Carys Moseley comments on the government’s new policy on community integration
Last week the UK government published a new policy on Community Integration, entitled ‘Protecting What Matters: Towards a more confident, cohesive and resilient United Kingdom’.
It is billed as a ‘Call to Action’ in the face of a world that is ‘dangerous and volatile’. It stresses that British citizens have responsibilities, not only rights in terms of cohesion and integration. All this sounds good, but the underlying structure of the policies raise serious questions as to how well grounded they are.
Are the fundamental problems well understood?
The report says there is ‘a collective responsibility to pursue integration’, which it says should underpin anti-hate and anti-discrimination laws.
“But we can and must do more. In a world where so many people – digital grifters, hostile states, politicians of grievance – have a vested interest in division, we need to be much more active in asserting British values and the responsibilities of integration.”
These are listed as “core liberal principles such as tolerance, protection for minorities, the rule of law or the freedom to live and let live.” Their provenance is not accounted for.
More speech controls are coming
The government tries to balance religious freedom and equality and human rights legislation. This is how it does it:
“The UK is a diverse, pluralistic, and equal society. We respect and value people of all races, religions, sexualities, and genders. But respect for religion or culture does not require us to tolerate behaviour which attacks or undermines our fundamental values as a society. Gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and freedom from discrimination are fundamental to who we are. Integration means understanding and embracing these values. Attempts to impose extremist views, restrict the rights of others, or pressure people to conform to an intolerant world view are not acceptable and religious pluralism should not come at the expense of another person’s freedoms or right to exist safely. We will not tolerate efforts of individuals to sow division, stir anger against those with religious, political or social views different to theirs, or spread extremist, intolerant beliefs that undermine our shared values.”
This is the mishmash that Keir Starmer’s government thinks is going to make the United Kingdom more resilient.
Gender not sex, ‘all sexualities and genders’, embracing the whole gamut of LGBTQ+ rights, etc.
In other words, integration into British values means accepting gender self-identification, and law and policy that continue to permit the unmooring of men and women, boys and girls, from our biological foundations created by God.
This is hardly a great surprise as the government refuses to heed the Supreme Court judgment on sex. What could possibly go wrong?
How should we decide what tolerance should look like?
How will the decision be made as to what is an ‘intolerant world view’?
Gender self-identification is an intolerant world view. It is not tolerant of people who want single-sex spaces for specific functions. We can see this from many of the Christian Legal Centre’s court cases, such as that of the Darlington Nurses.
There is no such thing as someone or a group that is 100% tolerant of everything. ‘Intolerant’ is a subjective term with a shifting meaning.
Tolerance is listed as a Christian virtue in the Bible, but clearly not as an absolute stand-alone one. Rather it is meant to be activated alongside other virtues.
Having preached tolerance, the government shows increasing intolerance in relation to speech. The report contains some new rhetoric that will no doubt become socially, politically and legally significant in the near future.
Protecting institutions from extremist abuse
The government says it will use the 2024 definition of extremism.
“We will embed the 2024 extremism definition across government, working closely with frontline partners such as the police. We will update and embed the 2024 engagement principles so that public bodies do not confer legitimacy, funding or influence on extremist groups.”
This extremism definition targets Islamist extremism and neo-nazism, both of which share an anti-semitic outlook. The definition uses the Human Rights Act as its legal instrument. This is important because there is a long-standing debate on whether the UK should leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which is enshrined in the act. The reason for that is precisely due to the massive challenges with dealing with Islamist terrorism.
So is a politician who argues that the UK should leave the ECHR an extremist?
The ECHR did not exist before or during the Second World War. The UK won the Second World War by means of its armed forces, not by pursuing legal cases against Nazi Germany. Meanwhile there is a risk that a decision of high policy by the executive branch of government – ministers – is becoming increasingly difficult to argue for because it is already implicitly stigmatised on the formal level.
At the same time, Christian Concern warned back in 2024 that under this extremism definition, pro-lifers could be deemed extremists due to denying that abortion is a fundamental right, and thus to be ‘intolerant’.
Charities and ‘the Extreme Right’
The government’s work on extremism powers in this report encapsulates its recent actions. It has announced in recent weeks that it will strengthen the Charity Commission’s powers to shut down charities and remove trustees, to tackle what it calls extremist abuse.
The government says it will publish an annual ‘State of Extremism’ report. Interestingly this will tackle the Extreme Right not ‘the far right’. This is what it says:
“Those in positions of power and responsibility have a role in promoting a confident, modern patriotism – not least because the failure to do so in recent years has created space for the extreme right to equate being English with being White, or being Christian – exploit national identity as an ethnic construct, tied to race or religion – something the vast majority of people reject.”
Why is this the only mention of Christianity in the entire document?
Is it ‘extreme right’ to say or imply that Britain is Christian?
The report references the Bloom Review of 2023 on the fracturing of society without really explaining why it matters. However, if we re-read the Bloom Review, we discover the likely reason for this lone stigmatising reference to Christianity. Section 6.3 is on ‘White supremacy and British nationalism’. He first acknowledges that most white supremacist groups in the UK do not use religious (Christian) symbolism as part of their propaganda. However he then zeroes in on Britain First, which he calls ‘cultural nationalists’, despite their fascist and racist provenance.
“While religious ideology is not necessarily a motivating factor, Christian religious imagery and language can sometimes be attributed to an imagined past (which is de facto white), where the UK was successful and thriving. A belief that the UK is a “Christian country, and we need to keep it like that” can be used to entrench an ethnonationalist agenda and gain public legitimacy for aggression towards others regarded as a threat to preserving what is perceived to be the national identity.”
It should be obvious what is going on here. Despite saying ‘can be used, etc.’, Colin Bloom effectively stigmatised the historic belief that Britain is a Christian country by only mentioning it in relation to ‘ethnonationalism’, by which he means racism and hatred towards people who aren’t white British.
This is a menacing sleight of hand because the notion that Britain is a Christian country is a legal and cultural one. It stems from the fact that the Roman province of Britannia became officially Christian when the Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the sole official religion of the Roman Empire in 383 AD. Even as the Roman Empire was fracturing and rival local emperors such as Magnus Maximus arose in Britannia, they still adhered to Christianity as the official religion.
This had absolutely nothing to do with race or white supremacism. The increased religious tolerance that gradually emerged in Britain later happened within a culture of live debate on the Christian grounding of such freedoms, not despite Christian moral reasoning.
Charities and the far-left
Significantly, the report for the first time acknowledges the extreme left. This welcome move probably follows on from Whitehall’s progressive clampdown on so-called ‘direct action’ networks on the far left, such as Extinction Rebellion and Youth Demand. The problem with this promise is that the court case disputing the proscription of Palestine Action is ongoing. So right there the government has a much bigger problem on its hands, namely judges who have undermined the law by choosing to allow criminal vandals to bypass the existing legal pathway to make the case for deproscribing the group.
The judges have relied heavily on the Human Rights Act here. It remains to be seen how the government will navigate this minefield of tackling left-wing extremism in the charity sector and across institutions.
Anti-blasphemy agitation will be tackled
Another good thing about this report is that the government promises to enable the police to tackle anti-blasphemy agitation.
“We will also ensure the Police are equipped to respond to those who try to intimidate, threaten and harass others for so-called ‘blasphemy’ related incidents.”
This is an Islamic problem, and no less than six independent reports published for the government before the 2024 elections addressed it one way or another. However, these proposals are frustratingly thin on the practicalities. This is compounded by the fact that the government has also recently adopted a definition of anti-Muslim hostility.
The definition says that raising concerns and contributing to debates in the public interest are protected speech. However Tim Dieppe, head of public policy at Christian Concern, has point out that this begs the question of what is ‘the public interest’. Will that be redefined in such a way that concerns cannot be raised thoroughly?
What is it about the UK that hostile states are targeting?
The report delves into some of what hostile states are targeting in the UK: universities, the workings of democracy and charities.
“Hostile nations and foreign actors – including influential figures, politically or ideologically affiliated groups and individuals, and state-backed organisations – promote extremist narratives and disinformation in an attempt to sow further division. Extremists foment division and target UK institutions, including schools, universities, charities, and even local bodies such as Standing Advisory Councils on Religious Education, to serve their purposes.”
So in reality this means that churches, being charities, are also targets. Are Christians prepared for this reality?
It’s significant that already in February the government has been providing advice to heads of universities and also all UK political parties on threats from hostile states.
It has warned of foreign interference aiming at shaping or censoring research and teaching in universities. All heads of UK political parties were advised on how to recognise and resist ‘attempts to manipulate the political process and our democratic values’. The government has been providing means for people to report problems as they arise.
Dechristianisation has put the UK at risk
What is left unexplored is how the dechristianization of the United Kingdom in law and policy and culture has left a serious spiritual vacuum in these sectors and others.
People – and therefore society as a whole – are now less resilient if their very worth as human beings created by God is undermined by a culture of death replacing a culture of life in healthcare, or by gender self-ID nonsense forcing lies in our institutions and workplaces.
Children are likely to be far more insecure than their grandparents were. If churches and politicians give up on defending the sanctity of and right to life, or choose to stay quiet about them, the culture of death that came in in Communist countries will take over. By the time some young people get to university, they are already indoctrinated and weakened. There are plenty more problems than these.
If all morality is deemed to be based on human rights, rather than human rights law being understood as one set of instruments useful for specific moral goals, then we are cut off from a living tradition of moral reasoning and debate rooted in Christianity that then feeds the development of legislation and policy. If the entire history of Britain from Theodosius onwards as Christian is merely juxtaposed to racism and fascism, then at a stroke everybody is cut off from being able to relate to the past in all its complexity. Hostile states can exploit such a vacuum: Russia through its hostility to western modes of Christianity, Iran through its Islamic hostility to western and Christian civilization, and China through its spreading of ‘Sinicization’, the plan to distort world Christianity by influencing churches around the world to become compliant with Communism.
It should be evident that instead of stigmatising Christianity, what is needed to make the UK resilient from within, and protect fundamental freedoms, is to move forward with a Christian vision.
