Hummm .... I wouldn't be too sure.
I reckon we have a bit of a disease in this country, a disease that makes us think that nothing seriously bad will really ever happen to us as a nation, that bad things happen to Africans or Middle Easterners, maybe South Americans -- but never to us.
And this is probably because we have had, what?, sixty years where nothing particularly bad has happened -- no mass influenza outbreaks, no huge natural disasters, no serious civil conflicts, no harsh disruption of supply lines etc. And I think this has made people a bit naive, they don't honestly think anything bad could happen to them anymore.
I mean, we now have a generation of young voters that have never experienced a recession, half of whom have no GCSEs and a sixth of whom are functionally illiterate -- but that's by the bye.
Things can change really rapidly. Really rapidly. And our modern technological environment has actually made us, weirdly, more exposed.
One hundred years ago, if there's was a problem with a energy supply line, most people could still cook and heat their homes. That's probably true for even fifty years ago.
Now? The gas or electric goes down and a lot of people in the UK get very cold, very quickly. They are cut off from sources of information, advice etc. In urban centres, you are looking at, what?, twenty million people who would be largely isolated in their cold homes, unable to cook etc, cut off from social networks because the mobile runs out of charge, no internet, no TV, no radio and they no longer function as part of a wider self-organising empowered community.
So, in short, the capacity for panic in such a situation is larger and swifter than it would have been sixty years ago. And with panic comes a whole heap of fear and unsocialised behaviour.
To my mind, I can't see a right wing fascist Nazi-like movement growing out of such a situation in the UK. I think we'd go more Argentina, myself, in the first instance. But I do increasingly see the possibility of a 'middle class' revolution forming, that is a revolution of working people who earn from minimum wage up to about £40K a year -- ie. 90 percent of all earners in the UK, including the modal average of £13K pa -- who decide enough is enough.
And this is quite a big pool of people. Off the top of my head, I'd say 80 percent of private sector by that date, so maybe 15 million employed earners who would sympathise, with a quarter of public sector, so another one to two million there.
So call it 16 million sympathic ears out of a working age population of 40 million. And then add the repossessed and layoffs, you could get to maybe 18 million.
That's about, more or less one in three, or one in two, sympathetics in everyone aged between 18 and 65.
In the circumstances are right, that's enough for a 'regime change'.
Of course, it all depends what sort of people you get in power after your bloodless coup, but if the circumstances were right, you could end up in a 'new paradigm' that you actually had some element of sympathy and support for because you'd spent the last five years cold, hungry, unemployed, and any income you had being destroyed by hyper inflation, and you are desparate for any hope that 'things can only get better'.
Cue a weird political figure that completely remodels the country, and you end up with, say, no rights and no freedoms, but at least you can feed your kids again.
Until said figure announces he/she is about to invade Ireland.*
*I can probably come up with a set of economic and financial scenerios for that as well.
