
An OBE and F&BF in 2025 – 5 Things to Expect
16 / 01 / 25
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27 / 08 / 24
Ali Amla
The newscycle is dominated by the names of Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate when we should be remembering Alice Aguiar, Elsie Dot Stancombe, and Bebe King, following the horrendous attack of a children’s dance party in Southport. My heart bleeds for their families, those injured and the town’s community. As a father, I cannot begin to imagine their suffering.
Instead of mourning these children, our screens are filled with ugly scenes of violence across the country, with the flames of hatred and division fanned by irresponsible influencers on social media.
Malign forces are exploiting the murders of these innocent children to satisfy their underlying grievances. Their rhetoric is not new, it has been parroted by newspapers and politicians for years. However, the extreme violence we are seeing is a worrying new development.
Like many others, I am horrified by what we are all witnessing on our streets. I have worked in the community cohesion space for over 15-years and I have never seen hostilities like this in Britain.
These so-called patriots are claiming to protect Britain by attacking police officers. They are looting shops, besieging homes and burning cars. They are setting up checkpoints, dragging people out of cars and beating people based on the colour of their skin. They are trapping worshippers, including young children, inside mosques.
Let us be frank: These are not protests, these are hate marches. As a society, we need to be able to differentiate between people’s legitimate concerns over political decisions on migration against far right rhetoric about race and religion.
The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has rightly categorised the riots as far right thuggery, fuelled by racism and Islamophobia.
I would go a step further, because this wave of violence has not come from nowhere. It has been fed by years of vilifying Muslims, immigrants and the othering of anyone considered foreign. What we are seeing is a symptom of a deeply-rooted problem that has gone unaddressed for years. We are witnessing the legacy of systemic, structural racism and institutionalised and interpersonal Islamophobia.
What has troubled me most is seeing young children involved in this violence and racist chants. The Crown Prosecution Service has charged children as young as 11 with disorder. Younger generations are inheriting hatred.
For many Muslims like myself, particularly those of South Asian heritage, this is particularly painful. It is reminiscent of the kind of discrimination our mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles suffered.
My older family members have often spoken to me about the horrendous racism they faced. A fear of being expelled from their homes, inflammatory National Front marches in their neighbourhoods, “p*ki bashing” and women’s headscarves being ripped off.
Modern community cohesion policy in Britain can be traced back to events in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2001. Dubbed by some as race riots, these disturbances led policymakers to view cohesion as something that must be built proactively rather than reactively.
The political discourse has not drastically improved in the past two decades. Narratives about “no go zones”, the left behind white working class and electoral success of the far right is nothing new. If anything, the lazy assumptions feeding the culture wars and blaming deep set societal issues on the failure of multiculturalism, have got worse.
As someone who has spent my adult life working with young people and communities, it is quite clear that cuts to local services are a huge part of the strains we are seeing in society.
Councils are on the brink of bankruptcy due to years of underfunding, and the cuts have fallen heaviest on the poorest people. Local youth services have been systematically dismantled over the last 14-years and many community cohesion teams have been axed, meanwhile neighbourhood policing has been hollowed out, leading to mistrust between officers and communities.
Britain needs to have an open dialogue about community cohesion. There is so much more that unites us than divides us and by bolstering these links we can heal the old wounds reopened by the events of recent days.
The talk of communities leading parallel lives is an unhelpful trope which overlooks the bigger issues like the role of social media companies in feeding division, hatred and disinformation.
Politicians need to get back on the front foot. We need a proactive, comprehensive settlement to rebuild strong communities up and down the country. Prevention is better than the best cure. Only tackling symptoms when they flare up will not cure a sick society. The Faith and Belief Policy Collective has called for those in public life to be accountable for their speech and actions and for an evaluation of acceptable standards on social media. This would be a good starting point for conversations about rebuilding communities.
During these dark, turbulent days there has been some light, which gives me cause for hope. The neighbours who have come together in the aftermath of riots in Middlesbrough, Southport and Sunderland to clean up and repair the damage. Or the powerful image of the imam Adam Kelwick photographed hugging a protestor outside Britain’s first Mosque in Liverpool, established by Abdullah Quilliam in 1889.
It is time to start building bridges again, challenging hatred and prejudice and investing in cohesion policies which empower communities and build on what unites us rather than what divides us. We need safe spaces for uncomfortable dialogue, in order to better understand the challenges facing us and learn to navigate differences rather than fearing it.
Ali Amla is Youth and Partnerships Director at the education charity Solutions Not Sides and a trustee at the Faith and Belief Forum
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