Britons are being asked to say what their community and country mean to them in a new National Conversation launched by the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion. The project is inviting people across the UK to complete a 10-minute survey and leave a 60-second voice note on what they think the future should look like.
The commission is co-chaired by Sajid Javid and Jon Cruddas and includes Sara Khan, Andy Street, Laura Marks, Caroline Lucas and Tim Montgomerie. It is being convened by the Together Coalition, the nonprofit cohesion campaign co-founded by Brendan Cox, and it is trying to answer a question that has moved from the political margins into the national conversation: what does it mean to be British, English, Scottish or Welsh today?
Javid said the country was in “real peril” if it could not regain a shared sense of what unites people, warning that differences risked pulling it apart. He said that vision would not come from politicians but from the public, adding that the commission hoped the conversation would give that wisdom a voice. Cruddas said rebuilding Britain’s social fabric and sense of community had never been more urgent.
The timing matters because the commission is launching against a stark public mood. Polling from the British Red Cross last month found that 75% of UK adults believe Britain is divided as a country, while 72% said it had become more divided over the last five years. The new project is designed to capture not just what people think, but how they say it, with Melinda Mills saying AI had “revolutionised” mass listening and could help identify the language people choose, the emotional register and the texture of how they talk about their communities.
Thousands of small group discussions organised by partner groups will also take place across the country, widening the reach beyond anyone willing to fill in a survey online. The commission wants to learn what unites and divides the public, what connects people to their neighbours and what makes the country feel like home, then combine that with academic research, expert testimony and the commissioners’ own deliberation in a report due later this year.
The project builds on earlier evidence sessions that looked at housing, education, the economy and trust, and heard from figures including Michael Gove, Mary Beard, Paul Johnson and David Cameron. But this stage is different: instead of asking institutions what is broken, it is asking ordinary people what still holds. If the effort works, the result will not be a neat slogan but a more grounded account of whether Britain is pulling apart or finding a language to describe itself again.
