Professor David Betz

King's College professor, historian.

David J. Betz is a British academic and a prominent scholar in the field of modern warfare. Today, he works as Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London’s War Studies Department, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Why did we invite him on?

Since the Southport riots last year, the prospect of civil war in Britain has gone from a hare-brained and paranoid delusion to something we have no choice but to confront. But there are still serious doubts over the legitimacy of those concerns. We wanted to talk to someone who could put it all in perspective.

David is one of the world’s leading thinkers in the field of insurgency - “how countries are torn apart from the inside”. We knew he was the man to come on and give us the full picture.

Why is it happening? Why are people “acting out”? What does the future hold?
We got all that. And we got more.

What did we learn?

“I’m reluctant to talk about this… discussing this subject, you make enemies you don’t want to make. But I feel compelled by my conscience.”

Any conversation about the prospect of civil war is replete with landmines, and perhaps never moreso than right now. David is a lifelong academic, not a public figure. He stands to gain very little from taking this position and puts himself at risk by doing so. However, the seriousness of the situation rendered avoidance unconscionable. The insurgency has arrived.

To an outsider, this all might seem slightly dramatic. Outside of the riots last year, there haven’t been mass demonstrations or eruptions of violence across Britain, and while there’s no shortage of scaremongering on the subject, the reality is we don’t see much of it. As David explains, that’s no surprise.

”Insurgency is an iceberg - most of it is below the surface. The guy blowing himself in a market, that’s the shiny bit at the top, but the important part is underneath.”

So what is the “important part” under the surface? In the last few decades of news consumption, we’ve developed a pretty thorough image of “insurgency”, one typified by attacks, toppling statues, and revolution. Britain seems fairly tame by comparison.

David corrects this. Insurgency isn’t just a species of political activity - it’s a rot. An inactivity.

”We don’t have Britain First guerillas blowing themselves in Westminster. What we do have is an increasing sense of alienation, more and more people expressing the view that politics is broken and doesn’t work … Politics is a way of solving collective action problems, and if it doesn’t work, it has to change … and now the problem is so severe, the system cannot fix itself.”

But why?

“If we had to list factors, multiculturalism would be at the top. And if we were to put some kind of ranking on them, it would be about 90%.”

Really? “Multiculturalism?” Weren’t we assured that multiculturalism was the path to peace? That it was the remedy to incohesion and mistrust? Isn’t it “our greatest strength?”

David doesn’t think so.