On the 26th of May, 2025, Liverpool city centre was flooded with rapturous Liverpool football fans celebrating their latest premiership victory when a car ploughed into them, injuring 75 people, with 55 needing hospital treatment. Thankfully, there were no fatalities, but how the institutions reacted is emblematic of the chronic levels of distrust between Power and People in the United Kingdom. For the second time in a year (the first being the Southport outrage), the national attention span fell upon Merseyside Police during what appeared to be the cusp of another tinderbox about to meet the spark.

During the Southport affair the authorities appeared to the public to be wilfully concealing the identity of the killer. To the public, this confirmed their suspicions that the murderer was of foreign extraction, perhaps Muslim, but at least belonging to a client group of the British State. Thus, the strategy deployed by Merseyside Police became an exacerbating factor rather than a mitigating one.

Let us then take a moment to place ourselves in the shoes of the authorities when news began to trickle in that a car had rammed into Liverpool’s streets full of football fans. The fact is, such an “incident” is coded within the minds of almost everyone as “Islamic terrorism” though such acts are far more common in a country such as Germany than in Britain. Moreover, the institutions know that such an event is coded in the minds of the public as “Islamic extremism”.

For a few moments, the people within the institutions of governance are themselves unsure as to who or what is responsible for the barbaric images of people catapulting over a car windshield, the screams and panic now spilling over onto social media.

As it turned out, to the relief of everyone in positions of authority, the driver was a 53-year-old white man. Somebody somewhere made the call, and within minutes, the description “white man” appeared on statements by the police and the media.

It isn’t difficult to see the play here. Merseyside Police were obviously terrified of having to deal with “another Southport”, meaning mass unrest and riots. Headlines and statements featuring racial descriptions of the arrested driver served the purpose of a wet blanket being placed over a flame before it could reach the leaking jerry can. However, it is also a tacit acknowledgment by the authorities that they’re aware of the fractured, us vs. them mentality inherent within multiculturalism. It also served only to highlight how often the ethnicity of a criminal is not released to the public, thereby reinforcing the “two-tier justice” trope.

Adopting the public relations strategy of “thank Christ he’s white!” after a horrific crime makes long-term sacrifices for short-term gains. The next time the authorities are forced to deal with an atrocity or mass casualty event (and there will be a next time!), the natives will infer, from the description or lack thereof, the background of the perpetrator. If a description is provided immediately, then the biases of the natives are confirmed, and the Government is distrusted for importing the problem. If information is withheld, then the accusations of two-tier justice are confirmed.

Former Boris Johnson advisor, political strategist, and somewhat rogue insider Dominic Cummings wrote this week on the catastrophic relationship between the British natives and their government.

According to Cummings:

Part of the reason for the incoherent forcefulness against the white rioters last year from a regime that is in deep-surrender-mode against pro-Holocaust marchers, rape gangs and criminals generally, is a mix of a) aesthetic revulsion in SW1 at the Brexit-voting white north and b) incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs.

…In parallel, they’ve started propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’). 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.

Cummings paints an amusing, if depressing, picture of careerist civil servants, bureaucrats, and political spivs hunkered down in their London stronghold, forever suspicious and increasingly paranoid about the activities of the natives in the wider country, particularly in the North. In their eyes, Britain is not a politically correct surveillance state but a hotbed of scheming reactionaries and racist networks conspiring against the Centre, presumably from strongholds in Yorkshire and the North East. The North must be harried once more, except with DEI female police officers, imported client groups, and HR managers replacing the Normans.

Cummings continues:

These deep state discussions about the growing prospect of violence, like the focus group discussions about ‘civil war’, have seeped through to few MPs or hacks. And the evolution of the Cabinet Office in recent years has excluded ministers, spads and the PM from almost any visibility inside the NSS, the National Security Secretariat of the CO, which has acquired power from the rest of the security/intelligence system and runs a failing empire within a failing empire.

The depiction of the British deep state as a dysfunctional entity unto itself is reminiscent of Suella Braverman complaining that she found it quite literally impossible to enact policy that would in some way stabilise the unending flow of immigrants entering the country. We do not have a government; instead, we have unaccountable grey suits who have locked the country onto a destructive course while at the same time becoming fearful of the forces being unleashed.

The references to “civil war” probably allude to the work of David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Betz has been doing something of a podcast tour in recent months discussing his view that many Western nations, especially the United Kingdom, are heading towards severe sectarian strife, if not outright civil war. In his most recent article, Betz claims:

On the other hand, perhaps I have been rather conservative? As I have argued previously the perception of ‘downgrading’ of a former majority which is one of the most powerful causes of civil war, is the main issue in all of the cases at hand.[v] Objectively, one must conclude that there is ample cause for concern about a worryingly large possibility of a form of war occurring in the West, to which it has not thought itself vulnerable for a long time.

Betz then claims that the advent of “feral cities” and rigid distinctions being drawn between the rural and urban centres, combined with perceptions of two-tier justice and scant regard for the wishes of the majority, will prove too much for civil society to contain. Betz even goes so far as to offer advice to military commanders on the need to secure infrastructure and “safe zones”.

Reading Betz is like reading a form of right-wing catastrophe porn. I do not believe that the United Kingdom is heading toward its doomsday scenario precisely because it is a heavy-handed surveillance state in which a paranoid centre keeps tabs on every Telegram chat, organisation, and, as I recently discovered, a conference discussing civilisational entropy. Stranger still is that Betz seems to actively suggest targets for any nascent network of disillusioned natives agitating against the system, which I find curious and, to be honest, suspicious.

Nevertheless, we do seem to be heading into a new era of discourse regarding the worries and woes stacking up in Britain. There is the inner core of civil servants and bureaucrats, NGOs and politicians who appear increasingly demented and an emerging outer ring of thinkers and rogues attempting to raise the alarm that the country is on course for a calamity of one sort or another. It is less a romanticised great overthrowing and cathartic victory and more akin to a John Le Carré novel. It is a kind of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, DEI” in which boring managerial types whisper and slip each other notes on what the enemy is up to, except the enemy is no longer the USSR but Brits out in the provinces.

This, in turn, leads to a feedback loop in which the majority population becomes ever more alienated and distrustful of the centres of power in London, and the cycle continues. Betz’s analysis assumes that sooner or later, this situation will blow. I remain unconvinced and certainly do not advocate for it.

Yet, the fact that Betz and Cummings are expressing these views is in and of itself significant because one has to wonder what other conversations are taking place within the outer periphery of power. The residents of Hampstead Heath may not be discussing civil war and revolution over their veal and Montrachet Grand Cru, but people they know are.

The farcical attempt by Merseyside Police to defuse a potentially explosive situation, which only served to compound the problem, is symptomatic of a political structure that has become unmoored from its populace.

One is reminded once again of John le Carré’s George Smiley in The Honourable Schoolboy:

I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my country’s goal. The enemy in those days was someone we could point at and read about in the papers. Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole life in terms of conspiracy.

It seems increasingly likely that the paranoia and madness of the British deep state have resulted in it becoming mired in its own conspiratorial phantoms. If the enemy of the country is the country itself, then maybe it’s time for a rethink, and maybe there are people closer than the far-flung Northern hinterlands starting to have similar ideas.

After all, somebody is talking to Dominic Cummings just as somebody is amplifying David Betz.