The New Labour Government Has The Opportunity to Build Cohesion In Every Community
Ted Cantle writes:
We’ve been waiting a long time for a coherent and consistent approach.
The new Labour Government has talked a great deal about ending division and bringing Britain together. It has also talked about rebuilding trust. But words are not enough – and nor is a top down approach. Cohesion has to be owned by every community and trust and understanding has to be built from the bottom up. It will be painstaking and careful work, but it has to start now, or we will see more of the fractures, easily manipulated by outsiders, or by bad actors within. We can avoid more of the hate filled battles we have witnessed in the recent elections – and in Southport – if we start now.
It should be straightforward for Labour. They were responsible for implementing the then new programme of ‘community cohesion’ following my report in 2001. While it lost its way a little after a few years – as it began to focus more on counter-terrorism – there was a well established programme in place by the time the Conservatives came into office in 2010. From that time on, support was sporadic and limited, often only being evident after another episode of tension and conflict.
There is much that needs to be done, but the good news is that costs are very modest and should not get caught up in all of the angst-ridden spending debate. Some measures can be simply re-instated, such as putting the school duty ‘to promote community cohesion’ back in the Ofsted assessment – Michael Gove’s decision to take it out was an active of political vandalism. Similarly, the Conservative’s recent about turn which would allow faith schools to admit 100% of pupils from a single faith could easily be prevented.
Dame Sara Khan’s Report was presented earlier this year. It is full of good practical recommendations – many of which have been made in previous reports over the last two decades. The Conservatives did not respond, so this remains outstanding and should now simply be adopted as Government policy.
There have been many shocks to the system which should mean that cohesion is taken seriously, none more surprising and serious so than the Leicester riots less than 2 years ago. If they can happen in Leicester – it was a former ‘beacon’ for community cohesion – they can happen anywhere. This demonstrated that the previously implemented programme of tension monitoring had long since lapsed. It also showed that the community resilience that had been built over many years in Leicester with good relations between communities, had not been maintained, let alone developed to reflect recent changes – the arrival of newer communities and the growth of social media in particular.
The previous Government toyed with the introduction of local integration plans for every town and city, though this was not supported in any meaningful way. And in any case it did not reflect the approach developed under community cohesion. So there is an opportunity to begin to create the network of community infrastructure, focussing on building community resilience to the inevitable challenges, stoked by Far Right and other extremists that will emerge.
At the very least, we need both a local and national system of tension monitoring in place urgently. This demands a system of community intelligence that has unfortunately long since been abandoned. But most of all, we need consistency and commitment, a clear longer term plan. It may not be glamorous work, nor does it lend itself to high profile policy statements, but communities cannot grow or thrive unless they are cohesive.