Migration and Social Cohesion in the UK

Migration and Social Cohesion in the UK covers a policy agenda that has dominated debates in the United Kingdom following urban unrest in a number of northern English towns and cities in the summer of 2001. The perceived urgency then grew in the wake of the U.S. bombings on September 11th later that year. All contemporary states are concerned with “cohesion,” in the sense of wishing to maintain stable relations between members of an increasingly heterogeneous citizenry. In the United Kingdom, debates around cohesion gathered pace as migration flows became ever more diverse over the past decade. Expansion of the EU resulted in the influx of sizeable numbers of Eastern European migrants, thereby increasing pressure on local services both in urban and rural locations.

The core argument of this book is that to characterize the key issue as a lack of “community cohesion,” which has been the case in U.K. social policy, is deeply flawed. The authors state, quite reasonably, that the focus on the alleged self-segregation of migrant communities is misguided. This characterization of “communities” not only misinterprets individual/collective motives, but also imposes an essentialist framework on constructions of sociality. In policy terms it also speaks to a culturalist agenda in which any lack of “cohesion” is deemed to be a result of a lack of mutual understanding grounded in ethnic background and/or cultural and linguistic heritage.

In rejecting the idea of community cohesion, the authors Mary Hickman, Nicola Mai, and Helen Crowley adopt the idea of “social cohesion.” Although there is nothing novel in this (it has arguably become the norm in academic debate), it adopts a highly distinctive definition. While most analysts place a major emphasis on the materialist dimension of the “social,” specifically the centrality to social stability of structural inequality (including the material impact of racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia), here the focal point is the role of social agency at the local level. “Social cohesion” is defined as “the ability within the individuals and groups informing a social field to manage the inequalities, differentiations and tensions intervening within and between them in terms that they perceive as positive and successful” (p. 13). The authors berate those who they believe focus overly on extra-local structural factors and also those who suggest that the key factors are essentially geo-political in nature or otherwise intractable in nature. The book, they argue, aims both to understand the “negotiation” of tensions and inequalities undermining social cohesiveness and to suggest a way forward in terms of possible policy solutions.

Seeking to avoid the accusation that their empirical focus was overly narrow, they selected six research sites: Downham and Kilburn in London, Leicester and Peterborough/Thetford elsewhere in England, Glasgow in Scotland and Dungannon in Northern Ireland. These were chosen to reflect a blend of urban and rural, and regional and national locations with varying ethnic compositions and diverse migration histories. All had been subject to the recent influx of “new” migrant flows, thus enabling the study of relations between these cohorts, earlier migrant generations and those defined as “long term settled, majority” populations. Significantly, however, these sites do not include areas where the most significant outbreaks of urban unrest in this century have occurred. Given that these areas have also witnessed significant levels of “new” migration, this will lead some readers to question the balance of the sample. Indeed, it could be argued that managing “the inequalities, differentiations and tensions” in such areas would present rather more challenging scenarios than those witnessed in the selected localities. As for Sighthill (Glasgow), the account also fails to mention historic tensions between asylum seekers and local “white” residents, evidenced by the brutal murder of an asylum seeker who was allocated a flat on one of the area’s “sink” (hard-to-let/low demand) estates.

The study does undoubtedly generate a swathe of extremely rich and illuminating qualitative data. Focussing essentially on the world of work, the housing market and the educational system (subjects of separate chapters), the narrative explores testimonies of a variety of different cohorts of respondents, ranging from “key informants,” new arrivals, and settled migrants to the “long term settled majority” (this latter term being a proxy for “white”). While this schema has some merit, it nevertheless creates at times a somewhat clumsy and confusing account that leaves many key questions unanswered, not the least of which is the relative significance of phenotype-based racism and Islamophobia.

There is a worrying lack of focus on structural forces throughout the narrative, despite an acknowledgement of the impact of deindustrialization on a number of the areas selected. The focus on locality and on the social agency of local actors, although laudable in itself, leads to a palpable disconnect between the local, regional, national and supra-national arenas. This is where the shunning of more mainstream interpretations of “social cohesion” is most noticeable, in that the latter invariably highlight the centrality of class and wealth inequalities to considerations of inclusivity and “cohesiveness.” In the educational arena, for example, the focus on social agency has been at the expense of a concern with the effectiveness of strategies to promote “cohesion” in schools (i.e., via the statutory requirement to promote “community cohesion”). In debating cohesiveness in the context of housing, there is also a worrying lack of focus on the dynamics of the housing market, and of housing market institutions.

To summarize, this is an interesting book that could be seen as a useful corrective for those who fail to see beyond structural accounts of “cohesion.” There is indeed a key role for social agency at a local level. Where I would take issue with the authors is that they appear to suggest that this in itself can successfully address/manage “tensions and inequalities”: inequalities in particular cannot simply be “negotiated” away. The latter assumption bears a disturbing similarity to the agenda at the heart of their critique: that of focusing on “community cohesion.” There is also a key lacuna, namely the failure to acknowledge the key driver of the cohesion debates over the past decade: Islamophobia and an overbearing focus on the relations between the “long term settled”/”white” and Muslim communities.