For a while now I’ve been convinced that Britain is heading for some sort of crisis. Despite outward appearances Britain, both its society and its economy, are very fragile.

We are entering a winter when all the renewable energy chickens might messily come home to roost. A cold snap with little wind to drive turbines, a drop in solar production, both from less daylight hours or solar panels being occluded by snow, coupled with issues with energy inter-connectors not working as they should and we might be into chaos time.

An energy crisis that might be accompanied by the additional problems of having to do a black restart to much of the UK’s electric grid, might aid property crime, create panic buying, provide an opportunity for society’s wrong’uns both home grown and imported to strut their stuff and get angry people out on the streets. If you thought that the social upheaval of the Covid era was bad then it’s fair to say that you ain’t seen nothing yet if we get major energy outages this winter.

A winter energy crisis would come on top of a rapidly worsening social situation with sectarianism becoming more openly expressed and increasingly robust protests about migration going on. Add into that the drop in public confidence in both government and agencies like the Police and Criminal Justice system and you have a recipe for disaster.

I’m not the only one who is looking at the dice that the political classes have thrown for the country and seeing in the numbers on these dice how the game of national stability could be lost. David Betz, Professor of War Studies at Kings College London and Michael Rainsborough, a Professor of Strategic Theory at the Australian War College, have also noticed that things are not at all well with Britain.

In a piece published on The Daily Sceptic website, Professor Betz and Professor Rainsborough examine the febrile state that Britain is in today.

It is not, I must say, a piece that makes for comforting reading, unless that is you are the sort of person who wants to just sit back and watch the world burn and I’m not one of them.

Professors Betz and Rainsborough start their piece by talking about the current convulsions across Europe. They mention the current riots and other trouble in France, the rise of challenger parties of both the Left and the Right, the emergence of Weimar-style political fracturing and the failure of multiple governments to deal with the issues and how this has led to a turn towards what used to be called extremists, but which have their roots in the actions of the mainstream political parties.

The professors talk about the issue of ‘accelerationism’ and said of the counterproductive actions of the political class:

“Aggravating the conditions driving the crisis follows the logic of accelerationism. Most closely associated with the British philosopher Nick Land, accelerationism holds that an existing order contains forces which, once unleashed, drive change forward and ultimately overwhelm attempts to restrain them. Rather than arrest the process, accelerationist thought embraces its intensification, although versions of the idea on Left and Right differ markedly over where it might lead. The essential rationale remains: if the existing order contains forces capable of destroying or transforming it, remove the restraints and let them run their course.”

It may not be the case that the political classes are making things worse deliberately, but they cannot conceive of carrying out the actions that might prevent the problems from accelerating. It would be anathema for example for the political classes to admit that millions of working class Britons might be correct in their assessment of immigration and change the nation’s policies accordingly.

Because they will not amend the policies that are causing the problems because politicians don’t want to step outside of the ideologies that have so far given them a comfortable ride, instead they make policies that feel good to them but in reality make things worse. A good example of this is the issue of immigration protests in Britain. The government will not deal with the root cause problem that of immigration because it goes against their guiding ideologies to limit it. Therefore instead of dealing with this root cause problem they deal with the symptoms which are the protests and clamp down hard on dissent.

In this piece, Professors Betz and Rainsborough take an especial interest in the United Kingdom and they mark it down as a place where accelerationism is happening.

They said:

“Judged by that standard, Britain’s ruling classes are accelerationists par excellence. They oversee economic stagnation, mounting national debt, growing welfare dependency, the decay of town centres and public services, and deepening social divisions, compounded by rapid demographic change and repeated failures to deliver effective immigration controls. Their own reports document segregation, declining trust and failures of integration, yet governments refuse to change the policies contributing to those problems. As opposition becomes more organised and disruptive, the state responds with surveillance and speech restrictions, as well as two-tier policing and justice. Grievance produces resistance, resistance produces stronger enforcement, and stronger enforcement fuels the grievance.

We first raised the likelihood of Britain moving towards violent social breakdown in a short article ‘The British Road to Dirty War’ in January 2019. At that time the prognosis was seen as controversial, not least within our own university. We were ‘cancelled’ and removed from our positions of authority in the Department of War Studies for daring to raise this heretical possibility.

Now, the prospect is no longer confined to supposedly dissenting academics. In June 2026, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch warned that communal divisions risked taking Britain towards civil war. What was once been dismissed as an alarmist prediction was now being voiced by the leader of the opposition. Recognising the danger is one thing, though; reconsidering the policies contributing to the problem is quite another.”

It’s difficult to disagree with the Professors on this. Governments in Britain, not just the current one but previous ones, have become more and more draconian towards dissent, rather than tackle the underlying problems. The situation is far worse than it should be because the grievances that the British people have, due to government policies and government failures, are fully justified. It’s justified to be angry at a border that is doing a good impression of a kitchen colander or a health service that would disgrace the Third World in terms of outcomes or about two tier policing or the evisceration of the freedom of speech that previous generations fought so hard to achieve.

We do indeed have a government who is making things a whole lot worse than they need be. I find that I’m reading Professor Betz and Rainsborough’s piece and despairing. Things didn’t need to end up this way or the even worse ways that they might be going. Governments in Britain could have sidestepped what is coming, had they obeyed the democratic will and sorted out major issues such as migration and sorted them out to the satisfaction of the majority of indigenous Britons. They could have ensured that impartiality was not unceremoniously turfed out of policing with all the force of a Trebuchet and stopped activists infesting and infecting the Judiciary. They could have not empowered poisonous identity politics. They could have created the conditions, including energy affordability and availability, that would have allowed the economy to grow. Successive governments have done none of this. Instead they’ve created policies that have made everything worse than it should be, then silenced the people’s complaints and turned the state’s boot boys on those who protested the wanton destruction of their nation. None of this is good.

Do I think that there is time and opportunity to turn things around? The answer is I do not know but I’m certainly not hopeful that things will change for the better without some sort of upheaval.

We are, as I see it, in a similar position to how England was in 1640 a couple of years prior to the English Civil War. I very much doubt that those who were mildly pissed off at the actions of King Charles in 1640 and would never have considered themselves to be radicals, could have seen that just six years later things would have changed so much that Parliament would put the King on trial for his life and subsequently execute him. Former moderates in the England of 1640 sometimes found themselves, due to circumstances, later on taking much more radical positions than they might have thought themselves capable of in earlier times. In 1640 there might have been members of Parliament who were unhappy with the King but who might not at the time have foreseen the future conflict or what their role would be in it or how their viewpoints might be changed in that future.

Like England prior to the Civil War, Britain is in a bad place. Like back then, people are starting to ask why are we being governed like we are? In Civil War England it was the question of who rules, the King or Parliament? Now it’s a question of who rules, the people or what has become a self-sustaining and self-replicating political and cultural elite, whose views and priorities differ greatly from that of the bulk of the nation’s people?

Can an implosion, both social and political, be averted? Again I’m really not sure. All roads at present seem to lead to some sort of abyss. We are currently very badly governed by those who have the wrong priorities, but there’s no guarantee that changing the governing party would change things for the better. I still believe that change might come via the ballot box but that route might also deliver more problems, such as a split anti-Establishment vote leading to a Rainbow Vomit Coalition of Labour, Lib Dems, Greens and Islamic Fundamentalists with ‘Independent’ labels in power or a big win for a challenger party that by dint of poor pre-government preparation screws things up badly. Traditionally when Labour screw up, as they so often eventually do, the electorate can reach for the Conservative Party as a method of changing things but that is less so today. The Tories are badly tainted by their failure to get to grips with problems such as migration and identity politics when they were in office for 14 years, which means that they are less likely than before to be seen as the traditional cleaner-upper of Labour’s messes.

I think that things are bad and the words of the two Professors calcify that view. I would strongly suggest that you go and read the entirety of this piece by the Professors and understand just how precarious things are in Britain and the wider West.

You can read the piece via the link below:

https://dailysceptic.org/2026/10/14/clamping-down-on-dissent-while-failing-to-secure-the-border-is-accelerating-britain-towards-crisis/