A commonwealth of communities

'Two-tier' societies are sometimes necessary and inevitable

Around the turn of the millennium one word acquired new-found ubiquity in British discourse: communities.

We’ve heard a lot about communities this past week: Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared that ‘the first priority is safety and security of our communities’. This was echoed by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, who said that ‘fears of extreme-right disorder’ had abated due to the work of police and a ‘show of unity from communities’. Northamptonshire Police declared that jail sentences for social media posts were ‘about standing up for what is right and protecting our communities from fear of violence’. Ex-Tory MP and podcaster Rory Stewart accused Elon Musk of not understanding ‘British communities’. The Crown Prosecution Service declared that ‘recent violence has shaken our communities.’

Alongside these communities the now-familiar term ‘community leaders’ has also been used by various figures, including anti-fascist campaigner Paul Mason who praised these ‘community leaders’ for calming the situation. 

The new concept of communities, as Aris Roussinos wrote in a powerful piece after the recent riots, came about in the New Labour era with ‘the Runnymede Trust’s influential report “The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain” pushed to reshape Britain as “a community of communities”, a genuinely multicultural state that rejected the “narrow English-dominated, backward-looking definition of the nation”. Ethnic identities — of which the British one was framed as one among many — were to be embraced, within the parameters of the newly multicultural state, and immigration restrictions lifted to achieve this goal.’

As some observers in the 2000s began to note, this seemed similar to the form of government once employed by empires, in particular the millet system of the Ottomans, where different religious communities were give a degree of self-rule. As Britain has become more multicultural, so the British system has come more closely to resemble the British Empire than the old United Kingdom. It is a new, more tolerant form of empire where the communities are equal and the ruling class can relive the Raj as goodies.