The Race Equality Foundation welcomes the Government’s acknowledgement that racism, antisemitism and anti-Muslim hostility threaten the safety and stability of communities across the United Kingdom. However, the response set out in the Social Cohesion Strategy risks underestimating the nature of the challenges we have recently witnessed.
In particular, the Government has introduced a definition of anti-Muslim hostility. While recognition of the prejudice faced by Muslim communities is important, the definition announced falls short of what had previously been proposed by parliamentarians and civil society. Earlier work by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims captured the way anti-Muslim hostility operates through racialisation and structural discrimination. By contrast, the Government’s formulation is narrower and non-statutory, which raises questions about how effectively it will guide policy, monitoring and institutional accountability.
The strategy also places considerable emphasis on social cohesion. Efforts to strengthen trust between communities are clearly important. But the recent riots across parts of the United Kingdom, and the violence witnessed more recently in Northern Ireland, were not simply failures of cohesion. They involved organised racist mobilisation, fuelled by misinformation, misogyny and political narratives that portrayed migrants and minority communities as threats. Understanding these events primarily through the language of cohesion risks obscuring the role that racism and exclusion continue to play in shaping public life.
For this reason, we believe that the goal of policy should be not only cohesion but belonging. A society based on belonging recognises that everyone who lives here should be able to participate in public life with dignity and safety, and that public institutions have a responsibility to challenge discrimination wherever it arises. Without this commitment, calls for shared values can too easily place the burden of integration on those communities who are themselves the targets of hostility.
The strategy does include some welcome steps, including greater attention to the role of misinformation and the establishment of mechanisms to coordinate action across government. But the recent violence has demonstrated the need to address how racial hatred intersects with other forms of harm, including the manipulation of narratives about protecting women and girls to incite hostility towards migrants and minority communities. Preventing future violence will require policy and government strategy to have a clearer recognition of these dynamics and a stronger partnership with the communities most directly affected.
Ultimately, if the Government is serious about preventing the kind of violence we have witnessed over the past year, it must move beyond a narrow understanding of social cohesion. Racist mobilisation is not simply the product of communities failing to get along; it emerges when prejudice is normalised, misinformation spreads unchecked, and public institutions fail to challenge exclusion. Addressing these risks requires political leadership that is willing to name and confront racism, to ensure that public policy does not legitimise hostility, and to work with the communities most affected to build a society rooted not only in cohesion but in genuine belonging.
