An investigation into community cohesion cannot be serious if it assumes that communities are cohesive
I have many disagreements with Keir Starmer. They are so numerous and so fundamental that it’s not really worth elucidating them in any great detail; but there is one thing I suspect we would agree on; Britain can’t go on like this.
We are stuck in a high tax, high spend, low growth doom loop that is getting worse every day as more and more burdensome statutory duties of questionable value place more and more unsustainable burdens on businesses, the state and individuals. Meanwhile an ever-increasing number of older people age out of the workforce and are replaced with migrant labour instead of productivity-increasing technology. The generations below them will find achieving the same living standards an almost insurmountable challenge. It feels like the only line going up is our national debt.
But economic challenges may not even be the biggest problem Britain faces. Rather, it might be an increasingly fractious polity. Britain feels like an increasingly febrile place, with riots from both white Britons and ethnic minorities scarring British society last summer. Disillusioned voters are rejecting traditional parties in favour of comically unqualified independent candidates or Nigel Farage’s often less than merry men. Leftist pseudo-intellectuals can wring their hands about those of us who warn of trouble in the future — but the problem isn’t us, it’s the trouble.
To that end a new cross-party body, chaired by former Conservative Home Secretary Sir Sajid Javid and Labour MP Jon Cruddas, has pledged to investigate what Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer last year described as the “cracks in our foundation.” In the op-ed launching the project, they warn that Britain is becoming “a tinderbox of disconnection and division. It is no exaggeration to say that unless we find ways to defuse it, the basis of our democracy is at risk.”
The Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion — not Community Cohesion — was launched in the wake of last summer’s riots, which erupted in several areas following the Southport stabbings. Starmer condemned the attacks at the time as “far-right thuggery” after mosques and hotels accommodating asylum seekers were targeted, following rumours on social media about the identity of the attacker — later confirmed to be 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana.
This autumn, the commission will begin a UK-wide “national conversation” to gather first-hand accounts from the public about their sense of community, connection, and belonging, and the changes they believe are needed. The initiative is being supported by the Together Coalition, founded by Brendan Cox, the widower of Labour MP Jo Cox, who was murdered in 2016.
The Commission’s website warns we are “experiencing challenges to our community and local lives, with fresh expressions of old tensions — and new ones — emerging.” And it continues to define those tensions:
In some cases, this includes a decline in trust between neighbours, declining community connections, a growing sense of isolation and loneliness, or a feeling of not belonging either to the UK as a whole – or to England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
In other cases, it includes social exclusion, prejudice, hate crimes, extremism, and the emergence of so-called culture wars – sometimes revealing a society in which a shared understanding of the nation is lacking.
Can we trust the Commission to seek this “understanding”? The particulars of each member could make for an article in itself, and so I don’t want to dedicate too much time to them, but they seem unlikely to be the sort of people who will make a genuine effort to understand British discontent. If a right-leaning Briton is to communicate their concerns about demographic transformation, then Sajid Javid — who responded to a tweet from Nigel Farage following the 2021 census findings that our three largest cities, London, Birmingham and Manchester, all have a minority white population with “So what?” — seems like a poor ear to lend.
The most likely outcome is the most disastrous — a continuation of the belief that multiculturalism is a workable project, rather than a disastrous experiment. The very opening sentence on the website is written with the placid voice of someone whose decision has already been made. “The UK is a thriving, multi-ethnic and multi-faith democracy where most people in towns, cities, and rural areas get on with each other,” it proclaims. If the UK is “thriving” then I’d hate to see what it looks like when it isn’t.
We have progressed beyond the multicultural stage, and are entering an era of Neocommunalism
This fundamental assumption is the thing rotten in the state of Britain. We have progressed beyond the multicultural stage, and are entering an era of Neocommunalism. “The fabric of British society is being strained by the failure of multiculturalism,” as I have written elsewhere, “The idea that Britain is a ‘community of communities’ lends itself not to a shared national identity, but to competing ethnic factions, which are now actively carving out their own political spaces.”
Without challenging the basic presumption that the project begins with, it will come up with the same limp answers that every commission of this type always does: more community hubs, more monitoring of online speech, more funds for third-sector NGOs with names like Harmony UK or Voices Together. It will never say the obvious — that you cannot build a cohesive society without a coherent demos, and that no amount of storytelling workshops or taxpayer-funded pop-up cafés will defuse the tensions created by the most rapid demographic change — and resulting cultural fragmentation — Britain has ever seen.
Instead, the Commission will nod solemnly, write its report, and quietly recommend that we ban anonymity on social media. So yes, by all means, begin the national conversation. Some of us, however, have already pre-ignored it.
