‘Britain’s most precious asset is our diverse and cohesive democracy’, trilled the opening of a government social cohesion plan just two years ago. The very fact the plan had to be created may have suggested otherwise, but back then, the captains of the multicultural state were at least still trying to keep appearances up.
Multiculturalism now expects ordinary Brits to channel the Blitz spirit just to live in their own country.
Two years later, following scores of appalling crimes by asylum seekers, ever more revelations about the rape gangs, Islamist terrorism, country-wide anti-immigration riots and blatant electoral sectarianism, those going to bat for multicultural Britain can scarcely muster the strength to lie anymore. Just take a look at the opening to the government’s community cohesion strategy, released this week. ‘By any fair standard’, bleats the Prime Minister, ‘Britain can be proud about of [sic] its approach to social cohesion’. Far from an ‘asset’, Britain’s ‘diversity’ is now understood only as a problem to be ‘approach[ed]’. The public, meanwhile, are implored forlornly to be ‘fair’, rather than exacting, in how we judge this.
Even before one gets to the policy measures in this plan – many of which look deeply draconian – the PM’s foreword paints a revealingly grim picture of how the state views the nation it governs. The world is now so ‘dangerous’ and so ‘volatile’ that we are in nothing short of an integration ‘emergency’, Sir Keir openly admits.
Starmer may be no Churchill, but he nonetheless hopes to issue a rallying ‘Call to Action’ to the British public, for ‘quiet act[s] of defiance against the forces of division’. What is this ‘whole of government’ and ‘whole of society’ effort to mean? For housing minister Steve Reed, in the second foreword, such banalities as litter picking or teaching English are to form part of a great civilisational struggle. The public are even chided that integration must be a ‘two-way street’ (not that it’s one they elected to live on). This is all a far cry from the complacent bromides about our ‘successful multi-faith democracy’ and our ‘community of communities’ we had grown used to in recent years. In a development that no one ever asked for – which certainly never appeared in any postwar manifesto – the consequences of multiculturalism now means that ordinary Brits must channel the Blitz spirit just to live in their own country.
Once ‘Protecting What Matters’ starts getting into the details, the picture is even more bleak. An overview of ‘demographic’ challenges admits that the previous government’s immigration policy was ‘unsustainable’ and that it has placed ‘huge pressure’ on wages and public services. Yet the problems of ‘social cohesion’, it has to admit, are really nothing new. It goes all the way back to Cantle Report into the Oldham and Bradford riots of 2001 to illustrate the ‘parallel lives’ many migrant communities are today living, which we are warned can ‘exacerbate tensions and limit the opportunities that a diverse society brings’. Meanwhile, everywhere and always lurks the ‘real threat’ of ‘extremists’, who ‘foment division and target UK institutions, including schools, universities, charities, and even local bodies such as Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education, to serve their purposes’. Strangely, despite this very specific concern, we are never told who these extremists are or what these purposes might be.
The text swoops between dark, lurid paranoia and twee banalities. Amid wailings about ‘malign foreign influence’, ‘hostile states’ with their ‘hybrid strategies’ and the ‘storms of this volatile world’, we are reminded of the success story of ‘the community who came together and, with government backing, are restoring their local pub in Tafarn y Plu’. Amid warnings about declining trust in institutions, ‘fraying’ cohesion and ‘extremist narratives and disinformation’, we get the primary school assembly platitude that ‘people show pride in their country and their community through their work supporting friends…’
This surreal attitude is reflected in the policy prescriptions, which mix the humdrum and authoritarian. Neatly smoothing over grievances about grooming gangs and asylum hotels will be a new ‘UK Town of Culture’ competition (to go with 2025’s Children’s Capital of Culture – Rotherham), £500,000 for ‘community-led school linking projects’ and an initiative to tackle male loneliness. These happy inanities sit alongside bungs for a Muslim hate-crime helpline (which encourages reporting of incidents even without ‘evidence or certainty’ they have happened), a sinister new ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ definition and a pledge to prosecute hate crime ‘with the full force of the law’ (presumably this will not apply to those against white girls).
Some £1.5 billion will be spent on ‘cultural organisations’ with a further £150 million to ‘rebuild confidence in our high streets’, and Defra will draw up a Waste Crime Action Plan. Meanwhile, Ofcom will go after ‘harmful’ content on Netflix and the Online Safety Act (OSA) may well be beefed up with extra ‘crisis powers’, as Whitehall continues to act as if Southport would never have happened were it not for social media.
For all the broad handwringing about nefarious ‘extremism’ and destabilising global trends, it is apparently online speech that nervous officials have decided is the real root of our ills. In order to tackle what Steve Reed calls ‘online echo chambers exacerbated by malevolent algorithms’, the government says it must urgently set about ‘securing online spaces’. AI images may have to be watermarked to help users ‘identify synthetic content’, while chatbots are to have their wings clipped to ‘protect users from illegal content’. The OSA’s present powers are to go live ‘as soon as possible’. The Chief Scientific Adviser, who chairs Sage, will draw up a report on ‘misinformation’. Parents and carers in Yorkshire and the Midlands, whom the government apparently thinks are especially tech-illiterate, will be treated to ‘practical tools to help children build resilience to harmful, divisive and polarising online content’. Whether any of this would really improve ‘cohesion’ is highly dubious, but at least it will give a few wonks something to do.
The Labour government’s cohesion plan, like many before it, is billed as the way to make more Britain ‘confident, cohesive, and resilient’. In reality, this bizarre smorgasbord of speech restrictions, municipal cultural initiatives and unsubtle ethnic pandering will do little to achieve these goals.
What we could do with instead is a little more honesty. Our leaders need to admit not just that multiculturalism isn’t working, but that mass immigration was always reckless and foolish, as well as wholly undemocratic. The fractious mess it has now created is a tremendous social burden that urgently needs to be undone. For all the handwringing, we haven’t quite got that in this white paper. But it’s clear that even in Whitehall, the penny is starting to drop.
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