The Civil War Has Already Begun

 Professor David Betz of King’s College London has done something few academics ever manage: he has got a good part of the country talking seriously about civil war in Britain. His case is about the body politic, a fragmenting society, collapsing trust in the state, and the point at which organised groups start using violence to settle what politics no longer can.

I think he’s right about the direction of travel. Where I part company with him is on the scale. Betz is thinking about organised groups and attacks on the infrastructure that keeps our cities running. I think the war has already started at the level of the individual: between brothers and sisters, between old friends, between the man in the van and the protester glued to the road in front of him. People no longer simply disagree. They regard each other as illegitimate, and in more and more everyday situations that contempt is spilling over into something physical. That, to me, is what civil war looks like before anyone hands out the guns....<<<Read More>>>....