Conclusion: Community Cohesion as a New Phase of British Multiculturalism

Abstract

It is beyond dispute that 2001 marked a significant watershed in British policy approaches to ‘race relations’. The Inquiries prompted by the riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford led directly to a new policy priority of community cohesion, and the associated concern with the ‘parallel lives’ apparently produced by ethnic segregation, and with the separate ethnic, rather than shared common, identities and values created and maintained as a result. This new focus has subsequently been sharpened by the shocking events of the 7/7 terrorist attacks in July 2005, and by other plots, all seemingly confirming that Britain faces a significant Islamist terror threat from a small minority of young British Muslims apparently growing up with an ideology violently oppositional to the values and identity shared by the wider population. Past policy approaches of multiculturalism have been blamed by commentators from across the political spectrum for these developments, suggesting that such multiculturalist approaches have disastrously fostered division and separate values, rather than commonality, a development mirrored by political debates of the past 15 years in the Netherlands (Sniderman and Hagendoorn, 2009).