From democracy to identity: the role of public policy in fostering the preconditions for violent social disorder
Introduction
One month after the elections – with the lowest share of the population voting since universal suffrage – Britain saw riots, a minority of which were racist in their immediate targets. Few seem to have given much thought as to whether there might be any connection. Here, DDU director Alka Sehgal Cuthbert argues that the riots of 2024, with their focus on immigration, have become a symbolic pole around which an inchoate anger and resentment are expressed.
The immediate focus is on immigration-related issues, but Alka argues that public sentiments, from unease to outright hostility on the part of many more who protested but did not riot, is not proof of their racism or propensity towards violence. Instead, it articulates, albeit in a fairly inchoate way, the frustrations of people who, over many decades, have found their leaders, from government to local services, increasingly unable to even acknowledge, let alone meet, their minimal aspirations. This is the deeper problem that no amount of turning back boats or imprisoning creators of imprudent and deeply nasty Facebook posts can address. This paper charts key moments in Britain’s social and institutional history – from the first Race Relation Act in 1965 to the present-day Equality Act – that have contributed to the erosion of our democratic social fabric.
Executive summary
• The recent riots across the UK are deeply alarming for anyone who loves this country, but it is facile to blame far-right thuggery while ignoring years of public policy failures that have entrenched divisions within our society
• Racially-motivated violence can never be accepted. If we want to eliminate the spectre of extremism — whether from the far-left or far-right — we must face uncomfortable truths about its causes and origins
• The riots and the atmosphere of resentment and simmering racial tension are the inevitable result of inherently divisive, government-sponsored identity politics that have taken over the full range of UK institutions
• There is a wealth of evidence that the social contract is failing large swathes of the UK public, particularly in the area that has the biggest impact on people’s life chances: education. This has not happened by accident. The rise of official multiculturalism and identity politics, the separation of people into ‘identity groups’ and the prioritisation of certain groups in a ‘hierarchy of victimhood’ have fostered a sense of disenfranchisement that is fatal to social cohesion.
• This paper examines how these divisions emerged in the UK. It charts the state’s journey towards regulating social relationships from the 1965 Race Discrimination Act to the emergence of multiculturalism in the 1980s, in particular within education policies. Finally, we look at the recent Equalities Acts and their dangerously divisive effects.
• Further, we show how, over the past four decades, British institutions — especially schools — have encouraged ethnic minorities to cultivate their own minority identity as an end in itself, to the exclusion of integration of people who share a common British identity. Logically, re-integrating the majority into political, cultural and social life is a precondition for integrating immigrant minorities into British society.
• This is driven by the rise of the powerful, unaccountable and tendentious Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) industry, which is corroding society, entrenching division and undermining integration. Its core tenets encourage addressing what should be a general public as a proliferating number of discrete ‘communities’.
• This paper identifies how successive governments have sponsored these corrosive policies, to the detriment of the working class (the largest social grouping), who have been ‘de-presented’ and subsequently disenfranchised from the British body politic. To help restore bonds between the public and its national, public institutions – that is, to re-integrate the general public of which ethnic minorities are a part – we suggest the following:
· Review the Equality Act and where it is found incompatible with affirming foundational values of freedom and equality, and divisive rather than integrative, it should be reformed or, if needed, repealed.
· Review the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion sector and where its provisions are incompatible with foundational values of democracy and equality, and divisive rather than integrative, a range of sanctions or regulations needs to be considered and enacted.
· Political and cultural leaders should start thinking in terms of policies that address a British public (unified in its diversity) rather than imposing top-down uniformity or inclusivity on people categorised into prescribed communities.
• Popular calls for control of immigration need to be understood as a response to more than numbers alone. Some of the reasons why immigration acquires its current significance are:
· increasing competition for decreasing services;
· frustration at successive governments who have made, and broken, promises regarding immigration control;
· anger at majoritarian concerns being ignored and, more recently, stigmatised by new cultural elites who use minoritarian rights to assert that any questioning of immigration is evidence of racism.
• In other words, immigration is intimately tied to a key issue of democratic accountability. The people assent to the authority of their political representatives on the basis that their representatives have the ability, and the will, to put their interests first. It has been a long time since any government has been able to do this.
Read the full paper here.
