UK politics must learn to “disagree well” or risk a descent into toxic, US-style culture wars, three influential thinktanks with links to the Conservatives and Labour have warned in a joint statement. Before a conference on Friday focusing on community cohesion, the Onward, Labour Together and Create Streets thinktanks said that as well as promoting political accord, there was a need to tackle crumbling towns and wider urban decay to fix fraying social bonds. The event in Coventry will be addressed by Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, who has emerged as a key voice among Tories calling for consensus, as opposed to those expressing more divisive rhetoric, such as Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick. Another speaker will be Carlos Moreno, the Paris-based academic who devised the urban-planning idea of “15-minute cities”, which has become a focus of conspiracy theories, including recent remarks by other ministers. In their joint statement, the thinktanks called for efforts to “reimagine new forms for our communities”. They said: “That is particularly true in an election year. How do we restitch communities, empowering local groups and councils and ensuring that we are listening to those with direct experience of our crumbling towns and villages? “How do we restitch politics, ‘disagreeing well’ as a society and avoiding the terrifyingly toxic mutual mistrust now common in America? How do we restitch neighbourhoods, physically reweaving places scarred by urban dual-carriageways or inhumane design?” The Tory-linked Onward is seen as particularly close to Rishi Sunak, who used a hastily arranged speech in Downing Street last Friday to call for more community cohesion, having warned days earlier that “mob rule” was dominating the UK.
Labour Together is close to Keir Starmer, while Create Streets is headed by Nicholas Boys Smith, the government’s most senior urbanism adviser, who chairs the Office for Place, an organisation created by Michael Gove that helps guide planning ideas. In comments released before the conference, Tugendhat said the internal security and cohesion of the UK “rests in the long term on the strength of our social fabric”, adding: “Our democracy is only as strong as the relationship between strangers who share the same citizenship.” This focus on improving community relations and encouraging more positive political dialogue echoes elements of Sunak’s speech on Friday, in which he seemingly sought to pull back from a focus on the supposed threat from the likes of pro-Palestine demonstrators and other protest groups. His speech followed comments by Braverman and Jenrick, the former Home Office ministers who have sought to frame recent tensions as almost entirely the responsibility of Islamist extremists, and by Lee Anderson, the former Tory deputy chair, who lost the party whip after claiming that “Islamists” had “got control” of Sadiq Khan, the London mayor.