A tinderbox of disconnection and division threatens our democracy
We must find out what unites us to avoid divisions such as those that led to the racist attacks after the Southport knife attack from deepening further
25 June, 2025
Sajid Javid | Jon Cruddas
When riots rocked 27 towns and cities across the country last year, after the horrific Southport knife attack, the prime minister admitted they did not happen in a vacuum.
Sir Keir Starmer said they “revealed a deeply unhealthy society”, with “the cracks in our foundation laid bare, weakened by division and decline”. He was right — but we have heard very little about it since.
Those cracks now threaten to deepen further. In the last few weeks we have seen more racially motivated riots in Northern Ireland and the stark findings of Baroness Casey’s audit into the state’s failure to tackle grooming gangs. Each of these are awful in their own right — the attacks on mosques by racist mobs, the burning of houses on the basis of ethnicity and the thousands of girls abused for years while too many turned a blind eye.
But these are not isolated events and to treat them as momentary crises is to miss the point. Beneath the surface lies a deeper shift: weakening trust, deepening polarisation, growing concerns about the scale and impact of immigration and a decline in our social connections.
Reflecting on the brutal class divides of the Victorian era, Benjamin Disraeli famously wrote of “two nations … between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy”. Two centuries on, we face a challenge that is at least as intense but also far more fragmented. The bonds that hold society together — civic participation, social connection and a shared sense of belonging — are under growing pressure. At the same time, the drivers of disconnection are intensifying: economic hardship, institutional mistrust and the siloisation and misinformation generated by social media.
These forces are converging into something more dangerous than any individual issue: a tinderbox of disconnection and division. It is no exaggeration to say that unless we find ways to defuse it, the basis of our democracy is at risk. Examples from history and around the world show us that building a peaceful, diverse democracy is a journey, not just a destination.
For years — in brief breathing spaces between elections, Brexit battles and financial crunches — our leaders have sometimes reflected that we need a greater sense of belonging; a unifying sense of community at a local level and camaraderie at the national level. But these reflections rarely make the jump from the pages of a speech into a concerted national project. Even when we have a compelling roadmap, like that set out by another Casey report into integration, meaningful follow-up is often lost in the churn of Westminster.
That timidity is partly because there is no single lever to pull that fixes these things in the short term, and because there is no one authority who feels they can lead the national discussion. We do not have a national era-shaping presidential figure such as Lee Kuan Yew or Charles de Gaulle and we probably would not listen to them if we did.
But we know a laissez-faire approach to community and national cohesion can no longer suffice, and is in fact now very much part of the problem. If we do not want to see the creeping balkanisation and extremism in our politics that is taking root in other countries, we need a radically different approach — one where disconnection and division are not treated as secondary issues, addressed only in times of crisis, but become central to our politics.
Realising this ambition will take boldness of thinking, bravery and a willingness to step outside of our comfort zones. It will also require as much cross-party consensus as possible. This, by its nature, is a whole-of-society challenge. Identifying the issues and values that can unite us is not something that government alone can dictate, not least when people’s trust in politics and government remains so low.
That is why we have agreed to co-chair the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion, which we believe will be a critical first step in this journey. We bring different political viewpoints and backgrounds but are united in our belief that this issue is one of the defining challenges of our time. While both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition support our work, it is an independent, cross-society effort to listen, understand and act.
Our commissioners reflect the full breadth of modern British life, from business and faith to civil society, academia, the media and more. In the months ahead, we will begin a UK-wide process of engagement, reaching into communities that are too often left out of national conversations. Asking: what unites us? What divides us? And what would bring us closer together?
This project will not be a magic bullet, of course. But we hope we can help capture a shared vision of how we want to live together and form a policy agenda to take us towards it. We also hope we can prompt a national conversation about the kind of country we want to build. Because if, as citizens, we decide we want to build a country based on kinder, closer and more connected communities, politics will have no choice but to follow.
Sir Sajid Javid is a former senior cabinet minister. Jon Cruddas was a policy co-ordinator for the Labour Party and MP for Dagenham & Rainham (2001-2024)