Community cohesion emerged as a government policy in late 2001. Only seven years later, how can it be that a policy which has been given such strong political backing should be perceived to be in serious difficulty?

Community cohesion will, in some years time, be seen as one of those buzzwords or phrases – like community capacity-building, empowerment, social exclusion and, of course, the Third Way (wherever did that go by the way?) – which most characterised the New Labour project, introduced either without acknowledgment that they were not new concepts at all (as in the case of social exclusion, first coined in France in the 1950s), or in a way which suggested that they were kneejerk political reactions to serious policy and political problems.

The ‘community cohesion’ agenda raises some profound concerns about what government is trying to do in its approach to communities (meaning marginalised communities often characterised by a multiethnic population). It is clear from the experience of the New Deal for Communities and government hostility to those communities (which sought to have real power over strategic direction and resources) and from the recent government White Paper on Empowerment (which privileges an individualised ‘active citizen’ form of empowerment rather than one which is collective and reflects needs and desires from the ‘bottom–up’) that the main aim is to have more stable, organised (many would say ‘managed’ or even controlled) communities and neighbourhoods with which government can more easily engage to pursue its own ideas of not just community cohesion but also community safety, family policy and criminal justice.

The concept of community cohesion first emerged in the aftermath of the disturbances in certain northern English cities in 2001; these disturbances were seen locally to have a clear link to the continuing discrimination – in access to jobs, adequate income, decent housing – against long-established minority ethnic groups living in these areas, with a particular catalyst provided by the provocative political activities of far-right groups such as the BNP. Recent government statements however suggest that the community cohesion policy agenda is not predominantly about race equality but is much more wide-ranging – and thus diluted − suggesting that work with individual minority groups may be inimical to the achievement of community cohesion (and indeed single minority groups are now debarred from accessing funding). If indeed the goal is to produce cohesive communities in the sense that they are communities where one ethnic group is not in open warfare with another but lives alongside it in a way which acknowledges difference and diversity, this should not preclude those organisations which are working to build capacity amongst specific groups to enable them both to build links with other groups but also to develop a voice and engagement with key policy actors. Perhaps then community cohesion is in crisis because local people have different views from government of what their neighbourhoods need, views which led finally, after years of mistrust and being ignored by governments, to the 2001 ‘riots’ and the community cohesion response. The ironic deracialisation of the community cohesion agenda, together with some infelicitous comments (such as the ‘parallel lives’ observation of 2005) emerging from the Commission for Racial Equality, appearing to blame the residents of these deprived neighbourhoods for the condition in which they find themselves, thus represents yet another way in which the needs of these communities are ignored. Underpinning the community cohesion agenda however is the deeply racialised ‘war on terror’ – also originating in 2001 – which, for many, has become a ‘war on Islam’.

Another interpretation of government's move to deracialise the community cohesion agenda might be that it is concerned to lower the profile of race within its overall policy framework. On the one hand, its increasingly harsh immigration policies fundamentally challenge the sense that ‘race’ is still not an important organising concept within the body politic, and, on the other, there is a growing feeling that the policy and service implications of the death of Stephen Lawrence have still, ten years on, not been addressed – there have been more than 120 racialised murders since his murder and most public agencies are still breaking the terms of the Race Relations Amendment Act, eight years on.

This challenging book consists of a thoughtful analysis of community cohesion within the context of the communitarian or Third Way New Labour project, and an afterword, both by the editors, framing 11 contributions – largely from Yorkshire's own ‘Golden Triangle’ of Sheffield, Leeds and York – which focus either on geographical (Bradford, Oldham, Rochdale, Birmingham, Glasgow) or sectoral (housing, Third Sector, young people, faith) case studies of community cohesion in practice. The editors argue that community cohesion has to be seen as part of an approach to social problem-solving ‘through a reinvigoration of the idea of community’ but that this particular policy has been shaped, on the run, by a series of events to the point that it now means very different things to different people. As well as dealing with the consequences (but not causes) of the Northern ‘riots’, it is now expected, inter alia', to address difficulties arising from A8 migration, including in rural areas the isolation of some ethnic groups from ‘the mainstream’, and the regeneration of deprived areas, whilst neglecting ‘the structural factors of deprivation, racism and cultural inequality’. Perhaps the most powerful political riposte to government's community cohesion agenda comes from Deborah Phillips and colleagues who show that the ‘self-segregation’ thesis so eagerly adopted by government, is quite at odds with the reality of differing ethnic groups' aspirations in some of the very towns where the ‘riots’ occurred. As the editors observe in their afterword, the community cohesion agenda is at root a moralising and civilising agenda for deprived communities and thus one which yet again ignores the potential for voice and agency of these communities. Under the weight of such contradictions and tensions, it is hardly surprising that it is in crisis.