17 September – 1 October 2024

After the law-and-order response to the far-right-orchestrated racist riots comes – seemingly – a return to New Labour policies of community cohesion. A Community Recovery Fund of £15million has been allocated to fund local authority-voluntary sector partnerships in areas affected by the riots.

But given the political framing of the riots, groups already question the validity of a ‘community cohesion’ remedy and worry that restrictive ‘counter- or cumulative-extremism’ labels could well be attached.

This week, as we report in our regular calendar of racism and resistance, thirteen civil society organisations, coordinated by Prevent Watch, write to the new Labour government asking it to urgently review its counter-extremism strategy, in particular to ditch the Tories’ attempt to exclude some Muslim organisations from public funding and consultation. Already, Runnymede Trust director, Shabna Begum, has pointed out how community cohesion frameworks that home in on a lack of ‘integration’ amongst different communities as the cause of ‘riotous violence’, underplay the role that racism and austerity play in fragmenting community.

Furthermore, with Conservative leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch contending that when it comes to immigration, ‘not all cultures are equally valid’, it’s worth examining the ways that community cohesion and Prevent policies have been grist to the mill of both hard-right and Islamophobic politicians across the spectrum.

Ironically, community cohesion as policy was first brought in by New Labour (following the Cantle report) after the ‘northern riots’ of 2001 which erupted in cities like Oldham, Burnley and Bradford and were prompted by racist gangs attacking Asian communities and compounded by mass arrests and heavy-handed policing of Asian youth. (Ted Cantle seems to be a key driver in community cohesion policy renewal.)

The key concept of community cohesion, as set out by home secretary David Blunkett, was shared values, which, in practice, meant British values as contrasted with Muslim values (the debate quickly focussed on alleged lack of integration amongst Muslims living parallel lives in ‘self-segregating communities’). From the start, Islamophobia was embedded in the British values debate. This deepened after the 2005 London suicide bombings which killed 52 people, with Prevent introduced in 2007 with the explicit goal of encouraging British Muslim communities to adopt British values, which were then defined as liberal values.

Seventeen years later, as Islamophobia and anti-migrant racism dramatically alter the balance of power in parliament, and as austerity and inequality continue to sow community division, can we really pretend that ‘British values’ are liberal values? With old-style Conservative Baroness Warsi leaving a party that has, in her words, drifted too far right, and with the new government apparently committed to the politics of scarcity, there is every reason to ask, what will the Community Renewal Fund deliver, beyond greater local authority control and ideological dominance of the voluntary sector?

We must ensure that the spirit of community defence that burgeoned during the riots is not choked off at source.