Britain’s biggest threat isn’t civil war

What if the nation is already defeated?

Elon Musk recently said in an interview with The Economist that his “batting average” for predicting the future was “very high for a human”.

Coming from virtually anyone else on the planet, this would be an audacious act of self-aggrandising. Coming from someone who has almost single-handedly transformed the EV market, commercialised space travel and accelerated the AI revolution, it’s a modest claim.

However, even the best batters occasionally swing and miss, and on this occasion, I believe Musk missed.

He was clarifying a tweet he posted in 2024 in response to the unrest sparked by the murder of three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.

Pressed on whether he still stands by his prediction that ‘civil war is inevitable’ in a country that has seen rapid, large-scale immigration and the attendant problems that come with it, the first trillionaire told The Economist’s editor-in-chief that he does, adding the caveat that this was based “on current trends”.

As he explained to a visibly indignant Zanny Minton Beddoes, when a society like Britain imports a large group of people from overseas whose ideas and beliefs are incompatible with those of the West, at some point, there will be a “reckoning”.

Before Stasi Britain locks me up like Lucy Connolly, let me make one thing clear: violence is never the answer. But the idea that decent Britons have finally had enough of the status quo and have the courage to do something about it is a romantic fantasy, one that harks back to the days of Empire when we still ruled the waves and forged our own destiny.

I say “we” because, as Minton Beddoes was quick to remind Musk throughout the interview, Britain is “my country”, not his. Unlike The Economist’s editor, however, I invoke that fact not as a cudgel to beat Musk with, but to argue that his vision of Britain is not dystopian at all.

Implicit in Musk’s insistence that Britain will snap if it’s pushed too far is an assumption that there is courage still to be found in this sceptred isle.

This is not my experience at all. I see a nation utterly defeated. A population too pusillanimous to push back against the forces that seek to destroy it. A collective malady has set in, with symptoms ranging from resignation to blithe indifference.

With voters restive about immigration and Reform riding high in the polls, my assessment might appear at odds with the national mood, but scratch the surface and it’s the same old story.

In what calls to mind a famous observation made by the French philosopher and diplomat Joseph-Marie de Maistre, “Every nation gets the government it deserves”, British voters claim they want to save this country, then head down to the ballot box and commit an act of national self-harm.

Makerfield was merely the latest example of this. Presented with the choice of sticking two fingers up to the establishment or voting for a socialist who is part of it - and who had engineered the by-election to return to Parliament - voters plumped for the latter.

If Reform’s candidate, Robert Kenyon, had won the seat, the resulting chaos would have cemented the case for an early general election, which is sorely needed to turn this country around.

Instead, we now have a (slightly) more competent leftie running the country who promises to rewind the clock on 40 years of neoliberalism, “reindustrialise” the heartlands, offer sweeteners on energy bills and bus fares, and believes carers “should be the best paid people in society” - not those working in AI or other cutting-edge industries that could boost productivity growth and make Britain a competitive player on the world stage.

The best we can hope for now is to cling on to America like barnacles on a ship as it dukes it out with China for AI supremacy. Or not. In Burnham’s Britain, it’s all about good vibes, statist intervention and nostalgia.

Who cares about the big picture stuff, anyway? The same voters who Musk has so much faith in have just given Burnham a bounce: Labour have now overtaken Reform to lead a national poll for the first time in 16 months.

Let’s not forget that Britain got itself into this mess in the first place because these same voters couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed at the last general election. Our last dud of a prime minister only secured around 33.7 per cent of the vote – one of the lowest vote shares ever to produce an outright majority.

This supine quality long precedes the present moment, of course, and arguably found its most grotesque expression during the height of Covid, when tens of millions happily complied with the government’s onerous lockdown restrictions and grassed on their neighbours for flouting them.

As Peter Hitchens recently pointed out on an episode of Triggernometry, if No 10 had “decreed that everyone had a pink extension on their nose, people would have done it”.

This was around the time that the gormless do-gooders were sharing black squares on their social media profiles to show solidarity with a black man who was killed 4,000 miles away on the streets of Minneapolis.

At least there was Brexit. That once-in-a-generation revolt against the unaccountable elites. Alas, even here, the British can’t stay the course, with 57 per cent of Britons telling YouGov that it was wrong to leave the EU, including 23 per cent of Leave voters.

Equally depressing is a recent survey that found 50 per cent of young people in Britain would not fight for their country under any circumstances. My bet is that they wouldn’t even look up if the rockets rained down. Then again, for the reasons I stated above, can you blame them?

With immigration consistently ranking as the public’s top concern, surely this is the one issue the public would not roll over on. Sadly not. It turns out voters are willing to compromise if they see a notable improvement in other areas of their lives.

For example, Ipsos polling from last year found many Conservative voters who were defecting to Reform over immigration would return to their traditional party if it were performing well on the economy and the NHS.

In other words, while immigration may be driving voters into the arms of Reform, dissatisfaction with the Conservatives’ broader record is what keeps them there. Address those wider concerns, and anger over immigration might subside.

In his recent monologue, my colleague and veteran broadcaster Colin Brazier attributes Britain’s decline to a growing incuriosity about the world. We’ve grown lazy and, in the process, let our guard down, he argues. Our enemies, meanwhile, are growing ever more curious.