Written evidence from Hope not Hate [CCI0035]

HOPE not hate exists to challenge the organised far-right, build resilience in the communities who are susceptible to them and address the issues and policies which give rise to them. We are submitting this evidence as we are very concerned about the current state of community cohesion, particularly following the riots in August 2024, and the opportunities this presents for the far right and other divisive actors to pursue hateful agendas.

What assessments have been made of community cohesion in the UK in a local and national context?

At HOPE not hate, one of the ways that we assess community cohesion is through public perceptions of tension between different groups living in Britain.

Our latest polling has found that attitudes towards national cohesion worsened as a result of the riots, and still remain negative today. Immediately after the riots 61% of Britons believed there to be increasing tensions between different ethnic groups in the UK, an increase of 8% from the beginning of the year. Despite physical violence fizzling out after two weeks, in January 2025 the perception of tension remained high, dropping by only 3% since the peak of violence in August.

Labour’s criminal justice response to the riots was swift and harsh, effective in putting a stop to the physical violence on the ground. However, notably missing has been centralised efforts to actually address and repair the hateful attitudes that drove the violence, and the social relationships that were fractured as a result. And arguably, the false narratives about ‘two tier policing’ and allegations of Government and police cover-up over the Southport murderer manufactured in response to the criminal justice response have fractured relationships and worsened cohesion further.

On a local level, the results are similar. Since 2017 there has been a notable reduction in the number of people who think their local community is peaceful and friendly, and this worsened further from 76% to 62% immediately after the riots in August 2024. Perceptions of local cohesion have continued to worsen; the percentage who think their local community is peaceful and friendly has dropped by 3% from 62% in August 2024 to 59% in January 2025.

These tension narratives, often fuelled and peddled by the far right media and social media eco-system, have been further exacerbated by huge cuts to local Government funding. Proactive cohesion measures that strengthen relationships between and within communities are often seen as unessential and the first to be dropped in the face of financial difficulties.

What are the primary barriers and threats to community cohesion?

Community resilience

At HOPE not hate, we address community cohesion through the lens of community resilience, as explored in our latest Fear and HOPE report - Fear and HOPE 2024: The case for community resilience.[1] We define community resilience as the ability for communities to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations and disruptive challenges. This relies on social connectedness, resource availability, and agency and empowerment.

These three pillars allow a community to collectively respond to trigger events that might otherwise negatively impact them. In the case of community cohesion, without these three pillars of resilience, communities are vulnerable to divisive actors exploiting tense situations to further strain and agitate relationships.

Assessing the barriers and threats to social connectedness, resource availability and agency and empowerment individually, particularly how divisive actors are benefiting from them to pursue a hateful agenda, therefore allows us insight into the barriers and threats to community cohesion more generally.

Social connectedness

Strong relationships within communities that foster a sense of ‘togetherness’ and shared identity are the foundation of community cohesion as they embolden communities to reject hateful narratives that demonise or scapegoat vulnerable groups during times of stress or crisis.

Over the last few years we have seen divisive actors becoming increasingly bold with exploiting trigger events to weaken social connectedness. The grooming gang scandals in Rotherham and Oldham are ‘proof’ that Islam ‘promotes’ paedophilia, the 2017 Islamist terror attacks ‘confirmed’ that ‘violent’ Muslims were not loyal to Britain, and the attack of a 31-year-old woman and her two children in Clapham by Afghan asylum seeker Abdul Azedi in February 2024 fed into ‘Stop the boats’ discourse about immigrants as a danger to women.

The nationwide riots in August 2024 following the murder of three girls in Stockport were the largest outbreak of far-right rioting and disorder in the post-war period, and a stark indicator of the dangerously low levels of social connectedness. The speed with which misinformation and disinformation spread and the speed with which physical violence followed is testament to the fragility of social connectedness in Britain today. Unpicking the causes and drivers of the riots, particularly the attitudes that drove violence, presents an opportunity to assess the barriers and threats to social connectedness and subsequently community cohesion.

Attitudes towards multiculturalism

With much of the inflammatory rhetoric during the riots thinly veiled behind so-called ‘legitimate concerns’ about multiculturalism, attitudes towards this issue emerge as one of the biggest threats to social connectedness.

Our polling shows that public support for multiculturalism has been dropping over the last couple of years, after stabilised improvements over the last few decades. In January 2023, 34% of Britons believed that multiculturalism undermined British culture. This had increased by 10% to 44% in July 2024, just prior to the murders in Southport. This puts attitudes back in line with the immediate post-Brexit period and following the 2017 terrorist attacks, reversing the improvements made over the last 5 and a half years in just 18 months.

The inflammatory rhetoric pushed by far-right actors following the murders in Southport was so successful at instigating violence and threatening cohesion because attitudes towards multiculturalism were already so negative, and as a result relationships between white and non-white communities were already fractured. Far-right actors were able to capitalise on these pre-existing divides, deploying rhetoric and narratives that had already been somewhat normalised.

The physical violence may have ended, but attitudes towards multiculturalism remain worryingly negative today, 6 months later. The percentage of those who believe having a wider variety of cultures and backgrounds undermines British culture has only decreased by 2%, from 44% during the peak of violence in August 2024, to 42% in January 2025.

Attitudes towards Muslims

HOPE not hate research from 2024 shows that attitudes towards multiculturalism are largely shaped by attitudes towards Muslims in particular, more so than other racialised communities.[2] With this in mind, anti-Muslim hatred remains a notable barreir to social connectedness.

Similarly to multiculturalism, attitudes towards Muslims were already negative prior to the events in Southport. In December 2023, 32% of Britons thought that Islam was a threat to the British way of life, an increase of 5% from 27% in October 2021. Again, the far-right were so quickly able to exploit and inflame around the murders in Southport because attitudes towards Muslims were already hostile.

We also know that the riots triggered a further increase in hostility towards Muslims, migrants and multiculturalism. Our polling found that attitudes worsened in the immediate aftermath of the attacks in Southport to a statistically significant degree.[3]

Our polling found a 5% decrease in those who think Islam is compatible with a British way of life, from 33% to 28%, and a 9% increase in people in favour of ignoring or withdrawing from international laws or conventions so that the UK has more control of its borders, from 64% to 73%.

Similar to attitudes towards multiculturalism, hostility towards Muslims has negligibly changed since the riots in August. Particularly as the topic of grooming gangs re-enters political, media and public discourse, it is of little surprise that our most recent polling finds that 22% of the public think Muslims “create a lot of problems” in the UK, approximately four times higher than for any other religion.

Today, 44% believe that Islam poses a threat to Western civilisation, 37% believe areas of the UK are under the control of Sharia law, and 6 in 10 believe that Muslim communities should be doing more to stop Islamist extremism (61%) and integrate into British society (60%).

A hostile political mainstream

These negative attitudes are a threat to cohesion as they have weakened social connection and relationships and provided a receptive audience for divisive actors to spread hatred and encourage violence. Crucially, this division is not just white and racialised communities, but also between those who are pro-multicultrualism and anti-multicultualism, and, particularly with the case of anti-Muslim hatred, even between different racialised communities.

This cannot be analysed in a vacuum. The culture wars pursued by radical right politicians and media have eroded the social connections that underpin our communities. Time and time again, we have seen communities pitted against each other: cis women against trans women, homeless veterans against people seeking asylum, Muslims against Jews.

The anti-multiculturalism attitudes that drove the August 2024 riots had been authorised and promoted by mainstream influential figures. The increased normalisation of hateful and harmful rhetoric, often via the narrative that “multiculturalism has failed” presents a huge threat to community cohesion as it has shifted the overton window on what is considered a ‘legitimate concern’ and normalised increasingly far-right rhetoric.

Whether it be Suella Braverman as Home Secretary criticising the “misguided dogma of multiculturalism” as “toxic”, for Europe, Robert Jenrick claiming as part of his campaign for Conservative Party leadership that Britain is “under threat” from mass immigration and that  “non-integrating multiculturalism” has “put the very idea of England at risk” or then Conservative MP and now Reform whip Lee Anderson accusing London Mayor Sadiq Khan of being controlled by Islamists, this inflammatory rhetoric has become increasingly normalised. Slogans like “Stop the boats” and “We want our country back” that accompanied the physical violence last August were popularized by mainstream politicians and the media.

But crucially, this is not only confined to Reform or Conservative politicians. Although far less common and extreme, Labour have at times dipped their toes in this rhetoric. In 2007 Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a ‘British jobs for British workers’ policy, which many viewed as nativist and contrary to anti-discrimination laws. During the 2024 General Election campaign, unnamed Labour officials were reported to have made degrading and anti-Muslim comments about Muslims voting for independent candidates running on pro-Gaza platforms. More recently, Starmer echoed Conservative alarmism by accusing his predecessors of running an “open border experiment”.

Hateful language adopted by politicians and media remains a considerable threat to community cohesion, as it increasingly normalises the extreme rhetoric of the far right and makes it easier for them to present themselves and their views as reasonable alternatives.

Access to resources

Economic insecurity and perceptions of scarcity hugely threaten community cohesion. The cost of living remains the biggest issue facing people and their families today, with 61% of all respondents in our January 2025 poll choosing it as one of their top three issues. With 22% of people in the UK living in poverty, and poverty deepening for 6 million people, [4] it is easy to see why this is an issue of concern.

Alongside these concerns often come narratives of scarcity. These narratives generate fear, panic, dejection and even suspicion by making people feel that there is not enough to go round and there is competition between those trying to access resources. Although this language is strongly associated with the Conservative party’s austerity agenda, Labour’s continued reference to the ‘£22 billion black hole’ in public services that needs to be filled mirrors this framing.

In our 2024 Fear and HOPE report, we explored how experiences of financial security often directly impact attitudes towards immigration and multiculturalism. Our polling found that those who rent  from the council or local authority or earn below the median national income are more likely to believe that immigration has been bad for Britain. 36% of those who describe themselves as financially desperate agree that immigrants have put their job at risk, twice as many as the 18% of those who feel well-off. Similarly, 49% of people self-describing as financially desperate feel that having a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures has undermined British culture, compared to 38% of those who feel well off.

This is also not to say that these hateful attitudes are contained within lower social classes, or that these findings should be used to demonise them. Indeed, some of the most hateful actors we have seen spreading divisive scarcity narratives have been highly educated, high-earning homeowners with positions of power across politics, the mainstream media, and social media platforms.

But we do know that economic insecurity has been exploited by divisive actors to scapegoat vulnerable communities and increase division. Complaints about the supposed ‘5*’ treatment of people seeking asylum in ‘hotel Britain’ at odds with ‘homeless Brits’ or veterans.

Economic insecurity and the scarcity narratives that accompany it remain a threat to community cohesion, These scarcity narratives have profound ramifications for how people view social relations. Fear can lead people to be more accepting of divisive narratives which portray other groups as competition. The far right can exploit this to guide resentment and suspicion towards certain communities – most often Muslims and people seeking asylum, as well as migrants and racialised people more generally.

Agency and empowerment

Opposition to multiculturalism is often a product of anger at a rapidly changing world and feeling helpless and excluded from setting the direction of travel. This is not to excuse or explain away the racism that often underlies this. But it is important to note that commonly used anti-multiculturalism slogans also denote perceptions of powerlessness and desire to have agency: “we need to take back control”, “enough is enough”.

Perceptions of agency impact community cohesion as attitudes related to multiculturalism are often inflamed by a wider issue of Britons feeling a lack of control over things happening in their lives, whether that be migration, cost of living or democracy more widely. They feel as though multiculturalism is happening to them, rather than something they are participating in.

These feelings of powerlessness hugely lower resilience to far-right agitation, as they are easily exploited into an anti-politics agenda that positions the far right as “defenders” against multiculturalism. This then only makes community cohesion worse as the far-right are able to agitate around cohesion issues further. Reforms success in the General Election as the third largest party by vote share laid clear the impacts of the growing anti-politics movement as they can present themselves as an alternative to the ‘Westminster bubble’; our polling from August 2024 found that 66% of people thought “the political system is broken”, and 37% did not see voting as a credible mechanism for change.

What can be done at a local and national level to improve community cohesion?

As discussed, improvements to community cohesion must go beyond simply addressing social connectedness. An effective and comprehensive community cohesion strategy must also address economic insecurity and democratic satisfaction. Fourteen years of sustained stress across social, economic, political and cultural frontiers has weakened community resilience drastically; a result of a combination of poor Government policy on specific issues as well as a deprioritization of communities in general.

Social connectedness

A successful community cohesion strategy must address the hateful attitudes that threaten social connectedness, and both the short and long term threats to social connectedness.

In the short term, the strategy should address community flare ups following trigger events. Crucially, this can not only include a ‘law and order’ response. Central Government needs to better support and bolster civil society to intervene in local disturbances. This was the approach taken in Harehill in Leeds in July 2024, when the Police Gold Command withdrew police from the street to allow community leaders to move in and reduce tensions, successfully containing and stopping the disorder.

For the longer term, initiatives that proactively build up social connectedness should be pursued in order to strengthen resilience.

Within each of these timeframes there must be a two-pronged approach to engagement to address hateful attitudes. Firstly, amplifying trusted, sensible voices to distribute narratives of inclusion, connection and tolerance will help keep the moderate middle united and strong. Simultaneously there must be efforts to target the extreme fringes with interventions that address the root cause of their hatred towards other groups.

●        Reconvene the cross-departmental cohesion working group. This should include members with links across local and regional government, public bodies, civil society organisations, and faith groups, with proposals for activity at local, regional and national levels.

●        Funding and support for local authorities, especially in areas with higher risk. Creating a dynamic measurement framework that identifies areas most in need, where social connection is lowest, and is able to respond with resources will allow for effective preventative work.

●        Develop effective tension monitoring. This will combine local authority and police, social media and national-level insights to proactively identify potential trigger points and allow for early intervention.

●        Cohesion between ethnic minority and religious groups. Moving away from framing cohesion as only white and non-white relations will make our understanding of the problem more accurate.

●        Restore public funding for English lessons, which were dramatically cut back by the previous Conservative Government.

Economic scarcity

Developing a way of talking about financial difficulties with accessing resources that builds solidarity across struggling groups rather than pitting them against each other is essential. Fixing the economy and lowering the cost of living are already central and local government priorities, but connecting the dots between treasury decisions and community resilience through messaging would be helpful.

●        Invest in areas with low community resilience. The August 2024 riots have laid bare the link between economic deprivation and low resilience to hateful narratives and far-right agitation. In addition to addressing cohesion, providing access to resources and quality of services in these areas will boost resilience. Labour’s Recovery Grant’s focus on rebalancing funding to “where it is most needed” is welcomed, although a one-off payment. This must come alongside longer term funding reviews.

●        Fair funding review. Labour’s latest local government finance policy statement is welcomed. Their intention for longer term change by adjusting the funding formula from 2026/7 is much needed, and must include reviewing the ways in which relative needs and resources are assessed, as well as tangible reforms to local government financing that protects against income loss.

●        Train people in frontline positions to intervene. Equipping frontline support services and community leaders with the tools to have difficult conversations that challenge harmful views combines practical help with economic solidarity narratives.

Democratic satisfaction

The 2024 General Election turnout rate shows that deeper research is needed into the intricacies of people’s dissatisfaction with voting and its political impact. Our research has shown that people feel stronger connections with their local than national community; repairing relationships and satisfaction with politics at the local level is the first step in addressing the wider anti-politics movement.

●        Introduce democratic reforms which increase voter turnout. These should especially target marginalised voters who are underrepresented in local and general elections.

●        Repair trust in standards in government and public life. This could include changes to ministerial standards, improving the right to protest, and greater accountability for the press and media.

●        Improve financing of local government. Supporting local governments to deliver for their residents could help reframe the wider relationship between people, politics and power.

January 2025