Why repairing the social fabric is not going to be as easy as the PM imagines - Jayne Dowle

Really though? Did the Prime Minister need Downing Street officials to tell him that people are not happy and may well decide to show their frustration by throwing bricks and setting things on fire?

Whilst it is undeniable that the continued practice of accommodating asylum seekers in hotels is heightening community tensions across Britain, this is not just about immigration. It’s about class. And it’s about isolation, the erosion of community and unresponsive government.

Does the man not have eyes and ears? Does he never look out of his official limousine window at battered High Streets, rows of boarded-up shops, kids delivering drugs on bikes, and wonder, ‘how can this be right?’

Did he not listen back in June when Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary and MP for Wigan, warned that the north of England could “go up in flames”, saying a “real sense of anger” could prompt more civil unrest?

The oft-maligned Nandy, whom observers say could be first in line for demotion in any Cabinet re-shuffle, is an under-estimated voice on social unrest.

On more than one occasion, including during a May 2022 parliamentary debate on ‘power in communities’, when speaking of the frustrations of those who feel as if they live “beneath the surface”, their concerns ignored, she has cited the 20th century writer and social investigator George Orwell.

In England, Your England, a collection of essays published in 1941, Orwell wrote of “the country that lies beneath the surface”, by which he meant the experience of those who were passed over, submerged by the simple act of survival. Sadly, almost a century later, that country is still with us, in all its visceral fury.

A courageous new Prime Minister would have visited troubled communities under cover, listened to local voices, thought long and hard, and set out his own vision for how his government was going to lead and empower a transformation. It’s too late for that now.

Once again, Starmer has already missed the point.

Much of these protests are about people who feel entirely left behind, who believe that decisions are made over their heads by remote politicians in Westminster holding no accountability whatsoever. It’s a long-term, depressing, corrosive rot, a terminal decline of the social contract.

The social contract theory, devised by 17th century English philosopher, John Locke, argued that a government exists by the consent of the people in order to protect basic rights and promote the common good of society.

Perhaps if people believed that the government did protect their basic rights and was working to promote the common good of society, they might not feel so angry.

Yet here we are. Downing Street sources stressed again that sending ministers away to work on social cohesion was not in response to recent unrest and that Starmer had been concerned since Southport about the unravelling of “unwritten rules that hold a nation together”.

Apparently, he fears that social media and school absence, as well as migration, are encouraging people to retreat into “parallel lives”, which, of course, Nandy did warn him about.

These lives are fiercely individualistic. The pandemic proved a touchpaper; forced by a hypocritical Conservative government into pulling together, forming ‘bubbles’ and banging pans in support of the NHS and keyworkers, yet isolated at home away from workplaces, schools, colleges and universities, people became their own little islands.

Now we’ve turned into a selfish, self-seeking ‘British Isles’, with little sense of community until it’s threatened, as it was in Epping, by reports that an Ethiopian asylum seeker who had recently arrived on a small boat had been charged with sexual assault against a local teenage girl.