Professor Ian Acheson is Senior Adviser to the Counter Extremism Project.

We are rapidly becoming a low trust society and this has serious implications for ‘community cohesion.’

The term, coined by academics after the 2011 riots has lately become a soubriquet for institutional cowardice in the face of a national child safeguarding catastrophe. But when it was originally conceived, it was a way of describing the ties that bind communities together and a means of breaking down stereotypes and misconceptions that can fuel sectarian alienation and even translate into ideological violence.

The gatekeeper against increasing distrust that fuels this cycle of decline is the Government. And here lies the problem.

In 2024 two polling organisations. Demos and Edelman released data which indicated that only around 30 per cent of UK citizens now trusted their government. This is the low point of a period of decline which is matched by other western European countries. It is quite striking that people in authoritarian countries such as China and Saudi Arabia reported higher levels of confidence in their leaders.

The Edelman Trust barometer reported levels of trust here at an historic low, reflecting a widespread lack of confidence in political leadership which shows no signs of abating.

Within this already dismal data there is a significant difference between levels of trust by class with working class people having the lowest trust levels of all. The riots over the summer have many and complex causes and certainly weren’t ideological in any coherent sense but they involved people who lived in areas where there are high levels of deprivation.

In our version of ‘flyover’ country, far from the preoccupations of Zone 1 elites in Westminster, people demonstrably do not feel politics is working for them and this plays out on the streets.

There is a noticeable shift in trust from traditional authority to peers and peer-led social media. A growing scepticism towards legacy media is replicated in fewer than half of those asked placing trust in the sources we have previously taken for granted as arbiters of the truth.  Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) supports this shift in trust. Politicians, parliament and devolved administrations are at the bottom of the pile when it comes to institutions in which we have faith.

This has real world implications.

The riots of August 2024 were aggravated by a vacuum of information about the perpetrator of the Stockport massacre of children allegedly carried out by a man now accused of related terrorist offences.

It seems almost certain that police obfuscation over the suspects identity and racial characteristics (in the name of community cohesion) accelerated the widespread criminality that disfigured many towns and has led to dozens being, quite rightly, jailed. In the case of the child rape gangs safeguarding catastrophe which has taken on global dimensions thanks to Elon Musk, a stubborn refusal by the Labour Government to investigate the nature and scale of this scandal on flimsy grounds has further undermined public trust.

The perception that Labour is trying to hide from full accountability for these grotesque crimes now has national traction.

The narrative that the Government cares more about electoral calculation than white children sundered by gangs of predominantly south Asian predators is being written by polemicists but if it is hyperbole, it is built on a solid core of truth. If racialised violence by Pakistani men is exaggerated, the only way to defuse this is to properly examine national incidences of child sexual exploitation and hold those authorities that failed children properly to account.

We need metrics of scale and nature not sanctimonious cant.

The Jay report (cited by Labour as the go-to reason for no more inquiries) only focused on one town where child rape gangs operated  – Rotherham  – and even then its analysis stopped over a decade ago. 500,000 children are estimated to suffer sexual abuse in England and Wales every year – five times the number of crimes the police detect.

It is right to say that there is a foul epidemic of child abuse and most of it is familial and most of it is committed by white Britons. But it is entirely wrong to use any of this awful data to subsume and contextualise grotesque scandals in Telford, Oldham, Bristol, Huddersfield, Rotherham, Derby and Oxford all of whom have very particular dimensions of ethnicity and religion attached to victims and perpetrators.

It is in no-one’s interest who is genuinely interested in an integrated society to misdirect genuine anger as ‘racism’ or ‘Islamophobia.’

There is a bleak irony in the way this uncomfortable reality is being managed by the Government.  Community cohesion depends upon the very things those that champion it are undermining in their blindness to public anger over rape gangs: Transparency, honesty, openness and legitimacy. That mix is sustained on rights but more importantly, responsibilities and obligations that give those rights practical effect.

In hiding from their obligation to rip the covers off a decades long scandal, the Government will send those dire numbers on trust down even further. Those who profit from the sectarian violence that this unforgivable inertia will drive are watching.

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