Fairness is key to a more cohesive Britain

Fairness isn’t just a moral ideal. It is one of the civic conditions that makes collective life possible.

Photo by Giulia May on Unsplash

Britain faces a real crisis of cohesion. We’ve seen the convergence of declining trust, increasing polarisation, and a worsening sense of disconnection from institutions, politics, and from each other.

That matters in its own right, but it also matters instrumentally. Societies that struggle to live together struggle to act together. Economic growth depends on cooperation, political stability depends on shared legitimacy, and collective ownership of our national direction depends on a sense of shared purpose.

Policymakers and practitioners alike have focused on strengthening practical opportunities for connection, and building bonds within communities and between them. This has included paying attention to the everyday spaces where people meet and mix, as well as looking at barriers to connection, from deprivation to inequality, prejudice, extremism, and isolation.

This work is necessary and valuable. But too often, starting this far downstream misses a question at the source of our cohesion challenge — who do we recognise as part of a shared “we”?

This question casts our cohesion crisis not solely as one of disconnection and division but also as a problem of disassociation from a previously shared understanding of the collective.

For much of the post-war period, there was broad — if often implicit — agreement about who counted as part of the civic body and what mutual obligations followed from that. That agreement has weakened over time.

Different pressures now pull in different directions when it comes to how to recast our sense of shared “we”. Should we freeze belonging as it stands, based on our social settlement to date, do we narrow it, as many on the right would have it, or do we expand it, as many on the left would advocate?

In rejecting the calls to narrow our definition of those who belong, we can think about how to build and strengthen recognition of our shared “we” — either on its current basis, or in some expanded way — by considering the process of recognition itself.

How might people with very different backgrounds, beliefs, and identities come to recognise one another as legitimate participants in a shared civic project? And how can we create a framework capable of navigating ongoing changes to our body politic in the future?

Shared culture and values are clearly critically important to enabling this, but attempts to impose cultural homogeneity are neither practical nor desirable. In diverse societies, thick cultural agreement cannot be assumed. Nostalgic visions of sameness tend to exclude. Permanently thin, procedural coexistence can feel hollow and imposed. The challenge is not to erase difference, but to establish the conditions under which thicker forms of shared culture can emerge organically over time.

Culture cannot be imposed, but the conditions for cultural convergence and indeed cultural hybridity can be shaped. Shared rules, norms, and practices — what might be thought of as lower-case civic culture — can create the enabling environment in which trust, recognition, and shared identity develop.

The question, then, is what kind of civic value is capable of playing that enabling role in a plural society. There are several candidates. Duty. Responsibility. Reciprocity. Contribution. But many of these quickly become culturally loaded or exclusionary. They risk being claimed by some groups and resisted by others. They can harden into moralised boundary markers rather than shared rules of the game.

There are few values with the cross-cultural salience of fairness. Across societies, people show a deep sensitivity to what they perceive as fair or unfair, even though cultures differ in how fairness is defined and applied. From early childhood, humans react strongly to perceived unfairness. Those reactions shape how we judge institutions, rules, and one another.

People experience unfairness as arbitrariness. Double standards. Being asked to play by rules that others escape. Being taken for granted. These experiences reliably undermine trust and willingness to cooperate. They push people away from shared institutions and toward withdrawal or anger. That is why fairness matters not just morally, but civically.

Fairness, in this sense, is not agreement on outcomes, but an agreement on rules: on how decisions are made, how power is exercised, and how people are treated within shared institutions. Crucially, it does not require shared identity, culture, or heritage. It allows people with very different values to recognise one another as equals within the same civic space. Fairness can help to create the minimal shared “we” on which thicker forms of culture and solidarity can later build.

Fairness also plays a second, equally important role. It underpins how people think about shared direction. If we were ever to ask a country like Britain what kind of future it wants to build over the long term, it is hard to imagine an answer that does not rest, in some way, on strengthening fairness. Fairness grounds our shared intuitions about opportunity, security, contribution, and legitimacy. It shapes how people imagine a good society and a good life. Even where people disagree sharply on policy, they often frame their arguments in terms of what they believe to be fair.

Research by the Fairness Foundation bears this out. Across political divides, people in Britain share strikingly consistent views on core fairness principles: that rules should apply equally, that contribution should matter, that opportunity should not be arbitrarily restricted, and that extreme economic inequality is hard to justify as fair. Fairness, in other words, is one of the few values capable of anchoring a shared sense of direction without requiring cultural uniformity.

But fairness cannot function — either as a basis for shared recognition or as a guide to shared direction — if it is not experienced in practice.

Deep inequality and deprivation have consistently undermined people’s experiences and perceptions of fairness. Severe inequality blocks participation in civic life, corroding trust, and weakening beliefs that the collective treats people as equals. When fairness feels implausible, its civic power collapses. And when fairness collapses, so too does the sense of shared obligation that underpins collective identity.

The state has a responsibility to create the structural conditions for fairness, but embedding this value — such that it can produce the effects described above — requires coordinated cross-societal action. It is a collective and self-reinforcing project. Where fairness is visible and credible, shared recognition strengthens, and where shared recognition strengthens, support for collective solutions — including redistribution and reform — grows.

Fairness alone will not rebuild cohesion. But without a shared civic commitment to fairness, attempts to rebuild community in a diverse society are made more difficult. Re-establishing shared recognition is the first step — with fairness acting as a strong foundation on which to build. From there, thicker cultural bonds, and a stronger sense of shared ownership in our country and the direction it takes, become possible again.

Emeka Forbes is Senior Advisor at the Fairness Foundation. He also runs the Secretariat for the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion. He has written this article in a personal capacity.