The Centre For Social Cohesion

So runs the justification offered by the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, in its recently published report entitled ‘Our Shared Future', for having subsumed the highly specific and urgent issue it had been created to address within an entirely different and altogether far less pressing wider question to the point of failing to answer the more pressing question at all.

The urgent and important question it had been called upon to answer was how to prevent any more young British-born Muslims growing up so hostile to and alienated from their compatriots to be willing to engage in their indiscriminate mass slaughter.

The more general and less pressing question the Commission instead considered was that of how best to unite the country’s increasingly diverse populace, created by the continuing and unprecedented high levels of inward migration to it.
As commentators as far apart as those in the Daily Telegraph and Guardian have pointed out, the Commission thereby squandered an opportunity to give serious consideration to what must surely be the most acute and serious problem the country is currently facing. Instead it chose to preoccupy itself with another far less pressing, and altogether different, question.

As well as not having answered the question it had been asked to, the Commission also lamentably failed to provide a satisfactory answer to the question it decided to address instead. It did so because it committed several conceptual errors very early on in the proceedings.

Its first conceptual error was to advertise as being a definition of ‘an integrated and cohesive community’ something that in fact is altogether different: namely, an account of what conditions a community must satisfy to be integrated and cohesive one.

To appreciate the difference between these two things, consider the difference between offering a definition of an acid with specufying the conditions a substance must satisfy to be an acid. An acid is a particular class of compounds containing hydrogen and some other element. Every substance with this chemical composition, and hence whichj is an acid, will turn blue litmus paper red. However, the definition of an acid is not ‘substance that turns blue litmus paper red’. Hence, the definition of a specific kind of thing is not the same as an account of the conditions a thing must satisfy to be of that specific kind.

The account the Commission gave of what an integrated and cohesive community is cannot be faulted on grounds of accuracy when construed as a statement of what conditions a community must satisfy to count as one. However, this is not what that statement is advertised as being which was a definition of what ‘an integrated and cohesive community’ is.

Thus, early on (3.2), the Commission equates ‘integration’ with ‘adaptation to one’s neighbours’ and ‘cohesion’ with ‘getting on well’ with them. Given these two equations, its definition of ‘an integrated and cohesive community’ should have run:

‘An integrated and cohesive community is one whose members are both well adapted to each other and get along well together.’

This is fine, but not how the Commission chose to define the notion. Instead, what it presented as being its definition is, in fact, an account of what conditions must hold true of any community, whether it be a local neighbourhood, city, region or country, for it to count as both integrated and cohesive in the sense stipulated above. It claims there are several such conditions of which the first runs as follows:

‘An integrated and cohesive community is one where there is a clearly defined and widely shared sense of the contribution of different individuals and different communities to a future vision for a neighbourhood, city, region or country’. (3.15)

This is an appallingly obtuse account of what I take to have been the Commission’s clumsy attempt to specify the conditions that it believes any neighbourhood, city, region, or country must satisfy in order for the inhabitants of each to be both well adapted to each other and to get along well together. The Commission here appears to have wanted to claim that, at whatever level of community one considers -- whether neighbourhood, city, region, or country, for members of any to be well adapted to one another and get along well, they need to share some common vision of the future of their community in the development of which they are all agreed as to what has been their respective contributions.

Had the Commission left it at that, then it would have given a reasonably satisfactory, if somewhat obtuse, account of what sort of internal consensus there must be within a community for its members to be both well adapted towards each other, as well as able to get along well with each other. They all need to share the same vision of its future, that is have come to desire the same future for it, and know who developed that vision they all share. In the case of any settled community, that vision will be one in which that community continues to remain as it has been, save where it needs reform or up-dating, and those responsible for developing that shared vision will have been those who created that community and brought it to its present form.

Such an account could well have formed a useful and fruitful starting-point for consideration by the Commission of what must be done at each level of community within Britain to bring about such a form of consensus.

However, no sooner had it proffered, in the wrongful guise of being a definition of ‘an integrated and cohesive community’, what in fact is a reasonably promising, if somewhat unnecessarily prolix, account of what conditions a community must satisfy to enjoy integration and cohesion, the Commission immediately added a further condition that it claimed needed to be satisfied, without any supporting argument whatsoever as to why satisfaction of this condition was needed or even possible. The entire rest of the report was spent by it trying to flesh what it would take for communities to satisfy this second condition, when it had not given a single reason for thinking they always could, let alone should.

This second condition is that, within all communities, there should be: ‘a strong recognition of the contribution of both those who have newly arrived and those who already have deep attachments to a particular place, with a focus of what they have in common.’ (3.15)

That every community must satisfy this condition to enjoy integration and cohesion is a deeply problematic claim for several reasons.

First, it assumes every community will always contain new arrivals – besides new-born babies, that is.

Second, even in the case of those communities that do, it assumes that, for the new arrivals and their more long-standing neighbours to adapt to each other and get along well, both parties must always be able to agree that the new arrivals have made or are making a positive contribution to that community.

But suppose the new arrivals are not making any such positive contribution - at least, not in the eyes of the more long-standing members. Is the Commission suggesting that, for such a community to achieve integration and cohesion under these conditions, some ‘noble lie’ must be concocted and disseminated within the community to convince its long-standing residents that the new arrivals have or are making such a positive contribution to it, even though they might not be?

Might it not be that, under such circumstances, that it will be simply impossible for such a form of community to enjoy integration and cohesion? Why always the need to pretend that it is? Why won't the more-long standing residents simply emigrate as new-comers whose presence they do not value move in?

Finally, and even more importantly, the Commission went on to assume, again without offering any supporting argument at all, that, where a community does contain new arrivals, what it needs to do to enjoy integration and cohesion is develop a new shared vision of its future in the development of which all members have helped, both new arrivals and more long-standing residents. This is even more contentious.

After specifying what conditions a community must satisfy to be an integrated and cohesive one, there follows a chapter, entitled ‘Developing shared futures’. Here, the Commission states:

‘The first principle emerging from our new definition … is one of a “shared future”. Integration and cohesion depend both on… developing a shared vision in regions, localities and neighbourhoods. (4.1)

‘Integration and cohesion both depend on … developing a shared vision in regions, localities and neighbourhoods.’ (4.2)

Since the only shared vision the Commission has previously talked about in connection with community cohesion is that of the futures of communities, it is not unreasonable to assume that it is, indeed, a shared vision of those that it is claiming communities with new arrivals need to develop so as to enjoy integration and cohesion, in the development of which the new arrivals will have contributed as much as have the more long-standing members.

The Commission offers no supporting argument at all for this claim, although it informs all its subsequent recommendations. What it amounts to, in fact, is nothing less than a recipe for disaster.

It is a call for a brave new world in which, to avoid new arrivals having to do the bulk of the adjusting to integrate and get along well with their neighbours, all tradition and historic memory must be expunged from any community that contains them, so that an entirely new social order can be constructed in deciding the future shape and character of which the newly arrived are to be granted as much leave and power as the more long-standing residents and their ancestors.

Such a demand is, of course, preposterous nonsense and entirely unrealisable in practise. However, what the Commission is proposing as the way forward amounts to a very pernicious social agenda. It is deliberately intended to accelerate the pace of deracination of Britain's more long-standing communities and to replace them by some bold new ‘multi-cultural’ social utopia which, assuredly, will turn out to be no more viable or desirable than have all attempted predecessors elsewhere.

To have provided a case for central government according local authorities and schools still greater license than they already have to uproot Britain’s established and settled culture, the Commission has been intellectually guilty, whether knowingly and deliberately, of eliding the following two things:

(i) a conception of the future of a community shared by all its members and on which they are agreed as to what their respective contribution has been to its development;

and

(ii) a conception of the future of a community shared by all its members to the development of which all have contributed equally.

All that the Commission has presented any convincing argument for is the thesis that, to enjoy integration and cohesion in the face of diversity, members of a community need to share a conception of its future that satisfies the first description. Yet, throughout and in its recommendations above all, it proceeds as if it has shown that, for a a diverse community to enjoy integration and cohesion, what its members need to share is a vision of its future that satisfies the second description.

Well, it hasn’t, and for any future government to allow, or worse still compel, local authorities to make the areas in which they exercise authority into places whose future shape and form have become determined in such an artificial fashion will prove a recipe for disaster.

It removes entirely the presumption of proven value in what in a place is local established custom and tradition. These are things without which, at all times and in all places, people have always been, and will forever remain, lost.

To become integrated and cohesive communities, those containing new arrivals must teach the new arrivals to appreciate and value the mores of the communities they have joined, assuming them to be good ones. There is no reason to think those of Britain are not. So there is no reason to think they need to change to accommodate the new arrivals. The call for all communuities that contain new arrivals to develop new shared visions of their futures in the development of which all members have equally contributed is, in practice, a mere job-creation scheme for otherwise unneeded local authority employees. In reality, it is only their futures with with which the Commission is at bottom concerned, for these are their own futures.