The Kemp-Betz UK Civil War Thesis, By Richard Miller (London)
Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and a veteran of Northern Ireland counter-insurgency, didn't mince words in his February 2026 i24NEWS interview: Europe is on track for civil war. "No government has the guts to stop the [disintegration] of the UK," he said. The end result will be something "more like Northern Ireland but on a much more intensive scale," with indigenous Europeans, segments of the immigrant population, and the government itself pulled into three-cornered conflict.
Professor David Betz of King's College London, who has studied modern civil wars for decades, is even bleaker: Europe has passed the tipping point. Normal politics can no longer solve the problem. "Almost every plausible way forward involves some kind of violence." The choice now is not prevention but mitigation of costs. Things will get "very much worse" before any possibility of getting better.
Both men are saying what demographic data, crime statistics, integration reports, and street-level reality have been screaming for years: Europe's experiment with mass immigration, combined with native fertility collapse and elite denial, has created a slow-motion catastrophe that is now accelerating toward either low-intensity civil war or outright societal fragmentation. Or, most likely, both.
The problem is not merely numbers; it is cultural incompatibility on a civilisational scale, they argue.
Multiculturalism was never a neutral policy — it was an ideological refusal to demand assimilation. European elites told natives that concerns about parallel societies were racist while simultaneously subsidising them through welfare, halal-only schools, foreign-funded mosques, and blasphemy-style hate-speech laws
The Political Suicide Pact
Here is where Kemp's "no guts" diagnosis and Betz's "past the tipping point" converge. Every mainstream party has spent 20+ years choosing short-term social peace over long-term survival. Deportations remain pitifully low. Border controls are theatre. Integration programs pretend culture and religion are irrelevant. Native Europeans who object are smeared as "far-Right," monitored by intelligence agencies, or stripped of platforms.
This is not democracy; it is elite-managed decline. Citizens vote for tighter borders and cultural preservation — see Reform UK, AfD, National Rally, Sweden Democrats — only to watch those signals diluted or ignored by courts, bureaucracies, and media. The result is exactly what Betz describes: loss of legitimacy, hollowed-out institutions, and growing realisation among natives that the system is rigged against them.
Two Roads, Both Leading Downhill
Scenario 1: Low-intensity civil war: Not tanks in the streets, but something closer to The Troubles on steroids — or the Lebanese civil war lite. Intermittent riots, targeted assassinations, no-go zones defended with violence, grooming gangs morphing into organised ethnic militias, native vigilante responses, and a government forced to pick sides (usually against its own founding population to preserve the multicultural narrative). Three-sided conflict exactly as Kemp outlined: the state enforcing "social cohesion" at gunpoint.
Scenario 2: Societal collapse without formal war: Slower but just as terminal. White flight from cities accelerates. Welfare systems buckle under demographic imbalance. Trust evaporates (Putnam's diversity research was right). Birth rates stay suppressed among natives who feel they have no future in their own countries. Major urban centres become effectively foreign territories governed by informal sharia norms. Economy stagnates. Innovation flees. Europe becomes a collection of balkanised zones where the state still claims sovereignty but cannot enforce it. Think 1990s Yugoslavia without the shooting — or modern Lebanon without the official war label.
Most probable outcome: a toxic mix of both. Decades of escalating chaos punctuated by outbreaks of sustained violence, followed by de facto partition along ethnic-religious lines.
Can It Still Be Avoided?
Only with measures so drastic they would themselves trigger immediate unrest: mass deportations of non-citizens and criminal dual nationals, immediate halt to all non-Western immigration, defunding of parallel institutions, and an explicit rejection of multiculturalism in favour of assimilation or repatriation; enormously controversial and polarising policies. Denmark has moved in this direction; Hungary never went there. Most of Western Europe lacks both the political will and the institutional courage.
The window for painless reversal closed years ago. The window for painful reversal is slamming shut now.
Europe is not facing "challenges from diversity." It is facing the consequences of importing a civilisation that has never successfully coexisted with the West on equal terms without one dominating the other. Colonel Kemp and Professor Betz are not alarmists. They are realists who have studied conflict for decades and recognize the pattern when they see it.
The question for Europeans in 2026 is no longer "Can civil war be avoided?" It is "How bad will it get, and what will be left when the smoke clears?" The data, the streets, and history all point to the same uncomfortable answer: very bad indeed.
