Community Cohesion is completely incoherent (Part 1)

In a recent letter to the Guardian (16/2/08) Hazel Blears, the Minister for State for Communities, revealed the real thrust of the government’s community cohesion policy. Not only is the policy a comprehensive attack on multiculturalism but also on local or national state support or funding for independent self-organisation by black people and BAME organisations. Indeed worse than this, the whole of the so-called community cohesion agenda is a thinly disguised way of blaming migrants and refugees for a break down of trust and cohesion in society and thus blaming the victims rather than the racists who prey on them. Blears’ letter is an attempt to rebut a bizarre “report” by the Royal United Services Institute which argues that undue “deference to multiculturalism undermines the fight against extremism”. Instead of ignoring the RUSI report - the highest level of intellectual respect it deserves – she merely argues that the report is out of date and that the Government has already “fundamentally altered” its approach and asked local authorities to do the same. New Labour has thus already caved in to all of the xenophobic and jingoistic assumptions of the RUSI without so much as an attempt at a defence of the many positive aspects of multiculturalism.

According to Blears, “the government rebalanced its community cohesion strategy more than 18 months ago, ensuring a new focus on promoting shared British values and integration.” She claims that the Government now puts “far greater emphasis on everyone speaking English” (though not enough emphasis to ensure that there is adequate resourcing for English classes where and when they are needed) and calls for an end “to automatic translation of all public information” (as if this was happening anyway). Lastly there are “proposals for new information packs, so all migrants understand and sign up to shared values”. What she does not mention is the Government’s fullscale attack on migrants and asylum seekers. It is not clear quite how community cohesion (whatever this means) is advanced by forbidding asylum seekers from working and starving out those whose cases have failed but who for whatever reason cannot return or be deported to their countries of origin. Given these quite disgusting and morally repugnant “shared values” of the government we should take anything the Secretary of State for Communities says with the equivalent of the Dead Sea’s amount of salt.

But where does this so-called policy of Community Cohesion come from? (Actually I would argue that it is more of a prejudice than a policy). It is based on a poisonous confection of highly questionable social “science” mixed with a nostalgic notion of “communities”, a circular and mystifying definition of “cohesion” and several dashes of thinly disguised racism and xenophobia.

The fullscale attack on multiculturalism first came about as a response to two very different events. First of all the attack by “home grown” Islamist jihadis on London and more latterly Glasgow. Secondly the disturbances in a number of Northern towns between largely Muslim young people and a number of both organised and disorganised white groups and then subsequently the Police. In the immediate aftermath of the disturbances Ted Cantle, without much of an enquiry, wrote his report “Building Cohesive Communities” (2001). As John Rex has rightly shown, Cantle’s report was “a thoroughly ideological analysis of the situation” that lacked the rigour and thoughtfulness of the previous Scarman and MacPherson enquiries. “Housing and Educational segregation is seen as responsible for the breakdown of social or community cohesion and what is sought is an overcoming of segregation, though there is little in the way of detailed recommendations as to how this is to be achieved.”

There were many things that could also have been analysed but Cantle seemed to miss most of them: the behaviour of the Police; an inquiry into the historic inequalities and racism in housing allocations that led to Asian families getting the worst housing in specific areas of the towns (and then being blamed for their own self-segregation!) or any real comment on the growth of the BNP and other racist groupings as a result of a breakdown of trust in local New Labour by the White working class. Instead of this (as the Institute of Race Relations has rightly pointed out) by blaming the Muslim community for their own “self-segregation” and failure to “integrate”, Cantle began the now widely accepted practice of blaming the victim that is known as “Community Cohesion”. In starting out with a complete misunderstanding of the situation in Oldham and other Northern towns it then proceeded to set out a set of entirely wrong-headed conclusions.

In my blog at http://communityconfusions.blogspot.com/ I have pointed out at length the dangers of a nostalgic and idealized notion of community that is another key component of this dangerous new ideology. However there are a number of immediate issues which follow from the discourse of community cohesion that all anti-racists and local activists should now organize against and confront. One of these is the move to cut funding from the more radical and challenging “single issue” community groups – of which Southall Black Sisters is a good example - by arguing that they are divisive and damaging to community cohesion by favouring one group against the majority.

Some of these arguments surface in a recent publication by the Department of Communities and Local Government called “Cohesion Guidance for Funders”. This document claims to be a consultation paper. However it seems clear from Hazel Blear’s letter above that the Government’s direction of travel is already firmly decided whatever we may say in response.

The document is a quite astonishingly vacuous, circular and ultimately dishonest piece of work. The quality of the writing and the lack of any rigour in its argument would only just about be acceptable in a GCSE English exam. The conclusion of the document is that local and national Government should reconsider any funding for groups engaged in “single issue or single identity activity” (by which they mean in particular racial or ethnic groups – though characteristically they don’t say so). By contrast, elsewhere in Government guidance, faith groups (whether single or bridging) seem to become the model of good practice.

The argument (such as it is) is riddled with inconsistencies and breaches two absolutely cardinal rules of logic. Firstly it is completely circular and tautologous. In defining (or actually failing to define) “community cohesion” as “meaningful interaction between people of different backgrounds” it then goes on to assert without any further debate that “we now have strong evidence for how meaningful interaction between people of different backgrounds can directly build cohesion”. This looks at first sight as though it might be saying something important but in logical terms is equivalent to saying cheese = cheese. Again here is another example: “We know that cohesion is higher amongst those who bridge for almost every ethnic group. Analysis of the Citizenship Survey shows that having friends from different backgrounds is a strong predictor of community cohesion, even when other factors are taken into account. Bridging can therefore reinforce cohesion”. This argument follows the form of most tautologies:
C = B (because cohesion is effectively seen as the same thing as bridging)
F = C (Having friends is effectively the same as cohesion)
Therefore B = C (and C = F) Well what a surprise! But this is not an argument it is just a set of interlocking definitions that actually tell us nothing at all and certainly are not enough to allow us to conclude what the Guidelines say in their next sentence:
“For this reason, we are particularly keen for funders to use resources to promote bridging activities wherever appropriate”. The next sentence is even more bizarre: “Those who have bonding social capital are more likely to bridge BUT when this is broken down by ethnicity this only holds for White and Chinese people”. In so far as this makes any sense, how’s this for heavily disguised ethnic stereotyping? It also appears to make social capital a predicate of individuals rather than communities which seems very strange – if I have lots of friends who are like me then do I have lots of bonding social capital? If a high proportion of them are from different ethnic groups from my own then do I have lots of bridging social capital? (I wouldn’t mind knowing how to spend all this capital). Quite what happens if (as is the case) I am married to someone from a different ethnic group and my family includes children of mixed heritage the Lord alone knows!

All this nonsense about bridging and bonding is an explicit reference to the work of Robert Putnam and his notion of bridging and bonding social capital. As I have argued elsewhere in this blog, this notion of “social capital” is increasingly being questioned both in terms of its own effectiveness as an argument and in terms of the underlying assumptions and ideology that it covertly imports.

The second crime that all this commits against elementary logic is the failure to see that correlation is not the same as causality. The notion that in localities where neighbours are less likely to interact with each other (“low social capital”) there may also tend to be a high degree of “social breakdown” (what ever this means) does not necessarily mean that one phenomenon has to be the cause of the other. There are many middle class apartment blocks where the neighbours neither want or need to know each other – one would hardly describe this as leading to social breakdown. Tony and Cherie will hardly be accused of having low social capital if they decide not to visit their new Mayfair neighbours on a regular basis. Indeed I argue elsewhere in this blog that the whole purpose of the discourse about community cohesion is to lead us away from confronting the real causes of social breakdown – poverty, inequality, discrimination, racism etc. This is why discourses about community cohesion spend so much time expressing trite and vacuous truisms about “social glue that binds us together”, “the bonds of trust that make community possible” and the vital importance of having “meaningful conversations of over 15 minutes a week with people of a different ethnic group.” Don’t get me wrong, these things are all to the good in themselves in so far as they make any sense (in the US they would be described as Mom and Apple Pie). However, in terms of explanatory power – let alone the power to help us change the real relations of power and inequality that really do blight our society - they are actually worse than useless.