Tony Blair delivers a speech about Europe during a CBI event at the London Business School in central London, in June 2014. Philip Toscano/Press Association. All rights reserved. After a bit of fanfare, a couple of catchy soundbites and a few top-line proposals leaked a day or two before the release, the Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s (DHCLG) Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper was released on March 14.
The Green Paper places much emphasis on the importance of social integration which is referred to as “meaningfully” mixing with people from different backgrounds. Although the remit for both the review and the Green Paper was wide and intended to address the whole population, the emphasis in both has tended to be new migrant and minority communities.
The title — Integrated Communities Strategy — gives a hint to the direction the report is taking. The paper sets out the Government’s strategy to create not a more integrated society, which would put the focus on what the government and society at large could and should do together, but integrated communities, code word for everyone else.
