SOCIAL cohesion wouldn’t be achieved without equitable access to housing, education, and health care, the Archbishop of York told the House of Lords on Friday.
He was moving a debate granted to the Archbishop of Canterbury, on the importance of social cohesion and powerful supportive community life during times of change and global uncertainty. It followed the rioting (News, 9 August) in response to the murders of three children, Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, in Southport, on 29 July (News, 2 August).
Those riots had been fuelled by “hideous extremist rhetoric, which got here from mysterious places online”, the Archbishop said. But the uncomfortable truth needed to be faced: most of the people involved had not been extremist.
More than half of those charged with violence and disorder had come from the country’s most deprived 20 per cent of neighbourhoods: “Those with the worst health outcomes, lowest levels of qualifications, lowest employment, and where the impact of austerity, the pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, and rising inflation have hit hardest, intensifying those feelings of being left behind.
“That was made all the more severe by social media’s wildfire of disinformation, and has been fed by years of hard and soft extremist rhetoric.”
That rise of misinformation was undermining trust in democracy itself, and within the rule of law, Archbishop Cottrell said, describing as a “tragedy” the findings of a diversity study that had revealed that one in ten people in England and Wales didn’t know anyone well enough of their local area to ask them a favour.
“The lack of what is usually called ‘the economy of favours’ is one we should always all feel deeply: a culture where we glance out for each other not because we’re told to, but because it might never occur to us to do in a different way,” he said. “Values are best protected and communicated by beliefs, customs, rituals, and practices: the very things which are the lifeblood of religion communities.”
The particular genius of the parish church and the parish system, he said, was that it preserved and communicated meaning, value, and belonging in places where people could serve and be served. A Theos report had found that parish churches had been central to the emergency response to the riots, however the Archbishop emphasised that the fruit of their relational work was also seen in other faith communities: “With others, the Church of England must proceed to construct and nurture these connections,” he said.
The Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Sarah Mullally, described the riots as “a wake-up call to us all to prioritise community cohesion”. The pandemic had been a world-changing event that had had a unique impact on everyone, and had evoked horror on the high death rate. “We know that those from ethnic communities were more more likely to have caught Covid, to have been hospitalised, and to have died from it,” she said.
“According to OS data, the Bangladeshi population faced a death rate five times higher than the white British population; the Pakistani population was thrice higher. . . We knew that there have been unequal health outcomes before Covid, but in some ways Covid demonstrated the dimensions of them.”
There had been lessons to be learned from the ingenuity of religion communities in constructing trust out of a crisis, Bishop Mullally said. “Working for the great of a spot that you simply live in and seeing a difference is one of the crucial essential and fulfilling parts of our citizenship. We are likely to have a greater appreciation and support for something we’ve helped to construct, and it is sweet to see this.”
The Bishop of Bristol, the Rt Revd Vivienne Faull, said that, within the Eighties, it had been John Savage, “a business leader and entrepreneur formed by Anglicanism’s bridge-building tradition”, who had led the Bristol initiative to construct common ground between the “estranged tribes” of town.
“This articulated intention was to create a city which, by 2050, can be a just, sustainable, healthy, and hopeful environment by which all of us could live. That is the underpinning of Bristol’s ‘one-city’ commitment drawing together public, private, voluntary, creative, and community organisations.”
Her own diocese, the parishes, and the cathedral were playing their parts, she said. One example was St Mary Redcliffe, “for some time the preserve of the Bristol elite”, which had “re-embedded itself in its local and infrequently marginalised community, particularly welcoming refugees”.
All this, she said, “buttressed the bonds of peace”. She searched for some reassurance that the Government would reply to the enterprising work that was being done in cities equivalent to Bristol to construct those bonds, and to “renew the justice in our divided city.”
Social cohesion acted as a bridge between richly diverse communities by which people of various cultures, beliefs and faiths lived alongside each other, the Bishop of Lichfield, Dr Michael Ipgrave, said. “It enables us to live well together, providing resilience to communities when faced with adversity and enabling us to coexist peacefully.
“But, as demonstrated by the riots this summer, this type of social cohesion can not be taken with no consideration. The consequences of growing division shouldn’t be underestimated, and we must not ignore the increasing threat of abrasion that the social cohesion binding us together faces.”
He spoke of “a significant spike” in anti-Semitic hate crime within the UK after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on 7 October 2023, and the concurrently increasing threats to social cohesion in most of the communities where Muslims lived.
“While national and international events can act as triggers for social unrest, I think that these incidents will not be isolated events, but reflect insidious tensions that had been constructing long before the events themselves took place,” he said. “It is subsequently vital that our approach to constructing social cohesion must be preventive and long-term.”
A protracted and powerful history of interfaith work in Woolwich, where he had served as Bishop, had been one reason that predicted widespread rioting and unrest after the brutal murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby (News, 31 May 2013) had not materialised, he said. It had “woven a texture of local people that was too tight-knit for any butcher’s knife to tear apart”.
Lord Singh congratulated the Archbishop on calling a vital debate. “The challenge before us is to recognise and discard irrational prejudice,” he said. “Religion was meant to make us higher human beings, but much of the conflict on the earth today is between different religions or subsets of religions, each claiming a superiority of belief and a singular access to the one God of us all.”
THE debate ran to four-and-a-half-hours. Just a few of the speakers, most notably Baroness Berridge, a PCC member, took the chance to precise unhappiness with the Church of England. Since Standing Orders didn’t permit inquiries to be asked of it, “In the absence of an independent structure, to whom should we send our concerns?” she asked.
She desired to “fire a series of questions on the Minister” about standards of principles, what an independent review constituted, and who may very well be an independent chair. “A correct inquiry or review heals wounds and brings cohesion if it engages victims properly,” she said, referring to Bishop James Jones’s chairing of the Hillsborough review on a non-statutory basis as proof that it was possible (News, 1 February 2022).
Parliament TVThe Bishop of London addresses the House of Lords on Friday
The nation needed “a swift, independent, probably judge-led redress for these victims and another historical cases or reviews to be handled” before a latest Archbishop of Canterbury took office, or there was a royal occasion to host, she said. The Lords also needed to know whether the Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, was “the Church of England’s equivalent of Alan Bates to the Post Office”.
Archbishop Cottrell concluded his own speech on what he called “a sobering note, in view of all that has been happening within the Church of England in recent weeks. Unless institutions are secure places for youngsters, families, and vulnerable adults, the things that all of us long for and imagine in is not going to come to pass.”
The Makin review had “revealed shocking failures inside the Church of England to safeguard children and, on this case, vulnerable young adults”, he said.
“I pay tribute to the victims and survivors who got here forward to debate the horrors that they experienced. My heart goes out to them, and I apologise for these shameful failings. Moreover, I pledge myself to work purposely for independent scrutiny of safeguarding within the Church of England and greater operational independence. These are the subsequent steps that we must take, and we now have much to learn from others.”
Bishop Mullally also issued an apology, at first of in a speech by which her declared focus was to be on trust and partnership. “First, on trust, we now have much to do to enhance trust inside the Church of England,” she said.
“Not least, we must ensure we now have a greater survivor focus, and introduce independent safeguarding and mandatory reporting. I join my friend, the Most Revd Primate, in apologising for the shocking failures that the Makin report highlighted.”
Dr Ipgrave, who spoke immediately after Lady Berridge, said that he “took to heart” her “searching and difficult words”, and thanked her for them. “We recognise the urgency and centrality of independent scrutiny within the lifetime of our Church,” he said.
