Myths and Realities: Community Cohesion in Practice

Abstract

Chapter 1 outlined the emergence of community cohesion as a post- 2001 British policy priority around the area of ‘race relations’, detailing the key themes and concerns of this new agenda. What community cohesion stands for and is trying to achieve is highly contested, as the debates analysed in Chapter 3 make clear. Most academic analysis of community cohesion has been negative, with its key themes and concerns understood by critics as representing a lurch backwards to the coercive assimilationism of the 1960s (Back et al., 2002), as a racialised blaming of the cultures and values of Asian communities for deeper structural economic and social issues (Alexander, 2004, 2007), and as an outright rejection both of the reality of ethnic difference in society and of the need to address the inequalities and conflicts associated with it (Kundnani, 2002, 2007). Some of this criticism is understandable, as it is clear that community cohesion has represented a profound shift in the language, tone and stated priorities of government’s policy approach, with community cohesion itself being a term that has emerged from nowhere (Robinson, 2005). A selective reading of some parts of the national (Cantle, 2001; Denham, 2001) and local (Calrke, 2001; Ouseley, 2001; Ritchie, 2001) community cohesion reports, and some ministerial pronouncements upon their publication, could indeed support an analysis of a reactionary and racialised step backwards on a profoundly important policy issue, the stakes of which had been illustrated by the violent disturbances in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford during the summer of 2001.