A growing and dangerous climate of threatening and intimidatory harassment is leading to serious censorship, freedom-restricting harassment, affecting not just politicians and those in public life, but others, according to Dame Sara Khan’s review into social cohesion.
In a foreword, she stressed the need for constant vigilance in a democracy, against disillusionment with democracy, the emergence and growth of social media and artificial intelligence, the spread of disinformation and deep fakes; and the mainstreaming of extremism. She wrote: “Rather than high risk and acute threats such as terrorism, cyber-security and foreign state interference, many of the cohesion risks I identify are chronic, insidious and often sit below the radar; the impact of which is not actively measured or even fully appreciated.”
She found ‘no strategic approach within Whitehall’s machinery to deal with these threats to social cohesion and our country’s democratic resilience’; and more practically no ‘guidebook’ or ‘tool kit’ for those caught up in community tensions. The review pointed to a growing and ‘wide-spread phenomenon of extreme forms of harassment leading individuals into silence, self-censoring, or abandoning their democratic rights. Freedom-restricting harassment (FRH) was defined as when people experience or witness threatening, intimidatory or abusive harassment online and/or offline. The 150-page review rejected that such harassment is mainly faced by those in public life, and essentially online. “Our evidence indicates that neither of these assumptions are true. Freedom-restricting harassment is a far wider phenomenon, whose victims range across political, class, belief and cultural spectrums, and which appears equally online and offline,” faced by academics and others: “A director of a civil society organisation working against hate crime receiving regular death threats and whose staff have left their jobs out of fear; councillors living in constant fear and considering leaving office after receiving thousands of death threats; a university cancelling a proposed academic research centre after threatening harassment to staff; intra-faith harassment including an imam who had 18 months of police protection from Islamist extremists for his religious beliefs and a Sikh community activist having to take different routes home each night for fear of being followed by Sikh fundamentalists after years of threats and abuse.”
The document made the case for social cohesion, ‘reducing the threat of terrorism and hate crime, increasing societal resilience to shocks such as pandemics, improving public health, increasing volunteering and strengthening communities’. It noted that polarisation and tension may only become apparent when ‘a flashpoint or trigger incident occurs resulting in violence, a surge of hate crime or a breakdown in public order’; and gave the example of a religious studies teacher at Batley Grammar School who was forced into hiding in March 2021 and who ‘was let down by all the agencies involved, most notably Kirklees Council, West Yorkshire Police and the Batley Multi Academy Trust’. The review heard of similar examples in other schools. The review singled out ‘cohesion threats’ to Barrow-in-Furness, Oldham and Stoke on Trent. More generally the review spoke of ‘a declining trust, confdence and participation in democracy and its institutions, declining civic engagement’; and noted it was not only faced by the UK, but the United States, notably the high-profile January 6, 2021 storming of Capitol Hill; France and Germany; and Australia, where social cohesion is actively measured.
As for the cost of poor social cohesion, the review looked back to the August 2011 riots ‘across many cities and towns in England’, costed at £500m. As for harassment and abuse on social media platforms, which allow ‘the rapid, decentralised spread of disinformation and alternative narratives’, the review said that the communications regulator, Ofcom should hold platforms to account. As for how to change ‘negative behaviour’, lessons should be learnt from institutions such the NHS and Transport for London that have invested in ‘zero-tolerance’ campaigns against abuse and harassment aimed at the public, the review said.
The document defined social cohesion as ‘how we live well together in a diverse democracy and how we peacefully navigate disagreements for the common good, despite the differences among us’.
Comment
For the Local Government Association, Heather Kidd, Chair of the LGA’s Safer and Stronger Communities Board, said: “This important report reflects our concerns around the growing threat to democracy and social cohesion posed by conspiracy theories, disinformation and extremist activity, in particular the appalling abuse of councillors. Councils have an essential role to play in building and maintaining cohesive communities, but as this report suggests, have been limited by a lack of funding for counter-extremism work while facing significant budgetary pressures.”
Background
Dame Sara Khan was appointed by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson as the government’s Independent Adviser for Social Cohesion and Resilience in March 2021, having been appointed the first Counter-Extremism Commissioner by the Home Secretary Amber Rudd in 2018. For the document visit https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-khan-review-threats-to-social-cohesion-and-democratic-resilience.
Photo by Mark Rowe.
