‘Reviving New Labour cohesion plans can stop tensions rising over Israel-Palestine’

LabourList has run a series of pieces offering different views on the conflict in Israel and Palestine, its implications and Labour’s response. You can read more of them here.

The last Labour government learnt a lot about the need to root out hate, sometimes the hard way in the aftermath of wars. We’ve learnt from experience that the consequence of wars in far-flung places in the here and now is the fomentation of radicalisation in years to come, particularly when it involves clashes between our great faiths.

We all feel the wash from it in our communities. The vicious terrorism of Hamas has left our Jewish community feeling particularly vulnerable – at home and abroad. But it’s not just the Jewish community. Islamophobia is inevitably on the rise, innocent by-standers suffer too, as we saw on the day of an international football match in Belgium last week.

In the likely scenario that there is no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the short term, our government has to prepare itself for some ructions in our communities. I’m not talking about bringing in more anti-terrorism legislation or crack downs, but long-term community cohesion strategies that help ensure the glue of Britain’s diverse, multicultural and multi-faith societies remains intact – something the current Home Secretary doesn’t appear to understand.

We need to be proactive to defeat hate

There is much more in Britain that unites us than divides us, but we need to be proactive to defeat hate. We cannot wait, allow it to foment and then let it spill out into our streets. One of the most important things that I was charged to do in the last Labour government was to design and implement some societal changes to protect communities under a growing threat, most specifically the Jewish community at that time. However, the principle is the same for all vulnerable groups.

Back then, in 2008, we needed to look across government to see where the gaps were – and which groups were not protected by law or left vulnerable through oversight. In the case of the Jewish community, not all police forces were recording antisemitic crimes as hate crimes. We changed that; funding was quickly made available to provide new security measures for schools, and for the first time, radicalisation on our campuses and in our prisons was put under real scrutiny.  

There was also a new approach to faith communities, with a detailed interfaith strategy. Interfaith went from being a nice cosy idea to being about national resilience and how we could utilise the strength of people, institutions and buildings in the event of disasters like floods and pandemics.

The big lesson for government was that you can’t wait for events like the 9/11 attacks in New York or the 7/7 bombs in London and then begin work on community cohesion and interfaith. Whilst the current situation in Israel-Palestine is a constant reminder that a shocking terrorist act by Hamas, followed by thousands of deaths in Gaza, can erupt and disrupt our society, we can still take active measures to build resilience.

The next government must work to strengthen our communities

Labour’s Prevent programme was often criticised for targeting or spying on the Muslim community, although other communities attacked it for giving too much resource to Muslim communities whilst ignoring others. Its intention was neither of these things. It was designed to work with communities or individuals at greatest risk of being radicalised.

It’s notable how the Conservatives criticised the programme in opposition but realised it was important enough to keep when in office.

One of my clearest and most unnerving experiences of that heightened period of work on this agenda, after the 7/7 attacks, was at one of the weekly meetings I undertook alongside the Home Secretary with the national security agencies. They are the very best in the business, and their antennae on hate crime, radicalisation and global threats is truly impressive.

But they would tell me that their measures of success were the same as that of every goalkeeper. Their job was to keep the ball out of the net every time. The only time the world would be aware of them was in the event of their failure and the concession of a goal.

As we head towards a general election, and hopefully a Keir Starmer-led government, those security agencies will be a great source of strength to the new government, although it will be up to the new government to set the framework that strengthens our communities, including through traumatic times, like the events of October 7th and its aftermath. We need to stay ahead of the game.