a greater kind of uh affinity and connection with other uh with other uh national elites than they

40:26 do with the people o over whom they governed they govern. So I think that the the the the primary driver of this is the what I call the postnational identity of uh the 21st century western elite which shares a a range of um um of attributes but probably the most significant and I'll f focus on in the interest of brevity is a is a essentially a perception of their own countries as as kind of as um very large Excel spreadsheets, right?

41:09 In which citizens uh exist as um lines um of um as bookkeeping lines, passports are effectively uh useful re really as tax designators. uh and there is no kind of uh understanding of an intrinsic or uh connection between a people and its history and its land. In fact, that kind of language in uh elite circles is very suspicious if one is to talk uh if one talks in that matter. In fact, you know, if merely actually in uh engaging in discussion of um uh specifically national interest is is uh is treated as um morally suspect. to put a face to this uh and a specific example uh again drawing on David Goodhart's book uh he recounts an interview with a very senior

42:13 the most senior British civil servant who at the time was in the treasury the man by the name of Gus O'Donnell who explained to Goodart that uh when he was at the Treasury he favored the most basically he favored mass migration because he saw his role as uh serving the global uh good rather than the national good. Okay. So that's that's the way I I I look at the uh the motivation of the um of the post of the elite. It is fundamentally postnational. It helps also that if you are in that class uh you also benefit financially from it. It's it's perfectly possible to have a comfortable and reasonably safe existence at least to this point within that within that uh within that system because the costs which I uh which I' I've described are generally not born at the elite level.

43:10 They're costs you know things like wage depression are are most acutely felt at among the working classes. the the the the huge uh kind of growth in u uh asset prices particularly houses and in many ways has benefited those who add assets to in the first place. So there's a combination of of of reasons both individual and pecuniary as well as larger and ideational. Um, so again, there's so many questions.

43:44 I'm going to just combine two and make this the last question because we really have kept you all for for longer than we anticipated, but what a great topic, David. Um, Sam also has asked what sort of system might ultimately follow such violence and breakdown and if authoritarian, what might that what might that system look like? Someone also asked whether the woke left and the non-assimilated immigrants remain on the same side throughout this process, for lack of a better word. So I guess the best way to end is what you think is going to happen through Let me take Let me take the last half of that question first. I I I think there's there's a there's a um there's an uh uh looming breakup of the of the woke left and the Muslim largely it's the Muslim population. uh that's I think that's that's um almost inevitable. I don't see how that alliance holds together. Um and one can

44:49 also already see how that is fracturing. And you know I think the best example of this for people who are interested in understanding that dynamic might be to look at the fate of the UK Green Party uh which started out as an environmental uh an environmentalist movement and essentially has transformed itself into a Gaza party. and I don't exaggerate. Um, so that's the so I think that is going there is going to be a breakup on that front. What will the post conflict settlement look like? I mean that's extremely difficult uh to predict. I mean I'm not going to dodge your question. I'll take a shot at it. I'm just saying for what it's worth, right?

45:33 Uh there's a long long way to go before we get to a settlement and many things could happen and it could you know and academics make bad predictions all the I freely acknowledge. Um but I think lo logically speaking I see sort of three possible or three quite plausible outcomes in uh not quite equally plausible. The one outcome is essentially what JD Vance uh outlined when he said uh what was it a year ago or maybe even longer that uh the that the UK may be the first Islamist country with a nuclear uh with a nuclear weapon.

46:16 I think he was throwing trying to throw a hand grenade rhetorically. Um but his reasoning was not completely not completely exotic. Um uh and essentially what he was painting was a a a picture of the trajectory of the country in which the demographic uh projections uh the um hold true or accelerate. Uh and that's that's that's very plausible. Um if you if you just look at the current trajectory and then you think about things like chain migration and uh and as as well as anyway so that's it's not completely implausible. I think it's not the most likely occurrence however uh for reasons essentially that I think from a I'm really a student of war more than politics. Uh but I think from a and from a from a tactical perspective, I would say the non-native situation has significant vulnerabilities.

47:19 The key one is the very low um bridging capital which they possess. There's not many allies uh available uh available to them. There are perfectly probably perfectly obvious ways in which they can be split if you have a sufficiently determined intent to do so. Um their configuration as represented on the map uh is uh is also quite uh quite vulnerable. um you know basically I don't probably don't need to explain too much why being in ghettos is actually not a safe um position to be so a trajectory that that that has resulted in ghettoization even self ghettoization is not one that is uh that that I think is ideal from which to fight an essentially herbicidal um um u conflict The last uh another possibility though

48:24 is u that the elites win out right but basically but they uh but I think that form of winning out essentially means the termination of democracy as we know it we'll have something pro possibly performative or maybe they won't bother with that but you can see the emerging signs of that in the increasing kind of algorithmization of security of domestic security uh particular particularly the policing of speech the uh which is very acute uh uh here in the UK as I think everybody now understands.

49:03 Um and so you result the result there is something like um you know maybe a version of a version of 1984 but less gray perhaps with you know u some combination. Anyway, uh a kind of reassertion of uh of an authoritarian pattern on some on some line in which we basically give up on this democracy thing. Um and possibly give up on a lot of security as well, though maybe they would be able to deliver on on on that, but it wouldn't be with much liberty left over. The third possibility is that basically the the native mass successfully punishes its own elite enough that it is scared and compelled into governing again as a national Um and you have uh you have essentially uh uh again for the second time in 100 years in Europe mass movement of

50:10 There is a fourth possibility uh and I I actually think that the third is the most likely or more likely than the previous two. The most likely though is the fourth. I should have mentioned that there is four uh and the the fourth is a long period of bulcanization. the close and uh in which my best efforts to I think rather than me describe I encourage people to pick up a relatively famous book by an American author Jack Wulmarmac called um uh random acts of senseless violence [gasps] which is a a novel written in the early 1990s. It's presented uh about uh the United States set in the future actually roughly about this time in the future. Uh and it's written from the perspective of a 12-year-old um Jewish girl actually it turns out um living in New York with her family in the United in a future version of the United States

51:14 in which presidents are assassinated couple of times a year. uh policing has effectively um uh collapsed. You're in a state of more or less chaotic application of martial law in which um uh violence is uh is endemic. And so people self um uh attempt to self-secure um various measures including home hardening um local defense uh measures and while at the same time trying desperately to maintain uh a degree of normal civil economic life and economic functioning. [gasps] Suffice to say, it is a very unpleasant uh book to read.

52:05 Um, it was uh it was popular and relatively popular in the 1990s, but I think bears uh rereading uh um uh today uh because it feels I think to be an image of what is the most likely to me interim solution. beyond that, I don't know. Well, that was quite informative for for not knowing. You certainly provided a number of very realistic possibilities.

52:41 Um, and obviously you don't have a looking glass, but it's it's all very frightening. Um, thank you, David. I'm so sorry that we've run out of time because again people are still throwing in questions to the queue, but maybe we'll have you back uh in a couple months and see where things stand. Uh thank you to the audience for joining and for sticking with us. It was an important conversation. Again, thank you for joining us this afternoon. To the audience and to you, David, good luck with all of your very important work. Thank you.