What does social cohesion have to do with Islamophobia in contemporary Britain? On 9 March 2026, the Labour government unveiled its new social cohesion strategy, Protecting What Matters, and on the same day, it also released its long-awaited definition of Islamophobia or what the government calls anti-Muslim hostility. The first document expands the infrastructure through which communities are monitored in the name of cohesion, security and integration. The second refuses the widely used term Islamophobia, replacing it instead with the narrower language of “anti-Muslim hostility”. Considered separately, each announcement may appear administrative. Taken together, however, they reveal a coherent political logic: racism against Muslims is conceptually narrowed at the very moment that the state expands the frameworks through which Muslim life is monitored and regulated.

The government’s new social cohesion policy presents itself as a programme for cohesion, safety and resilience. Yet its operative logic is much closer to an expansion of security governance into ordinary social life. It states government must set standards, enforce expectations and act against those who undermine rights and freedoms; it proposes a local cohesion risk assessment tool with information-sharing links between councils, central government and Prevent; it intensifies oversight of universities; and it expands Prevent-related guidance on external speakers and events. In other words, “cohesion” is not being framed simply as neighbourliness or equality but as something to be managed through risk metrics, institutional monitoring and counter-extremism infrastructure.

That matters because, in Britain, once cohesion is fused with extremism, Muslim life is almost always the space in which that fusion is operationalised. The paper states that extremism comes from multiple directions, but emphasises that Islamist extremism is a predominant threat, defining Islamism in sweeping terms, and then builds new systems for monitoring campuses, speakers, local tensions and integration. Even where Muslims are not named in every measure, the historical pattern of British policy means they are the community most likely to experience the downstream effects of these frameworks in the form of referrals, suspicion, compliance burdens and reputational scrutiny. That is not a speculative fear; it follows from the paper’s own decision to route cohesion through Prevent-linked mechanisms and university surveillance structures.

Taken together, these two developments form a coherent political arrangement. On the one hand, the state expands the policy architecture through which Muslims are monitored and managed in the name of cohesion and security. On the other hand, it narrows the language through which anti-Muslim racism itself can be understood. The result is a framework in which hostility towards Muslims can be recognised rhetorically, while the structures that produce ‘hostility’ remain beyond scrutiny. 

The Long Story of Social Cohesion

To understand the significance of the new strategy, it must be situated within the longer trajectory of British policy since the late 1990s. The earliest widely recognised articulation of anti-Muslim racism appeared in the Runnymede Trust report Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All (1997), which described Islamophobia as a form of cultural racism that constructs Islam as a monolithic, threatening and inferior civilisation. That report was one of the first attempts to name the phenomenon that Muslim communities were experiencing across Europe. Yet the policy trajectory that followed moved in a different direction.

After the 2001 disturbances in northern England, in cities such as Oldham, Bradford and Burnley, the government commissioned the Cantle Report (2001). The report concluded that Britain’s ethnic communities were living “parallel lives,” and it framed Muslim communities in particular as self-segregating and insufficiently integrated. In doing so, it drew on a much older trope in British policy discourse, present since at least the 1950s, that portrays ethnic minorities as culturally separate from the national community. This marked a turning point in the politics of race. Structural inequalities in housing, employment and urban deprivation were increasingly reframed as problems of cultural separation and community cohesion. The policy emphasis shifted away from redistributive justice and toward the cultural integration of minorities.

Following the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the London bombings of 7 July 2005, this cohesion agenda became increasingly intertwined with national security policy. In 2006, the government introduced the Prevent strategy, one of the four pillars of the UK’s CONTEST counter-terrorism framework, designed to stop individuals from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. Prevent extended the reach of counter-terrorism governance into everyday institutions. Schools, universities, local councils and healthcare providers were encouraged to identify signs of radicalisation, effectively embedding surveillance mechanisms within ordinary civic spaces.

This trajectory was further consolidated through the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act (2015), which imposed a statutory duty on public institutions to consider the need to prevent individuals from being drawn into terrorism. Universities were required to monitor speakers and events, while teachers and public sector workers were encouraged to report concerns about radicalisation. At the same time, the state introduced the requirement that schools actively promote Fundamental British Values. This policy was accelerated by the Trojan Horse affair (2014), in which allegations that Muslim teachers in Birmingham schools were attempting to impose Islamic values were framed as a national security crisis. Although later investigations revealed serious inconsistencies in the original claims, the episode reshaped education policy by linking Muslim civic participation to questions of ideological risk.

Further integrationist pressures emerged through reports such as the Casey Review (2016), which argued that segregation and cultural difference were undermining social cohesion and called for stronger expectations around integration and shared values. More recently, the Independent Review of Prevent led by William Shawcross (2023) reinforced the focus on Islamist extremism as a primary security concern and called for a sharper ideological orientation in counter-extremism policy. The review was widely criticised, given Shawcross’s prior Islamophobic commentary whilst serving at the Henry Jackson Society and his controversial tenure at the Charity Commission for England and Wales, which faced legal challenges amid allegations of disproportionate targeting of Muslim charities.

Alongside these developments, immigration legislation such as the Nationality and Borders Act (2022) introduced stricter controls over asylum and migration, further embedding questions of belonging, citizenship and national identity within the politics of security. Seen against this backdrop, the new cohesion strategy does not represent a departure but rather the latest iteration of a policy trajectory in which questions of race, integration and security have increasingly converged. Importantly, within this framework, the language of social cohesion operates less as shared civic value than as a disciplinary mechanism, through which Muslim presence, politics and institutions are continually assessed for their compatibility with the national order.

Securitising Community Life

A first major critique of the new policy is that it recasts political and social questions as pre-security problems. The document repeatedly describes social strain through the language of tension, risk, malign influence, unrest, intolerance and extremism. It links demographic and economic change to worsening community tensions and emphasises the need for earlier identification of potential risks. This is the grammar of pre-emption: communities are not engaged politically so much as assessed and managed before a perceived threshold is crossed. For Muslim communities, this means that ordinary associational life, public religiosity, community grievances and political mobilisation can become objects of suspicion long before any unlawful conduct occurs.

A second critique is that the policy normalises assimilation under the language of fairness and contribution. Integration is framed around English language proficiency, labour market participation and alignment with British values. The proposed Earned Settlement model suggests that belonging must be demonstrated through contribution and cultural conformity. This creates a moral hierarchy of citizenship in which migrants and minorities are required to prove their compatibility with the national community. For Muslims, who have repeatedly been asked to demonstrate their adherence to British values, this reinforces a conditional form of belonging. The wider discourse of “parallel lives,” “no-go zones,” “segregation” and “grooming gangs” operates within the same narrative field. Even when not explicitly invoked, the underlying assumptions remain: minority concentration and cultural difference are framed as potential sources of disorder requiring management.

Thirdly, another revealing aspect of the policy paper is how it treats recent political protests. The document explicitly references the large demonstrations that took place across Britain in response to the war in Gaza, acknowledging that many people exercised their right to protest peacefully but warning that such mobilisations can risk undermining social cohesion when they contain hostile rhetoric. Yet the paper makes no comparable reference to the large far-right mobilisations that have taken place in Britain, including the anti-immigration demonstrations organised by figures such as Tommy Robinson. The contrast is striking. Muslim political mobilisation around Palestine is incorporated into the policy’s discussion of social tensions and cohesion risks, while far-right protests targeting migrants and Muslims remain largely absent from the analysis. The result is a subtle but important asymmetry: dissent associated with Muslim communities becomes legible as a potential cohesion problem, whereas organised anti-Muslim mobilisation does not occupy the same analytical centrality.

From Islamophobia to “Hostility”

The conceptual shift from Islamophobia to anti-Muslim hostility must also be understood within this broader policy framework. Islamophobia names the racialisation of Muslims as a civilisational threat and directs attention to the institutional and political structures through which that racialisation occurs. By contrast, the term anti-Muslim hostility confines the problem to interpersonal prejudice and discrimination. Racism is therefore reduced to individual behaviour rather than structural power.

The government’s definition is also non-statutory, emphasises the protection of free speech and focuses primarily on recognising incidents of hatred or discrimination. While this acknowledges the reality of Islamophobia, it leaves untouched the wider policy architecture; counter-terrorism frameworks, integration regimes and political narratives that have helped produce suspicion toward Muslims in the first place. The likely consequences for Muslim communities are therefore not abstract. They include intensified institutional suspicion, expanded monitoring of Muslim civic spaces, pressure to demonstrate alignment with official values and a continued misrecognition of Islamophobia as merely interpersonal hostility.

Seen together, these moves reveal the underlying logic of the current moment. Islamophobia can be recognised so long as it remains confined to the realm of individual prejudice, but the governing structures that produce suspicion, counter-terrorism frameworks, integration regimes and security narratives are left largely untouched. Muslims are thus positioned in a paradoxical role: victims of hostility yet objects of vigilance, citizens in principle yet communities to be monitored in practice. The danger is not only the expansion of surveillance but the gradual normalisation of a common sense in which Muslim life is encountered first through the language of risk. It is this dual positioning, recognition without structural accountability, that defines the contemporary governance of Muslims in Britain, where Muslims are acknowledged as victims of “hostility” even as they remain subject to marginalisation and securitisation as a suspect community. It is precisely this condition that Islamophobia was meant to name.