The good and bad news about Labour’s leaked social cohesion strategy

Some things in the government’s leaked social cohesion strategy will be deeply neuralgic to many. There is the creation of a “special representative on anti-Muslim hostility,” which will almost certainly hand an official bully pulpit to an activist such as Baroness Gohir, who has attacked media coverage of the grooming scandal as “disproportionate” and being “used…to fuel racism and Islamophobia,” or to a figure such as Dominic Grieve.

The leaked strategy is clear that Islamism is the country’s greatest extremist threat There’s a claim that last summer’s widespread flying of English, Scottish and Union flags were “tools of hate” and the “misuse [of] national symbols to exclude or intimidate.” There’s the statement that “integration is a two-way street” – that the indigenous community must adapt to the practices of newer arrivals. And there is the party-political tone of the first chapter, jarring for something meant to be about bringing people together, which blames austerity and “immigration policy under the last government” for social tensions with far older, deeper, more complex roots.

The strategy creates clear free speech risks, pledging to crack down on “divisive content” online. But “division,” or disagreement, is necessary for democratic debate. If everyone agreed, or was forced to agree, it would not be a debate. There are also, however, some policies here that would constitute major breakthroughs – if they actually happen. In contrast to last year’s dismal “counter-extremism sprint,” leaked to us at Policy Exchange and disowned by ministers the next day, the new strategy is clear-eyed that Islamism – responsible for three-quarters of the police’s counter-terror workload and 94 per cent of all terrorist deaths in the last quarter-century – is the country’s greatest extremist threat.

And it recognises Islamism’s institutional strength. Most popular There will be new powers to shut down extremist charities and suspend trustees, to “strengthen monitoring” of non-violent extremism in universities and to exclude hate preachers from the UK. There will be greater oversight of home schooling, sometimes exploited by extremists, and a “dedicated Home Office horizon-scanning function to identify and disrupt individuals and events of extremist concern” in hireable venues and outdoor spaces.

There will be an annual “state of extremism” report, hopefully a counter to the one-sided work of groups like Hope not Hate. In its chapter four, “resilient communities,” the strategy promises to “embed the [Conservative] government’s 2024 extremism definition across central and local government” and “embed the 2024 engagement principles so that public bodies do not confer legitimacy, funding or influence on extremist groups.” That could be significant – though working out which groups fall within the definition does risk creating a buffet for lawyers.

The 2024 definition was also attacked at the time, including by the independent reviewer of counter-terrorism legislation, as “very loose.” Three former Tory home secretaries feared that it could end up being used against legitimate organisations which inconvenience mainstream politicians. The left could try to weaponise any extremism definition against Reform, for instance. A section entitled “resetting the social contract” makes clear that “those who come here must make a genuine effort to integrate into and engage with our shared way of life” and must speak good English, as almost a tenth of the non-white population do not: “the ability to use and understand our shared language should be a fundamental basis for participating in society and an expectation of those who wish to call the UK home.”

Perhaps the same principle could be extended to Green Party election leaflets? If Starmer falls, prime minister Angela Rayner and communities secretary Wajid Khan are unlikely to take the same view After the scandal of the Batley teacher forced into hiding by a mob for showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed – where, almost five years later, he remains – the document makes a very strong statement that the government will “stand against those who try to intimidate, threaten and harass others because they are offended by so-called ‘blasphemy.’

We do not recognise blasphemy law in the UK.” One potential ingredient of a blasphemy law – an official definition of Islamophobia, now rebranded anti-Muslim hostility but just as dangerous – is nowhere to be seen in the leaked strategy, though it may still be announced separately. The risk, of course, is that the bad things in the strategy happen, and the good ones do not. As one colleague put it, the document reads like “Morgan McSweeney’s last hurrah.”

That underlines that there is likely to be significant pushback from the left against some of the proposals. The Government is unstable and has a record of policy reversals. If Starmer falls, Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Communities Secretary Wajid Khan are unlikely to take the same view. And at the operational level, the strategy suffers from the classic delusion that any objective can be achieved by setting up new boards and committees.

These will almost certainly end up stocked with the same identity-politics activists, woolly-minded councillors and forty-watt policemen who helped bring about the mess we are in now. Previous efforts at resets, including by Tony Blair’s government, failed for the same reason. As the saying goes, personnel is policy. The creation of an “anti-Muslim hostility” tsar, with his or her government megaphone, constantly finding tendentious new examples of “hostility,” constantly pressuring for new restrictions, constantly present on Radio 4, could alone cancel out a significant part of the good which the strategy’s other policies would do.

So it’s fingers crossed from me. Andrew Gilligan is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange.