'Dominic Cummings appears much like a David Peace character, a Right-wing organiser in the shadows.' Hollie Adams / Getty Images
Rereading the novelist David Peace’s GB84, set during the Miners’ Strike, it recently struck me that when Peace wrote the novel, in 2004, he was writing from the middle of the “End of History” era. His portrayal of a country on edge, breaking apart under civil conflict, was a historicising one. Twenty years after the events it depicted, its jagged, paranoid tone was a literary construct, not a reflection of Peace’s lived reality under the New Labour consensus. Yet in today’s Britain, Peace’s fictional evocation of that atmosphere strikes the reader as more relevant than the now-vanished world of Blairism. Indeed, in his latest Sky News interview and Substack blog post, Dominic Cummings appears much like a Peace character, a Right-wing organiser in the shadows, muttering darkly of a slide to civil war and of murmurs of dissent from within the “deep state” and security services.
“Inside the intelligence services,” Cummings writes, “special forces, […] bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently.” As Cummings notes, the Government’s panicked response to last year’s ethnic riots, and its fear of their recurrence, derives from “incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs… The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence.” And yet instead, Cummings claims, “As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicisation of white English nationalism.”
Much of this analysis I agree with. Certainly, the events that followed the parade crash in Liverpool this week provided a glimpse of a country, and government, on edge, waiting for an explosion it is either unwilling or unable to escape. Unlike after Southport, the perpetrator was swiftly revealed by the state to belong to Britain’s ethnic majority (or rather, Liverpool’s Irish one). This information was revealed so rapidly precisely to ward off another wave of riots, the prospect of which hangs over the Government like a deferred death sentence. Yet even still, simply revealing the facts of the case was not enough for many, who saw it as another instance of two-tier policing: we have, unfortunately, entered a situation where for many the police, and state, can do no right.
Fears of a second round of riots may have been overblown in this instance — the incident was, fortunately, not fatal, and the current inclement weather, as the Police Service of Northern Ireland well know, is an inhibitor to mass street violence — but the initial tension of the moment provided a vivid portrait of a country on edge. The Government is held hostage to factors outside of its control: the possibility of a mass casualty attack that can be linked to mass migration, as now commonly occurs throughout Europe, and a simultaneous extended spell of good weather in Britain, which is less common. One may, as I do, believe that sustained bouts of civil conflict are not the most probable outcome of Britain’s current unhappy circumstances, but the revealed actions of the British state suggest that they are highly possible.
The state’s official report on the policing of the summer riots observed that police forces were nearly overstretched by the scale and geographic dispersal of the events, characterised as “exceptional levels of violence” in which “offenders attacked police officers with missiles, including petrol bombs”, and which saw 54 police officers hospitalised. The report briefly considers the use of baton rounds in any repeat of the disorder, and suggests that “it may be timely to explore whether current and foreseeable circumstances might render the use of water cannon conceivable”. For the authorities, then, the retention of coercive power sufficient to suppress probable future disorder is a process still being refined. The question now is how to arrest the tailspin of the British state to render these refinements no more than a latent, unneeded capability.
Starmer’s late-stage pivot on mass migration, using language that would have Hope Not Hate chasing him if he were an anonymous blogger rather than a centre-left prime minister, is one such attempt to steer away from disaster. But Cummings too has evolved in this regard. Two years ago, he was ultimately a reformer, aiming to save Westminster from itself, rather than a revolutionary. Yet now, for Cummings, the Westminster state is “the regime”, and a failing, pre-revolutionary one at that. As he observes in the Sky News interview, the attitude of British voters towards their political system is one of “hate, contempt and disgust”, adding that “it’s now very common to have discussions outside London with normal people where they talk about the coming civil war, about how their area is going to crack up, what they see around them, and how frightened they are for the future. That’s not an abnormal conversation to have now.”
Cummings’ newest musings on civil war are an elaboration of his February observation, glossed over by lobby journalists in favour of SW1 gossip, that the next election presents the last opportunity to install a reformist Right-wing government before 2032, “by which time many problems will be profound and serious violence harder to avoid”. For Cummings, as he says to Sky News, Britain’s current political system is already dead: “the old system can keep struggling and fighting, but it’s not going to win that battle in the end, it’s only a question of how destructive that transition is.”
In his follow-up this week to his now-viral essay and interview (referenced by Cummings) assessing the likelihood of civil war in Western nations, including Britain, David Betz, the King’s College London Professor of War in the Modern World, claimed that “At the time of writing the countries that are most likely to experience the outbreak of violent civil conflict first are Britain and France”, as “governments under increasing structural civilisational distress and having squandered their legitimacy are losing the ability to peacefully manage multicultural societies that are terminally fractured by ethnic identity politics”. Cummings now claims that Betz “reflects similar discussions I’ve had with people in intelligence, SF [Special Forces] etc about the dynamics pushing the UK towards civil violence”. Betz’s suggestion is that “Generals should be formulating strategies to respond to the reality of civil conflict now. At the very least, should they fear for their careers lest they begin to plan for the outbreak of civil war without a civilian political directive, they ought to seek such a directive.”
But is this actually true? It is certainly true that a sense of foreboding has settled over the country, that these conversations are now being had, from previously unexpected quarters. But there also remains the opposing feeling that much of this derives from the circular reasoning of the Right, a handful of people referencing each other, talking themselves into an unnecessary disaster. Would the Army leadership seeking a political directive to plan for civil war, as Betz suggests, ameliorate a looming disaster, or would it summon an avoidable one into being as the plans are leaked and the nation’s already fraying social fabric tatters even further?
Accepting their framing, how can disaster be averted? Cummings cites the existence of unnamed “Political entrepreneurs arguing explicitly for radical change”, claiming that “There are, though, for the first time embryonic networks inside both old parties starting to grapple with the themes of this blog and ask themselves: perhaps we need to change our mental pictures radically and side with voters against the NPC mainstream…? And very powerful forces will keep pushing this way regardless of how the NPCs scream ‘fascist’.” Who are these “political entrepreneurs”? He surely does not mean Farage, who appears more like the last vestige of the old regime than its replacement. What are the “embryonic networks” and “very powerful forces”?
When Cummings claims that “deep state discussions about the growing prospect of violence… have seeped through to few MPs or hacks”, is this the same “deep state” that fears seeing networks emerge combining explicit anti-Islam, explicit violence/sabotage, and competent organisation?” Is it the same “deep state” as in his claim that “the last thing any part of SW1 (outside some of the deep state) wanted to see was the Tories transformed into a different party that was super-tough on crime and immigration, super-focused on productivity and science-technology-startups-investment, super-disruptive of Whitehall’s core institutions, and supported by a national coalition uniting parts of the working classes and middle classes”? Exactly what or who this “deep state” is is never revealed, but it sounds strikingly close to his own view.
Whitehall, Cummings implies, is divided between those that are preparing “to sabotage Farage, copying their friends in Europe who routinely sabotage political threats to the old system” and those, “particularly in security and intelligence”, who will respond to this disintegration. How do the repeated references to the SAS, which is, he claims, “under attack from its political bosses today” and “watching carefully who keeps quiet and who speaks out in their defence” fit in? Does this relate to his assertion in the Sky News interview that during Covid “we put the former commanding officer of 22 SAS in there… and then things actually worked, we sent his mates from the SAS around the country and they actually built stuff […] while all the other useless wankers in Westminster were just sharing powerpoints”? How does all this relate to his claim that dissatisfaction within the Army “is one of those invisible-to-SW1 tidal waves with potential to be a huge crisis — sudden and ‘unforeseen’ in SW1 but obvious long before if you were looking in the right place… bubbling out of control for Whitehall”? Does this fit into his previously expressed suggestion to place “Army heroes” into his reformist Right-wing government? If so, aside from anything else, this idea assumes a higher degree of competence in the Army’s leadership than its ongoing procurement woes (which Cummings unfairly places squarely on the MOD’s shoulders) would suggest.
The suggestions Cummings makes here are far more interesting than gossip about the dying days of the Johnson government — and consequently, have been ignored by the Westminster lobby. The cumulative effect is like reading political fiction about the alleged plot against Harold Wilson, or, as noted above, a Right-wing conspirator in a David Peace novel: it reads, at times, like a Left-wing fever dream of Right-wing politics. Without Cummings’ access to the inner workings of the British state, it is impossible to form an opinion on the veracity, or otherwise, of these doom-laden “deep state” conversations. Betz, for his part, puts the likelihood of civil war in Britain at around 18% over the next five years, certainly much higher than one would like, but far from likely — and even Betz would agree that his stance is a minority opinion. Either way, both Betz and Cummings address themselves directly to security elites within the heart of the British state in an attempt to either avoid or ameliorate the effects of serious civil disorder they place on a sliding scale from possible to near-inevitable.
That these claims can be made seriously, by credible people, is testament to the failure of Britain’s political system over recent decades. Certainly, urgent reform is needed before the country descends further down a dark and slippery path. But we are not there yet, and disaster is very far from inevitable. Even should civil conflict occur, it would, I suggest, look more like the Northern Ireland of 2025 than that of the Seventies: Britain’s politics gummed up with the petty narcissism of unresolvable ethnic factionalism, with only sporadic and brief outbursts of violent disorder. This would be a mark of historic political failure, but is a far more palatable scenario than the refugee flows and Army-protected “secure zones” Betz envisages. The more likely scenario is the three main parties competitively outbidding each other on immigration, in a Rightward shift with no functional Left-wing opposition, the focus of which will eventually turn towards mass deportations, as now underway in the United States.
Cummings is probably correct that a Reform government, representing a last-ditch protest vote by Britain’s voters, would be the final gasp of Britain’s political system in its current ailing form. The stakes of British political reform are now uncomfortably high: if the system cannot reform itself, it will break. Cummings concludes his Sky News interview by saying that “the forces now in play will express themselves one way or another. The old system’s going to get much worse before it gets better, chaos is coming in all sorts of ways… But how that all works itself out, it could work itself out in different ways.” The lesson is either banal or profound: something will happen, unless something else better does. But in averting disaster, reformists on the Right should be careful not to talk themselves into one.
