Community cohesion

The report's findings became best known for identifying the parallel lives of minority and majority communities, but also proposed a wide range of new policies, which were subsequently adopted by government and other agencies.

Its work concluded with a final report the End of Parallel Lives that stressed the importance of mainstreaming cohesion into local government services.

[citation needed] The first academic textbook, produced by a proponent of the concept and author of the Cantle Report was supportive and attempted to build a substantial and theoretical underpinning for community cohesion.

[3] This analysis suggested that multicultural policy and practice had contributed to separation and segregation and built on the idea of the parallel lives of the earlier Cantle Report.

Other academics claimed that community cohesion was being used as part of a new politically inspired approach to, firstly, shift the agenda towards one of assimilation of minorities and, secondly, move away from the focus on inequalities and disadvantage.

He suggests that "identity, culture and tradition are seen as conducive to prejudice, antagonism, polarization, mistrust, hatred and overt (fanatical) loyalty associated with preservationist or past-orientated orientations"[4] and that emotionally hot patterns of identity are being replaced by "a calmer cosmopolitan mentality which is characterised by flexibility, ‘cool’ loyalties and thin patterns of solidarity.

Kundnani, for example, claims that the changing nature of debates on ‘race’ has helped to shift the imperative to integration and by building shared norms, common identity and stable communities, diverse groups would be expected to ‘buy into’ British institutions, organisations and processes.

[9] Lentin and Titley (2011) also believe that the development of community cohesion was a means of reining back race relations policies on the part of Government.

The suggestion that community cohesion did not take full account of inequalities from the outset is contradicted by the formal definition adopted by the LGA (see above).

[12] It is also contested by Thomas who dismisses this charge in the first academic study based upon real evidence from the operation of cohesion in local communities.

[13] The assertions were also contradicted by the Government policy commitments given during the earlier development, particularly the annual series of Building Opportunity, Strengthening Society reports from 2005.

In addition, Delanty (2011)[14] goes to the heart of the academic critique by pointing out that "The notion of a cultural encounter has been a surprisingly neglected topic in sociology and has hardly been addressed in related fields", in other words, the central concern of community cohesion had simply not been seriously considered in previous race relations theory, casting doubt on the validity of the previous academic concerns.

More than sixteen years since the concept of 'parallel lives' was expounded in the Cantle Report, Thomas et al., (2017)[15] has found clear evidence of their continued existence in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, an area previously identified as a 'failed space' of multiculturalism and one which has much in common with many other English Northern towns and cities.

They particularly focused on active projects in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Israel and noted the relative absence of such programs in North America.

These campaigns were important in that they tried to present a new positive picture of diversity and whilst recognising the value of cultural heritage and distinctiveness, it placed a new emphasis on the commonalities between groups and thereby contributed to a less defensive and more progressive form of multiculturalism, or towards the idea of interculturalism.