Saving or Dividing Communities?
Why official community-speak makes things work
Can government ‘level up’ communities?
That is certainly the aim of its various investment programmes. Post-pandemic it is keen to show what it is doing to demonstrate that no community, wherever it is in the UK, is ‘left behind’. The aim is to ‘support local economic growth’ to regenerate towns and high streets, get people into employment, invest in local transport and culture, and give people the opportunity to take over local assets. It’s all very local, in other words. And yet - as the Local Authority Assurance Framework makes clear - it’s also very top down and bureaucratic, despite the talk of ‘decentralising power’.
Still, the £220 million Community Renewal Fund, launched in 2021, pays for initiatives to ‘invest in skills, community and place, local business, and supporting people into employment’. This was intended to ‘help local areas prepare for’ the rather more generous £2.6 billion Shared Prosperity Fund launched in 2022. The £4.8 billion Levelling Up Fund is for ‘infrastructure that improves everyday life across the UK’, to support the kinds of investments in towns, employment, transport and culture described above.
The community ownership of local assets, paid for out of the £150 million Community Ownership Fund, is intended ‘to help ensure that communities … can support and continue benefiting from the local facilities, community assets and amenities most important to them’. The latest allocation of the fund includes the restoration of a derelict cinema in Devon, the redevelopment of a live music venue in Birmingham; a historic rugby club, in London, buying their ground for the first time, and community projects in Scotland including the redevelopment of an arts centre in Edinburgh.
Pubs in Wales, such as The Cross Inn and the Tafarn Crymych Arms in Pembrokeshire, will also receive funding ‘to allow them to stay open and serve the needs of local people’. Dehenna Davison, UK Government Minister for Levelling Up, is surely right to say:
Places like these play a vital role in their communities, and we want local people to reap the benefits from them for as long as possible.
Welsh Secretary David TC Davies agrees:
In many rural areas the pub is the lifeblood of the village, creating jobs and boosting the local economy, as well as providing locals with a place to socialise and come together.
I’ll drink to that. This is, perhaps, the only pot of funding that facilitates a more direct role for communities themselves in identifying and ‘owning’ parts of their local areas for improvement. Indeed, the language used makes much of how the fund allows ‘community groups to take control of prized local assets that are at risk of being lost forever’. But behind the promise of money to ‘provide vital services, create opportunities and boost local economies’, Brexit and feelings of neglect and indifference lurk in, and even haunt, the government’s carefully written press releases.
So too does the unmistakable sense of communities themselves as having ‘fallen into disrepair’, being in need of ‘a new lease of life’ or in danger of being ‘lost forever’. The mission of ‘restoring optimism, hope and pride in UK communities’ says a lot about the state of UK society and, in turn, the failure of decades of technocratic statecraft to do anything about it. This is not to diminish the value of investing in local areas but to say that state action is no substitute for communities acting for (and on) themselves.
Nevertheless, it has a role to play. Unleashing Rural Opportunity describes how the government is providing £7 million to ‘test out new ways to bring together satellite, wireless and fixed line internet connectivity’ to rural communities, ‘helping support farmers and tourism businesses to access lightning fast, reliable connectivity in remote areas for the first time’. This doesn’t sound like much, but is on top of an £8 million grant to provide high-speed broadband via satellite connectivity for ‘up to 35,000 homes and businesses’ too. While this is aimed at promoting economic activity, the metaphor for improving the social connections between people is never far away.
Perhaps religion can help bring people together? The Bloom Review: An independent study into how government engages with faith, argues that it is an ‘overriding force for good’ and that a better understanding of, and engagement with, faith groups will help ‘tackle systemic issues’ from child safeguarding and forced marriage to radicalism and extremism. Colin Bloom, the government’s Faith Engagement Adviser, argues:
For millions of people, faith and belief informs who they are, what they do and how they interact with their community, creating strong ties that bind our country together.
This is hard to disagree with. There is something to be said, in this age of moral confusion and woke ‘extremism’, for what traditional faith-based communities have going for them. A coherent set of values. A social glue that allows them to, well, stick together. That is something worth emulating in these fragmented, value-free times. But equally, where there are problems associated with people’s faith, particularly with regards the continued threat of Islamic extremism, we need a robust defence of Enlightenment values and a willingness to openly debate with those who do disagree.
We don’t have to go far to see what happens when we fail to do this. An independent review has been commissioned by Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Communities, into the violent unrest that took place in Leicester last year. There was a wave of violence stoked by tensions between sections of the city’s Muslim and Hindu communities, including attacks on places of worship.
While Gove insists the review will get to the bottom of what happened and why, his conviction that the city’s ‘proud history of community cohesion’ makes these events all the more ‘shocking and upsetting’, suggests otherwise. Lord Austin, who is to chair the review, concurs that ‘cities such as Leicester have proud histories of tolerance and diversity’. This cut and paste multiculturalism doesn’t help at all. It actually gets in the way of an important conversation.
Leicester has a large South Asian population, and is one of just three UK cities with a white minority. None of which is a problem and would indeed, in different circumstances, be cause for celebration. But when the evidence could hardly be clearer that all isn’t well in some of our most diverse communities, we need to face up to what has gone wrong not obscure that reality with ideological fluff. The notion that, as Lord Austin puts it, our nation should be defined by its ‘acceptance of each other’s background and beliefs’ is to confuse silence with toleration.
It is only by accepting that we won’t always agree with each other and yet are still able to tolerate each other, that we can live together peacefully. Gove warns against ‘attempts to foster division or violence’ but divisions have been stoked over decades by the political establishment in the name of inclusion. It is the elite’s own valorisation of exclusive identities over universal values that has facilitated such riotous urban divisions. Far from saving or levelling up communities, for all the good done elsewhere, there is a very real danger of making things worse.
In my view, it is this very insistence that we must be forever divided into our separate communities, rather than brought together by a shared sense of community, that is at the heart of the problem. Division is baked in. As much as the various investments into our communities are to be welcomed - particularly where they give people more control over the places where they live - we can’t fund our way out of the problem. The time for obfuscation is over. Politicians need to grapple with the contradictions that underlie their misleading rhetoric on community cohesion. And the rest of us need to make a reality of it.