Diversity is not our strength
by Laurie Wastell, Artillery Row:
The Khan Review reveals a society needlessly splintered along ethno-religious lines.
The Khan Review, the government’s independent report into social cohesion published last month, begins with a ritual genuflection to multiculturalism. “Britain’s most precious asset is our diverse and cohesive democracy”, we are assured by Dame Sara Khan, social cohesion adviser to Michael Gove. Yet the report itself exposes this as mere liberal pablum: far from being an asset, a litany of grim evidence finds that “diverse” modern Britain is anything but cohesive. This may not be news to anyone with their eyes open, but it is significant that it is now implicitly the view of officialdom, too. Indeed, after decades of mass immigration and multiculturalism, Britain’s social cohesion problem is now so severe that a senior communities adviser believes we need a vast state and civil society programme to attempt to manage it.
The Khan Review paints a bleak picture of modern Britain. On each metric of social trust, be it trust in democracy, democratic participation, civic engagement or social capital, it finds that British society is in “decline”. One reason is what Khan calls “freedom-restricting harassment” (FRH): “threatening, intimidatory or abusive harassment online and/or offline which is intended to make people or institutions censor or self-censor out of fear”. A poll by the review found that three-quarters of Britons were self-censoring out of fear of FRH.
The report investigates the shocking case of the Batley Grammar School teacher, an example of FRH. In March 2021, the religious studies teacher had shown pupils a picture of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as Jesus and the Pope, in a class on free speech and blasphemy (resources other teachers had used before). Local Muslims in Batley soon organised a protest outside the school gates, and an online campaign against him began, with his and his partner’s name and picture being published on social media. Fearing for his life — after the French schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded following a similar incident just six months earlier — he and his family went into hiding, where they remain to this day. The report calls this “shocking and appalling” incident a clear failure of social cohesion. It castigates the school, local police and the council for having tried to “appease” Islamists in this shameful episode, rather than standing up for a blameless teacher.
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