On the new UK Communities Strategy

Protecting what matters?

For many years, the primary goal of British officialdom has been to maintain the perception that multiculturalism is working. We all know the platitudes: that ‘diversity is our strength’, that we are the ‘world’s most successful multi-faith democracy’, or even that ‘Britain’s most precious asset is our diverse and cohesive democracy’, as the opening of a government social cohesion plan put it just two years ago.

Historically, this ideological fervour has meant that where diversity has, in fact, proved a profound weakness, institutions have responded by ignoring and downplaying problems — a dynamic most obvious in the decades of failures and continued foot-dragging over the Pakistani rape gangs. Today, though, amid daily headlines of migrant crime, rape gangs, electoral sectarianism, and Islamism, this ‘see no evil’ approach is becoming untenable. Keir Starmer, who entered office imagining that his Labour government would cool the fractiousness of modern Britain by returning ‘respect’ and ‘moderation’ to politics, immediately found his premiership rocked by mass anti-immigration riots, on which he effected a harsh and punitive crackdown, gaining the moniker ‘Two-tier Keir’. Before long, he was barracking the Conservative Party’s ‘one-nation experiment in open borders’ and lamenting that we’ve become an ‘island of strangers’.

It would seem Chernobyl has exploded, and as a result, British officialdom is being dragged towards some glimmering of glasnost. To ‘save’ multiculturalism, it is now deemed necessary for it to be subjected to some (small) measure of criticism. This is what we find in the government’s latest social cohesion strategy, ‘Protecting What Matters’, which has within its remit both the ‘whole of government’ and the ‘whole of society’. Starmer’s gloomy foreword, for instance, goes as far as describing a ‘dangerous’ and ‘volatile’ United Kingdom suffering under an integration ‘emergency’. An overview of ‘demographic’ challenges then admits that the previous government’s immigration policy was ‘unsustainable’ and that it has placed ‘huge pressure’ on wages and public services. Migrant communities are living ‘parallel lives’ and social trust is ‘fraying’, we learn. Everywhere and always lurks the ‘real threat’ of ‘extremists’, who ‘foment division and target UK institutions’. ‘Social cohesion’, according to housing minister Steve Reed in his own foreword, is even ‘a vital front in the resilience of our national security’, with Britain needing to alleviate social strife so that it can ‘weather the storms of this volatile world’.

This all sounds rather dire, and it should do. Once again, the Politburo of the multicultural state are being forced to admit that the multiracial society they have created — wholly against the electorate’s wishes — has proved an utter failure. One might have thought this would prompt a moment of honest reflection about the policies that led to this, or even, dare we say it, contrition. But we are not quite there yet. The old instincts to dissemble and propagandise remain deeply ingrained, resulting in a paper that combines moments of startling frankness with many of the same familiar lies: ‘[O]ur diverse democracy is both envied and feared around the globe’, Starmer insists, unconvincingly, alongside other such bromides. Revealingly, an attempt is also made to delineate what kind of criticism of the current settlement is and isn’t acceptable, and from whom. ‘In a world where so many people — digital grifters, hostile states, politicians of grievance — have a vested interest in division’, the Prime Minister adds, ‘we need to be much more active in asserting British values and the responsibilities of integration.’ The Government and its officials get to hold forth on the need for greater social unity; however, when ‘politicians of grievance’ (opposition politicians) or ‘digital grifters’ (journalists or engaged citizens) do the same with just a little more perspicacity, they are peddling ‘division’.

Such a line seems entirely untenable, not least since any critic can note they are only agreeing with the government’s own admissions. Still, the felt need to circumscribe political discourse in this way speaks to a brittle authoritarianism in the corridors of power. Only avowed Marxist-Leninists may be allowed to note the scale of the food shortages.

Further weakness is evident in what is offered to knit our frayed society back together. Anxious officials, weary from trying to keep a lid on Islamism, hail the success story of ‘the community who came together and, with government backing, are restoring their local pub in Tafarn y Plu’. That sounds lovely! But what is happening to pubs in places like Oldham and Bradford, described by the government as ‘completely divided or segregated’ as long ago as 2001, after seeing mass race riots? Brits ‘worried about the consequences for crime and public safety’ of asylum hotels will (apparently) be mollified by a ‘UK Town of Culture’ competition, £500,000 for ‘community-led school linking projects’, and an initiative to tackle male loneliness. Watermarks will appear on AI images to reduce ‘online harm’. Some £1.5 billion will be spent on ‘cultural organisations’, with a further £150 million to ‘rebuild confidence in our high streets’. Defra will draw up a ‘Waste Crime Action Plan’, and there will be several new bureaucratic frameworks to measure how much we all hate each other: a ‘cross-government Cohesion Support and Interventions Function’, a ‘Social Cohesion Measurement Framework’, and a ‘local cohesion risk assessment tool’, too. You get the picture. Perhaps some of these policy announcements might end up achieving something (although probably not), but they hardly seem appropriate given the scale of the challenge, as outlined by the government itself.

However comically inadequate such initiatives may be, the British state has become deeply paranoid, and that paranoia makes it dangerous. The regime sees enemies everywhere, both external and within, and it is clear from ‘Protecting What Matters’ that it believes those enemies are principally to blame for the problems and instability it faces. Thus, arrayed against ‘our communities’, warns Starmer’s foreword, are the dangerous forces of ‘exclusion and those who seek to divide us’. He is echoed by the Housing Secretary, Steve Reed, who describes those ‘who want to divide us’ as ‘hostile actors’ from whom the government must ‘protect our country’, by ‘uniting those of us who are proud of the UK [sic]’. This is the basis for Starmer’s new, ‘confident, modern patriotism’, a ‘collective act of community-building that is totally opposed to exclusion and those who seek to divide us’.

There is, of course, a tremendous irony in a political platform which claims to be ‘totally opposed to exclusion’ while treating political opposition as enemies of the state. But we learn that ‘the extreme right… [who] equate being English with being White or being Christian [and] exploit national identity as an ethnic construct’ are ‘hostile actors’, who it must implacably oppose. Thus in the section on hate crime, Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Roma are namechecked as victims, but there is no reference to historic and ongoing Pakistani rape gangs targeting white English girls; nor is there any reference to, say, Richard Everitt or Kriss Donald. Under ‘modern patriotism’, the white British population are not allowed to be considered victims of racist crimes. There is a blind spot around Christianity too; we are told that the state has ‘commissioned academic research papers on antisemitism, anti-Muslim hatred, anti-Sikh hatred, and online religious hatred’, but for the established faith there is nothing. In service of the multicultural narrative, ‘Protecting What Matters’ also presents a false history of a Britain which was never ethnically homogenous, claiming that ‘for centuries, people have come to this country to build a better life, contributing economically and culturally to our society and helping to rebuild it after major shocks, such as the Second World War’.

These, then, are the internal enemies of the British state: those who challenge multiculturalism as a concept, those who recognise that the English are an ethnic group, and those who know the true history of these isles. This fear of resurgent English nationalism is particularly perverse and evil. For the British imperial state, in its final form, now considers its own primary nation-forming ethnos and religion to be such a threat to the multicultural project that it is denying their very existence.

It is no doubt humiliating for the British state to find itself admitting that its primary antagonists are within its own borders. And so we also see a concerted effort to blame external foes for our ‘division’. We are told that at ‘various points in our history, community tensions have erupted into social disorder’ and that ‘foreign actors, and hostile states, particularly Russia, which is engaged in information warfare against the UK and Ukraine, often attempt to fan the flames of such violence, exploiting people’s frustrations and concerns, through spreading or amplifying disinformation online’. In this worldview, internal ‘extremists [who] are exploiting people’s fears for their own purpose’ are aided by, and are aiding ‘malign foreign influence’, in ‘online echo chambers’ where harm is ‘exacerbated by malevolent algorithms’. The last claim is particularly astonishing. The British regime has become so paranoid that it now attributes agency and malice to ‘algorithms’.

One real enemy is acknowledged in the paper: Islamist extremism is described as a ‘predominant threat’. No wonder, given that this ideology’s adherents represent three-quarters of MI5’s caseload and have murdered 97 innocent Britons since 2001 and injured many more. This stark fact is damning in and of itself — and so, naturally, the state chides people not to draw the wrong conclusions. Despite many of these terrorists (such as the 7/7 bombers) being British-born and notionally integrated, we are reassured that ‘Islamists do not represent the Muslim communities of the UK’. This is might well be true in the most technical and literal terms, in the sense that the most extreme elements within any given demographic group can always be said to be ‘unrepresentative’. Yet it will hardly offer much comfort to the victims of Islamist terrorism; nor does it bother to address the fundamental question of whether some of the more ‘moderate’ elements within the Muslim community might sympathise with at least some of the ideas of Islamist extremists. That they even bothered to give this caveat is (once again) highly suggestive of the state’s basic unwillingness to accept responsibility for its own failings — in this case, the entirely unnecessary harm caused by home-grown Islamic terrorism — even in a paper that is supposed to subject British multiculturalism to some degree of frank criticism.

This specific caveat is not mirrored in the section about ‘Extreme Right Wing’ threats, whose views are taken to be so pathological as to sit entirely outside society. The regime is unwilling to consider the possibility that real, material conditions might be the true cause of discontent, disorder, and even riots. While it does accept those factors exist, it believes that enemies within and without are taking advantage of these challenges to attack the state. Through this lens anyone who is found to be ‘exploiting people’s frustrations’ (or rather, speaking about the many problems facing the country, and the failures of our state) is an enemy.

Once we understand who the state believes to be its enemies, the regime’s plans for online environments and the education system take on a sinister quality. The plan is to ‘ensure that…digital literacy [is] embedded into the curriculum’ so that young minds might better identify and reject counter-revolutionary ideas. The regime will ensure ‘that citizenship is taught in both primary and secondary schools to… raise awareness of threats to democracy’. As we have seen, those ‘threats to democracy’ include anyone who challenges the multicultural state and its messages. Finally, the state seeks to control the past. It will ‘ensure high quality teaching of our nation’s history’, meaning that the state’s preferred — false — account of British history will be taught as fact.

Meanwhile, this fear of ‘algorithms’ and ‘online harms’ leads the state to threaten that it will be ‘securing online spaces’, using ‘robust powers to require platforms to mitigate risks related to their algorithms’, with the goal being to ‘reduce accidental exposure to hateful content’. Platforms will be required to give ‘independent researchers’ access to their data. And despite the Home Secretary’s recent statements that police should not be investigating ‘perfectly legal language’ used online, we are told that ‘an online hate crime reporting portal’ will ensure that reports are ‘swiftly investigated’, with police forces expected to ‘bring perpetrators to justice’. A special Muslim hate crime helpline will encourage reporting of incidents even without ‘evidence or certainty’ that they have happened. Alongside the new ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ definition, this is an invitation to widespread weaponised reporting of ‘hate’, where for many the process alone will be punishment.

The already draconian Online Safety Act looks likely to be strengthened — the excuse being that the ‘public disorder that followed the Southport attack’ was somehow caused by ‘viral, harmful content’ which ‘can destabilise communities’. Despite both the police inspectorate and the Home Affairs Committee pouring cold water on this narrative last year, it has become deeply embedded in Whitehall, with the notorious pro-censorship campaign group the Centre for Countering Digital Hate chairing a discussion shortly after Southport from which emerged a plan to award Ofcom ‘crisis powers’, a cause the report takes up. These would give the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy, the ability to directly flag online content for removal where it is deemed to pose a threat to public safety. These powers are also to give ‘due prominence’ to ‘trustworthy media’ during such periods, so that the public will find ‘authoritative sources to counter mis- and disinformation’ pushed onto their timelines. The meaning, of course, is that when the next Rudakubana strikes, the state will suppress evidence and arguments which most acutely show the failure of multiculturalism, or blame the regime itself.

Throughout, it is clear that the state believes ‘cohesion’ is fundamentally a matter of controlling what information people are allowed to hear, and through which medium — rather than, say, preventing knife attacks on children. Following Marx, leftists once held that material conditions determined everything in society, with ideas being merely a ‘superstructure’. But today there is no space at all in the regime for a material analysis of the conditions and grievances which are causing social breakdown and making people want to riot, perhaps because such an analysis would lead to conclusions which the state is unwilling or unable to countenance.

All of this is, as noted, sinister. As the British state weakens and dies, its growing paranoia makes it dangerous. Still, it is weak, and it is dying. What is most striking on reading ‘Protecting What Matters’ is how few ideas the multicultural state’s Politburo have. Suppressing speech, rewriting history, pandering to ethnic client groups, and building tools to measure how bad things are. None of this is going to save the failed experiment, nor somehow renew the regime. The same problems will continue and indeed the decline will continue to accelerate.

But the state’s weakness has made it easier for others to challenge multiculturalism. It’s now clear from even the government’s own admissions that the present multicultural settlement is wholly unsustainable. This presents a tremendous opportunity for those who would shape what comes next. We are fast approaching the point at which radical, revolutionary change becomes likely, leading to a new Settlement. The last time such a revolutionary change happened in a major economy was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

Where will the British 1989 come from? We know there is little radical thinking on the left — the ‘insurgent’ Greens merely offer what we’ve had for the past quarter-century, but more, and faster. It is on the right that truly radical ideas are found, of reshaping the state and reversing the failed experiment of multiculturalism. This moment is the right’s to seize, if it has the necessary wisdom and will.

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This article was written by David Shipley and Laurie Wastell, Pimlico Journal contributors. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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