Retired British Army Colonel Richard Kemp has said the primary risk the UK faces is from an alliance “of the hard left and Islamist extremists” and that he fears civil war because politicians are too myopic to take action.
Colonel Richard Kemp, a high-profile Infantry officer who fought counter insurgency on home ground in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, served in the Gulf war and Bosnia, commanded an Afghanistan operation, and who had political-facing senior roles in Westminster including the powerful Joint Intelligence Committee and the Cabinet Office crisis centre COBRA, has expressed concern about unrest and even civil war potentially breaking out in Britain.
The Colonel’s comments in many regards echo those by top academic David Betz, professor of war in the modern world at King’s College London’s prestigious War Studies department, who says his research has led him to believe the classic preconditions for civil war are already present in many Western nations, and particularly the UK.
Yet Kemp’s interviewer, podcaster Conor Tomlinson, related after it was taped at the MCC Feszt conference in Hungary earlier this month that Colonel Kemp had never heard of Professor Betz or his predictions, and had arrived at his views independently, which he suggested “makes his well-informed warnings all the more alarming”.
The United Kingdom and the broader West face a “primary threat” from an alliance of “hard left and Islamist extremists who have, together with other causes, come together to threaten the cohesion and the culture, the entire culture and political existence of the West,” Colonel Kemp said. This nexus, in his view, is “fostered by,” and “funded to a large extent, by our international enemies like Russia, China, Iran, and other countries as well”.
Kemp, who is openly conservative and who is something of a Bête noire for the UK left over his support for Israel, expressed concern that because the British political system produces leaders who are necessarily risk-averse and short-sighted, the political levers available to avert a crisis in the United Kingdom won’t be used. He told Tomlinson that, in general, politicians are “in a state of bewilderment, they’re like rabbits in headlights,” privately understanding what the problems are but not how to deal with them.
Their “horizon is four years”, the retired officer said, stating of politicians obsessed with the electoral cycle: “They want to keep a state of equilibrium for that time, they want to do what they can to make sure they win the next election. They don’t want to take the radical sort of action that might be necessary to address these sorts of problems”.
All of this adds up to a political crisis that can’t be solved, and increasingly desperate people who want to live in a Britain that makes sense. Kemp continued: “I’d hate to be right on this, but I believe that I know there is no political solution to the situation Britain faces today. When I say there is no solution, I don’t mean there actually isn’t a solution, but there is no solution that any of our politicians are willing to take… because they are afraid of doing anything significant”.
Picking out the hot-button topic of mass migration, which was the feature of every national election for a decade in Britain and yet was never addressed, Kemp was pessimistic, noting the political class had made “little effort” on the matter and did not appear to be about to try. Growing anger over allegations of sexual abuse of children by new arrivals has already sparked “an element of civil discontent” and could foment more, he said.
Between high numbers of legal and illegal migrant arrivals and their impact on society, the counter-terror expert and seasoned counter-insurgency fighter observed:
There’s only so much that I think people can take of that, and they’ve been very quiet up until now, the people in the UK have not really raised their voices against this, or in a very limited way only. But the more it develops, and it is going to develop more and more, the more unrest we are going to see.
And they have no option. I’m not encouraging or supporting this, but I think the people will feel they have no option than to take action into their own hand rather than rely on political leaders who are doing nothing, in their eyes. I think there is every likelihood, I don’t know what the timeframe is, but I would go so far as to not just predict civil unrest, but civil war in the UK in the coming years if this situation continues which I believe it will.
Breitbart News has previously reported on the views of Professor David Betz, which in some regards parallel those of Colonel Kemp. First reporting on Betz back in 2019, the academic took a step up to public prominence earlier this year with a series of podcast appearances in which he relayed that his reading of the academic literature on civil wars suggests that many Western nations, including Britain, are on course for such a conflict.
On the point of there being no political offramp, not because there are no levers to pull but rather no one willing or able to do so, Betz said earlier this year:
… there isn’t anything they can do, it’s baked in. We’re already past the tipping point, is my estimation… we are past the point at which there is a political offramp. We are past the point at which normal politics is able to solve the problem… almost every plausible way forward from here involves some kind of violence in my view.
Anything the government tries to do at this point… you can solve one kind of problem, but it will aggravate another kind of problem in doing so, and you get back to violence. The question really is about mitigating the costs, to my mind, not about preventing the outcome, I’m sorry to say… I have not heard a credible political way forward and I don’t see a single political figure who is credible in the role of national saviour, or even inclined to do so.
… “the bottom line is I don’t think there is now a political solution to this which takes the form of everything just working out OK after some period of difficulty. Things are bad now, but they are going to get very much worse. Hopefully after they will get better, but you will have to go through the period of very much worse before you get there.
