A Tribe of Values.
After the attack on Golders Green: on tribalism, fear, the silence of the moderate majority — and what it means to belong somewhere without requiring anyone else to be expelled.
A community was attacked. Jewish families walking to synagogue in Golders Green were targeted because they were Jewish. In one of the most recognisably, irreversibly plural cities on earth — a city I chose to build something in precisely because of what it represents — this happened. Again.
I want to say something about this that goes beyond condemnation, because condemnation — however necessary, however right — has not been enough. We have been condemning for years. The numbers keep going up. Something else is required, and I think it starts with a harder question than “how could this happen?”
The harder question is: what kind of belonging are we building? And what are we prepared to do — as parents, as employers, as citizens, as people who shape what the next generation inherits — to build a different kind?
Where We Are
The Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents across the UK in 2025 — the second-highest annual total since records began, more than double the 1,662 recorded in 2022. Every single month of 2025 exceeded 200 incidents. Forty-two percent happened online. The Home Office’s police data appears to show an 18% fall in recorded antisemitic offences — but the Metropolitan Police, which accounts for 40% of all religious hate crimes against Jewish people, is excluded from the 2025 figures due to a methodology change. When MPS data is included, the total reaches 106 crimes per 10,000 Jews: the highest per-capita rate of religious hate crime for any group in England and Wales.
Tell MAMA recorded 6,313 cases of anti-Muslim hatred in 2024 — a 43% increase year on year, with Islamophobic hate rising a further 19% in the Home Office’s dataset. Anti-Muslim incidents spiked sharply after the Southport murders, when disinformation falsely identifying the attacker as a Muslim asylum seeker reached approximately 1.7 billion people before the truth was established. Mosques were attacked. Families stayed indoors. A lie that confirmed what the algorithm had already made people feel was immediately, catastrophically believable.
Jewish and Muslim communities are both experiencing structurally elevated, sustained hatred — targeted by different ideologies, through the same mechanism. A world event becomes a trigger. The algorithm amplifies and distorts. Ordinary families pay the price. And beyond religion, NatCen’s British Social Attitudes data shows the picture widening: in 2022, half of British people said migrants enriched the country’s cultural life. By 2025 that had fallen to 32%. A society growing more confident in its prejudices. Not more honest. More confident.
The Tribe That Requires an Enemy
The impulse to belong is not the problem. It is one of the most fundamental things about being human. The problem is a particular kind of belonging — the kind that can only define itself by who it excludes. Identity-based tribalism, in its current online form, does not say “we believe these things.” It says “we are against those people.” And it rewards the most contemptuous, most dehumanising articulations of that opposition, because contempt generates engagement, and engagement is what the algorithm is optimised to produce.
This is the mechanism behind both Golders Green and Southport. Not a sudden emergence of new hatred, but the systematic amplification of old hatreds, given new reach and new permission. The person who commits a hate crime did not arrive at that act from nowhere. They moved through a landscape in which contempt for the other had already been normalised — in comment sections, in speeches, in the ambient signal that certain groups of people are more suspect, less real, less deserving of the full protection of our goodwill.
We have all — I include myself — contributed to that landscape in small ways. The eye-roll before engaging with an argument we disagree with. The retreat into feeds that reflect us back to ourselves. The assumption of bad faith in someone who voted differently or worships differently or arrived from somewhere else. These are not the same as violence. But they exist on a spectrum, and the permissive conditions for one are built, slowly, by the tolerance of the other.
The Silence of the Moderate Majority
Most people in Britain do not want to live in this. The polling is genuinely reassuring: despite everything, a majority still hold civic rather than ethnic definitions of Britishness, still believe shared values rather than shared ancestry are what make us who we are. The moderate, values-led majority exists. It is not imaginary.
But it has gone quiet — and its silence is one of the most consequential facts about the current moment. The space of public discourse has been ceded, almost entirely, to those who have the most to gain from conflict. The extreme voices are organised, loud and well-funded. The moderate majority is largely paralysed by a fear that I think is worth naming precisely: not just fear of violence from the virulent and bigoted extremist (on both sides of the political spectrum), but fear of being misunderstood, of being labelled, of the pile-on, of losing belonging in the very communities where belonging already feels precarious. The deterrent is working. And in working, it has handed the field to the people who most want to destroy what the majority actually values.
There is a related trap here that compounds the silence. When legitimate anger — on any genuinely contested political question — is met not with argument but with accusation, with the suggestion that holding and voicing a strong view is itself a form of hatred, people do not simply stop being angry. They stop believing there are legitimate places to express it. And they look elsewhere for community. Ed Kessler of the Woolf Institute has spent twenty-five years working on exactly this: that the collapse of shared vocabulary — the misuse of precise language as a blunt instrument to end conversations — makes the real problem harder to name and therefore harder to solve. Silencing is not safety. It is, too often, radicalisation with a time delay.
Britain used to have a different kind of ballast against this — an empirical tradition that said: show me the evidence, tell me the facts, let us look at what is actually happening rather than what we are afraid might be happening. Applied to the immigration debate that has defined so much of our politics: the OBR’s own modelling shows a migrant arriving at 25 on average UK wages contributes around £341,000 more to public finances over their lifetime than they consume in services. Recent migrants are more likely to be in work than British nationals and earn slightly higher average wages. The claim that immigrants drain public services is a falsifiable claim. It has been falsified, repeatedly, by the very institutions that those making it would cite as authoritative on anything else.
And yet the share of people who believe migrants are good for the economy has fallen from 50% to 32% in three years — as the evidence became more robust, not less. This is what happens when the people who know the facts go quiet, and those who benefit from the error are the only ones speaking. Staying silent is not neutrality. It is a choice with consequences. And I think the moderate majority has not fully reckoned with its own share of those consequences.
The Earliest Possible Intervention
I am aware this is where someone might call what follows self-serving. I run a multilingual, multicultural nursery school in Hatching Dragons. Of course I think the early years matter. So let me be precise about why, and why it is not a soft answer.
The cognitive science is unambiguous. Birth to five is when the neural architecture for language, social cognition and emotional intelligence is being built. The brain’s plasticity in this window is extraordinary — and irreversible in one direction. The habits of mind that children form in those years about who belongs, who is safe and who is strange, become the scaffolding for everything that follows. You do not have to believe that destiny is fixed in early childhood to believe that what is learned earliest is learned most deeply, and is hardest to unlearn.
I studied Mandarin at university and spent a year in Beijing. What that year gave me was not fluency alone. It gave me the irreversible understanding that there are multiple valid ways to organise a life, a relationship with time, a sense of what it means to belong to something larger than yourself. The Chinese framing did not replace my own. It sat alongside it. And that has been one of the most practically useful things that has ever happened to me — because when someone insists there is only one way to see something, some part of my brain says: that is not true. I have been somewhere that sees it differently, and they are not wrong.
That is what cultural intelligence is. Not cosmopolitan decoration. An inoculation. A child who grows up knowing that there are multiple valid ways to organise a life has cognitive tools that the child who was never exposed to difference simply does not have. And social contact theory — the research strand built on Gordon Allport’s foundational work since the 1950s — consistently shows that real contact between groups reduces prejudice. Not deep contact, not sustained contact. Real contact. Actual people, not curated caricatures.
A Tribe of Values, Not Identity
Here is what I think we are actually trying to build — and I use “we” deliberately, because I do not think this is something one organisation, or one nursery school, or one founder can do alone.
Not a tribe without identity. That is not the goal, and it would not be honest. Every family that comes to Hatching Dragons has a culture, a language, a history, a set of practices and loyalties that make them who they are. We do not want to dissolve that. We want to honour it. What we are trying to build — what all the organisations doing this work are trying to build, from the Woolf Institute’s scholarship on Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations to Nisa-Nashim’s network of Jewish and Muslim women who have chosen, repeatedly, to remain in relationship through the worst periods, to Reboot the Future’s work on the Golden Rule in 12,000 classrooms — is a different kind of belonging. One that is defined not by who we exclude but by what we are for.
A tribe of values holds some things in common: that evidence matters more than fear, that disagreement is a form of respect rather than a declaration of war, that the person across from you — however different their background, their faith, their politics — is a full human being whose presence in your world is not a threat but an enlargement of it. These are not weak or vague commitments. They are, in the current climate, genuinely countercultural. They require something of us. They require the willingness to walk the harder ground — to sit with complexity, to resist the pull of the comfortable caricature, to call out contempt in our own camp as readily as in our opponents’.
This is also the answer to the question of free expression that I think is genuinely at stake in this moment. A values-based tribe does not silence disagreement. It welcomes it, because it is confident enough in its own principles to engage with challenge rather than suppress it. The answer to hatred is not less speech but better speech — more specific, more evidenced, more willing to hold its own position clearly while remaining genuinely curious about what has brought the person across the table to a different view. What we have too often done instead is replace argument with accusation, and in doing so driven legitimate anger underground, into spaces where it is met not with challenge but with amplification. A tribe of values refuses that trade.
We Are Choosing This
Everything about this moment is a choice. The content we share and the content we ignore. The conversations we have and the ones we avoid. The communities we build for our children and the assumptions those communities quietly teach them about who belongs and who does not.
What happened in Golders Green is an extreme point on a line that runs through all of us. But the line does not have to go in the direction it has been going. The moderate, values-led majority in this country is real and it is large — it just needs to stop acting as though its absence from the field is a form of neutrality. It is not. It is a gift to the people who are most intent on destroying what it values.
Cultural intelligence begins before the first day of school. The capacity to hold your own identity securely while remaining genuinely open to others — to belong somewhere without requiring anyone else to be expelled — is learnable. It is teachable. And the window for teaching it most deeply and most durably is the one that closes earliest.
Hatching Dragons exists to do that work at the earliest possible age. But we know that it cannot be done alone, and we are not trying to do it alone. The Woolf Institute, Nisa-Nashim, Reboot the Future, Schools of Sanctuary, Near Neighbours, the funders sustaining this coalition through Pears Foundation and Esmée Fairbairn — all of us are trying to build the same thing from different directions. A society that knows how to disagree without dehumanising. A public square where evidence still counts. A sense of belonging that does not depend on anyone’s expulsion.
A tribe of values, not identity. If that is the work you are doing — at whatever age, in whatever space — we want to build with you.