A new cross-party commission chaired by former Tory and Labour community secretaries is aiming to speak to millions of people to try to improve cohesion after the Southport tragedy and riots.
Led by Sajid Javid and John Denham, both former cabinet ministers, the commission will launch in the spring.
It is being facilitated by the Together Coalition, founded by Brendan Cox, the husband of the Labour MP Jo Cox who was murdered by a far-right extremist.
Although the commission will not be government-sponsored, No 10 and the opposition leader’s office are understood to be interested in the project and its aims.
Its organisers are planning for it to engage with millions of people across the country for ideas on how to rebuild connections and deal with challenges to community cohesion.
Cox said the country was “crying out for a uniting vision for how we rebuild community life and address threats to cohesion – these issues have been ignored for too long”.
“But to make that vision stick, it needs to start outside politics. This commission is aiming to do just that – to ask the difficult questions, to engage the public and try to come up with a shared vision of how we live well together in modern Britain,” he said. “Having cross-party support and two of the best recent community secretaries co-chair it is a good place to start.”
Its organisers say the commission will seek to “answer the foundational questions of how we live well together”.
Sunder Katwala, the director of the thinktank British Future, a member of the Together Coalition, said it was a “really important time to do this – six months on from the riots, a shocking scene of racist disorder we haven’t seen in my lifetime”.
He said the commission would look at “what are the sources of division and unity and what can we actually do about them”.
Katwala said in the past there had been attempts to look at how best to improve community cohesion after major events but it had been “very stop-start and there’s not been the narrative or agenda for building the community cohesion ahead of whatever the next event is”.
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Dame Louise Casey led much of the work on community cohesion and integration under the previous government, authoring a review published in 2016. In the paper, she argued that governments had failed for more than a decade to ensure that social integration in the UK kept up with the “unprecedented pace and scale of immigration” and had allowed some local communities to become increasingly divided.
In 2018, she sounded the alarm on not enough having been done to improve community cohesion, and suggested the government could set a target date for “everybody in the country” to speak English. She is now the Labour government’s lead non-executive director.
Denham, who was communities secretary under Gordon Brown from 2009 to 2010, told an event last year that “social cohesion is not the absence of riots” but should be judged “by whether most people believe they have a stake and a voice that is equal with others – and whether this is a nation with the confidence to handle difference through dialogue”.
Javid, who was communities secretary when Casey’s 2016 report was published, said at the time he was drawn to public office holders having to swear a British oath of allegiance. “We can’t expect new arrivals to embrace British values if those of us who are already here don’t do so ourselves, and such an oath would go a long way to making that happen,” he said at the time.
Javid said at the time that his aim was not to create a “government-approved one-size-fits-all identity” where everybody listened to the Last Night of the Proms, but “without common building blocks of our society, you’ll struggle to play a positive role in British life”.
Article by:Source: Rowena Mason Whitehall editor
