Tag: social cohesion

Bishop of Leicester highlights importance of trust in communities during debate on AI

The Bishop of Leicester took part in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s debate on AI and society on 5th June 2026, highlighting the importance of trust in communities and the pitfalls of algorithmic content

The Lord Bishop of Leicester: My Lords, in the past, if you wanted to persuade people to think badly of others, you were limited by two things: the number of people you personally knew and the number of conversations you could physically have. Social media removed the second of those limits, letting one person reach millions at once. Artificial intelligence is now loosening the first. It allows one person to produce vast quantities of content of increasingly high quality. The frictions that once limited the spread of contempt have disappeared. We should not, then, be surprised that the fabric of our society is being torn.

For society to function, we need a broadly common understanding of the world and what is happening in it. Democracy is about disagreements over what to do about the opportunities and challenges we face, but for that disagreement to be constructive, we must all be able to access the bare facts: what is happening, who is involved and who is affected? Generative AI throws all this into question. Anyone, anywhere can now produce an image of an event that has never occurred or a video of a public figure saying something they never said. I really do mean anyone, anywhere. The BBC recently reported that accounts producing AI-generated anti-immigration content that appeared to be British were in fact run from east Asia, the Gulf and the United States.

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Kings Speech Debate: Archbishop of Canterbury speaks on importance of social integration and community relations

The Archbishop of Canterbury gave a speech during the King’s Speech debate on 18th May 2026, emphasising the importance of integration and understanding in society:

The Lord Archbishop of Canterbury: My Lords, it is a pleasure to respond to His Majesty’s gracious Speech today. I too look forward to the maiden speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Case, and my right reverend friend the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich.

We face serious challenges at home and abroad, and I continue to pray for those who carry responsibilities of office as we seek to meet these challenges together. At my installation at Canterbury Cathedral, I spoke about the presence and importance of hope. As a Christian, I believe that we have hope because we have a God who walks with us, even when circumstances feel overwhelming.

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Bishop of Leicester speaks in debate on the UK’s demographic future

The Bishop of Leicester spoke in a debate on a report from the Common Good Foundation and Centre for Policy Studies on the UK’s demographic future on 11th December 2025, pointing out the impact of poverty and and inequality on social cohesion:

The Lord Bishop of Leicester: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, for his work in bringing together this report and giving us the opportunity to debate it. I add my thanks to him for his fascinating speech today and his wider contribution to this House, and I wish him well for the future.

The authors of this report raise various thorny policy problems, each of which demands careful negotiation so as to manage conflicting trade-offs. It would be easy to brush them aside in favour of more electorally popular concerns or to oversimplify them to stoke division. I want to put on record first my support for an open debate on questions such as, “What is a reasonable level of population growth?” It may be an uncomfortable question, but what are we here for if not to model healthy, mature debates on uncomfortable questions?

I want to focus my remarks on the chapter on social cohesion by Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali. While I would differ from Dr Nazir-Ali on a few of his points, I welcome his overall thrust: calling for more attention to be paid to the fabric of our society and how it is affected by the demographic shifts noted in the report.

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Bishop of Lichfield speaks on impact of community tensions and the importance of interfaith work

On 6th December 2024, the Bishop of Lichfield spoke in the Archbishop of York’s debate on social cohesion, highlighting the impact of community tensions, exacerbated by global events, on faith communities and particularly Jewish and Muslim communities in the UK:

The Lord Bishop of Lichfield: My Lords, I am sure that on these Benches and more widely, all of us as Bishops will register and take to heart the searching and challenging words of the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, and I thank her for them. We recognise the urgency and centrality of independent scrutiny in the life of our Church.

The UK is home to communities that are richly diverse and in which people of different cultures, beliefs and faiths live alongside one another. Social cohesion acts as the bridge between those differences. It enables us to live well together, providing resilience to communities when faced with adversity and enabling us to coexist peacefully, but as demonstrated by the riots this summer, this kind of social cohesion can no longer be taken for granted. The consequences of growing divisions should not be underestimated, and we must not ignore the increasing threat of erosion that the social cohesion binding us together faces.

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Bishop of Bristol highlights importance of community and interfaith relations in promoting social cohesion

The Bishop of Bristol spoke in the Archbishop of York’s debate on social cohesion on 6th December 2024, raising local examples from the city of Bristol and the importance of community and interfaith outreach:

The Lord Bishop of Bristol: My Lords, I too am grateful to the most reverend Primate for securing this debate and setting its tone. I am also very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sharma, for his impressive speech, and look forward to many more contributions from him in this Chamber. I am glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Elliott, and realise that there is more that unites us than divides us. Indeed, there are overlaps with many of the contributions from the Benches opposite in what I am about to say, because I want to speak of a particular place and of particular people.

I begin with Liverpool, as the noble Lord, Lord Elliott, mentioned. It was David Sheppard who, as Bishop of Liverpool, ordained me deaconess in Liverpool Cathedral and helped me to understand the stresses that port cities experience as global trade and human migration patterns shift. Port cities absorb, endure or thrive on the consequent change. Bishop David and his Archbishop and Free Church colleagues were well aware that social unrest was a symptom of the impact of felt injustice and a stimulus to work to create justice and peace. “Better together” was their theme and their motto in a city divided on economic, racial and religious grounds.

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Archbishop of York leads debate on social cohesion

The Archbishop of York led a debate on Social Cohesion and Community during Periods of Change on 6th December 2024:

The Lord Archbishop of York: That this House takes note of the importance of social cohesion and strong, supportive community life during periods of change and global uncertainty.

My Lords, on Monday 29 July this year, just before 11.50 am, police officers were called to a property in Southport, where children attending a dance school had been appallingly and ferociously attacked by a man with a knife. Three of the children—Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice Dasilva Aguiar and Bebe King —died. Many others sustained terrible injuries, and a whole community and many families were devastated and traumatised.

Understandably, horror and anguish convulsed not just Southport but the whole country. Rumours quickly circulated on the internet that the man to blame for this attack was an asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK illegally and was on the MI6 watch-list. This was not true. As a reporter put it a few days later, once lit, the torch paper of disinformation burned quickly. Although this rumour was quickly debunked, in the days that followed, as we know, riots broke out all over our country.

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Bishop of Gloucester asks about role of churches and faith communities in rebuilding social capital post-pandemic

On 25th January 2021, the Bishop of Gloucester asked a question on the role of faith communities and churches in helping to rebuild social and spiritual capital in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic:

The Lord Bishop of Gloucester: Churches and other faith communities bring together a diversity of people across all ages and backgrounds, and thus are often a strong source of social capital, as well as spiritual capital, as we have seen during the pandemic. Will the Minister say what Her Majesty’s Government are doing, both financially and in other ways, to enable local and faith communities to invest in and rebuild their social capital, as we emerge from this pandemic?

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