The riots that took place in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2001, followed by the terrorist attacks in the USA later that year and in London in 2005, combined to bring about fundamental changes in British educational policy and in the manner in which British citizenship is officially articulated. In concluding that all these events involved Islamist extremists, we need not ignore the genuine grievances of, particularly young, Muslims. But the reaction of the British government and other elements in British society to these events has been to create a series of myths, upon which radical new policy initiatives have been based.

Chief among these myths are the assertions that to permit ethnic or religious groups to live in self-segregation is to aid and abet social fragmentation, and that faith schools have played a disproportionately prominent part in that process. In Disunited Kingdom (Civitas, £10) philosophy professor David Conway has offered not only a comprehensive rebuttal of these myths, but has also turned a spotlight on the dangerous new policy departures in which they have resulted.

Simply put, there is no evidence that allowing young people to grow up in “ghettoes” necessarily results in the destruction of the fabric of society. On the contrary, group identification invariably underpins a sense of status and social worth.

The present government’s obsession with “community cohesion” amounts to a determination to pressure members of different groups to mix whether they want to or not. This, as Professor Conway argues, is likely to be ineffective at best and, at worst, woefully counter-productive. Worse still, the government has bought into a view of education for citizenship that is explicitly designed to undermine a sense of British national identity, especially among white children.

Faith schools have been singled out as a barrier to national cohesion. Yet there is no hard evidence for this, other than in relation to a small number of independent Muslim schools.

Until I read Professor Conway’s analysis, I had not realised how weak Ofsted has been in dealing with this. But, given Labour’s dependence on Muslim votes, there is little prospect of an early end to this appeasement.