Major unrest is inevitable because “we don’t really live in a democracy” and political decisions are being made to “appease” and to avoid lesser unrest today rather than fend off greater trouble in the future, Colonel Richard Kemp has said.
A former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, retired Colonel Richard Kemp — now a prominent commentator on security and political issues — has told Israeli media his concerns about social cohesion in Europe and Britain, and the risk of civil war.
Colonel Kemp, who also fought eight years of counter-insurgency operations on British soil in Northern Ireland and had intelligence roles in Westminster and the Cabinet Office, spoke to Israeli broadcaster i24News about integration failures that allegedly saw more “British Muslims” fighting against the British Army in Afghanistan than for it.
Asserting the situation has deteriorated in the 20 years since he commanded in that conflict, Colonel Kemp said: “Things have been getting worse, getting bad, for many years, and they are only going to get worse.
“No government, the government now or any prospective government of the UK, has the guts to stop it. If they want to take strong action to prevent the Islamification of the UK, it’s going to mean big trouble for them. They don’t want trouble, they look four years ahead, they will kick the can down the road to someone else.”
The consequence of this “Islamification” running in tandem with political cowardice will likely be “civil war in Europe”, he said. This would be “something more like Northern Ireland but on a much more intensive scale where you have the indigenous British and some of the immigrant population and the British government all on three different sides fighting against each other,” the retired officer said.
The chances of Britain and Europe’s already fractious social order being maintained, let alone improved, are slim because of this political kicking the can and democratic dysfunction, the experienced counter-terrorism Army officer said. There is “no prospect of the government, any government” arresting decline, he claimed, because “the big problem that British people have is they don’t have political choice. We don’t really live in a democracy”.
He continued: “Whatever party you vote for, you get the same policies. That applies also to immigration and to the way in which the Islamic population is allowed to grow in numbers and dominance.”
Kemp cited the recent development of avowedly Islamist politics in the United Kingdom, with Gaza platform candidates elected to both parliament and council seats in high-migration, left-wing areas. This is an issue that has recently been revealed to be a source of concern for Britain’s left-wing governing party, Labour, after private internal messages between prominent politicians were unveiled.
Health Minister Wes Streeting had reflected on the impact of demographics on election results, messaging now-disgraced party Grandee Lord Mandelson to reflect on a recent local election: “I fear we’re in big trouble here – and I am toast at the next election. We just lost our safest ward in Redbridge (51% Muslim, Ilford S) to a Gaza independent. At this rate, I don’t think we’ll hold either of the two Ilford seats”.
Colonel Kemp said of the rising sectarianism of British politics: “We’re going to see much more of that in the next election”.
The civil war comments, while remarkable, are not the first time Colonel Kemp has made such remarks. Breitbart News reported in August 2025 when he addressed the same concerns, noting the retired officer has become something of a Bête noire for the UK left over his openly conservative views and support for Israel. Social cohesion, culture and the “political existence of the West” are under threat because of the developing “alliance” of the hard left and Islamism, which to some extent is supported and funded by geopolitical rivals to the West as a means to weaken it from within, he noted.
As reported then:
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.”
The discourse about the risk of civil unrest in Western countries is steadily growing, but has not yet been publicly addressed by any government, as doing so would necessarily accelerate deterioration. The first to address the subject in the public sphere was King’s College London War Studies Professor David Betz, who applied the longstanding, widely respected theory and literature of civil war research to Western nations such as the United Kingdom and France and concluded that the prerequisites for conflict were already present.
Professor Betz has been public about this developing situation since 2019, although in the past year has started to signal that Western countries have passed the run-up period and are now at the “tipping point”. As reported last summer, the academic said in an interview:
…it now appears to be too late to actually prevent things getting “very much worse”, and urged decision-makers to act to at least cushion the blow.
In a chilling warning, the academic said, “I would probably avoid big cities. I would suggest you reduce your exposure to big cities if you are able”. The coming violence, he believes, has been made inevitable by decades of government ineptitude and can’t be totally avoided.
Professor Betz said:
… 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.
