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The Department of Communities and Local Government has launched its long awaited new strategy on integration – simply entitled Creating […]

The government had made a mistake in not having a proper judicially-led inquiry into the summer’s riots, former Met police commissioner Ian Blair said today, giving the inaugural Stephen Lawrence criminal justice lecture to the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust in London.

When you’ve no stable family network, an area becomes home. The prospect of leaving Brent, a decision I had to consider last year as the call for independence intensified, proved far more unsettling than I had anticipated. My obsession with the area, Willesden in particular, mirrors Zadie Smith’s passion in her bestseller White Teeth; even the author’s American polemic On Beauty makes its way home.

The 1948 London Olympic torch was a feat of British craftsmanship. It had to stay alight through all weather conditions, and be cheap for a war damaged Britain to make. But it also had to be something Britain could be proud to display to countries across Europe as the runners made their way from Olympia to Wembley – across the Mediterranean, Italy, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, France and finally across the English Channel.

Sunder Katwala reviews a week of thorny debates over the Union, human rights and the role of faith.

The government is right to want to deport Abu Qatada. He is a threat
to community relations in Britain. The Home Secretary is right to want
to use her powers to exclude him, say Shamit Saggar and Sunder Katwala.

Rather than being created by grand declarations of Britishness, British identity has grown organically through history, says James Forsyth, political editor of The Spectator.

British identity is about how we treat each other, and a civic sense of fairness is at the heart of Britishness, says Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

“When you go into school, or into college, you meet people from everywhere – from America, from Poland, everywhere – in one day”, says one Hackney Community College student at a British Future debate.

British Future went to Hackney to talk to students about whether they defined themselves as British, English or something else. The students’ debate, chaired by Anthony Painter, also focused on integration – in terms of the diversity they could see around them in London, and how they thought that was mirrored in the rest of the country.