It looks as if I returned from England just in time. According to Elon Musk, ‘civil war is inevitable’ there now, after the riots of the last weekend. Wouldn’t that be great for Musk’s newly-acquired social media site ‘X’ (formerly ‘Twitter’) – all that enhanced traffic, the hatred, the threats, the lies, and the dollars flooding in?

If this isn’t an incitement to civil war, I don’t know what is. One best way to encourage an event is to persuade people that it’s bound to happen anyway. That’s what Enoch Powell tried to do fifty years ago – ‘rivers of blood’, and all that. In that case it didn’t quite happen, fortunately. Hopefully we can staunch the stream today.

Obviously not all the rioters can be accurately characterised as ‘Far Right’ or – more recently – as ‘terrorists’. The Far Right has a political agenda, or a number of them, which can be defined and spelled out; most of our recent rioters however, judging from their posts on social media, can’t even spell. They really do seem to be ‘mindless hooligans’, motivated by the process – getting into fights and smashing things – rather than by any recognisable ‘cause’. When they’re asked to justify their actions in terms of ‘causes’, they display a degree of ignorance and irrationality which is astounding, and easy for thinking people to demolish. (James O’Brien on LBC Radio is good at this.) We can perhaps blame ‘toxic masculinity’ for this, with most rioters being men and boys; which may well indicate a genetic condition – testosterone and all that – imbuing males from birth with hatred and a proclivity for violence. (Not me, of course.) But I have no expertise in this field. (Kajsa, who is an expert, tells me no. It’s conditioning.)

Of course, many of the rioters have genuine grievances; but not against the targets that they’re putting the blame on today: asylum seekers, refugee hotels, Moslems, foreign-looking people generally, the out-of-touch ‘intelligentsia’, the police, Greggs pastry shops, ‘wokeism’, and so on. The real sources of their resentments are broader and deeper: gross inequality, welfare cuts, inadequate education, undirected migration, consumer culture perhaps, an electoral system that they will feel – reasonably – doesn’t adequately represent them; and a vile popular press exploiting all this and diverting it into avenues that leave the real culprits in the clear.

That’s where the ‘Far Right’ enters the picture. Theirs is the political agenda, or agendas, that make it worthwhile manipulating these movements of vague ‘protest’ for their own end; which is a more ‘Rightist’ form of government, that any historian of modern Britain and/or Europe would recognise as being authoritarian, liberal economically but not in other ways, and at least proto-Fascist, if not the whole hog. Certain foreign agents may well be involved here too; in particular Putin’s deeply illiberal Russia.

If a new ‘English civil war’ is brewing, then this will be one of its agencies. It already has a kind of pre-echo in the so-called ‘culture wars’, which are even now dividing people sharply, and might – who knows – morph into armed rebellion. Jonathan Swift’s Big Enders and Little Enders come to mind, as a war borne of a triviality.

But Musk has probably been misled by his own Lilliputian social media. Civil War? That’s a very big claim.

The Swedish Foreign Office, incidentally, today recommends that if Swedes want to travel to England, they should avoid large crowds. I don’t suppose that this advice has been given before, at least since World War II.