13 May The Brexit effect – why the divisive vote is still causing racial hatred.
Every year the number of racial hate crime rates keeps increasing. UK Government reports show that in 2015/16, 49,419 accounts of racial hate crime were reported and in 2016/17 62,685 accounts of racial hate crime accounts were reported, this is 13,266 for in just over a year but what happened over that year? Brexit. Since voting leave in the Brexit election in 2016, the percentage of hate crimes involving race and religion have only increased. Has it just become a normality and is it now more acceptable because of Brexit?
As an immigrant myself and for many other people just like me who have made the UK their home, we know from personal experience that racist incidents have increased since the Brexit vote. But we also thought that three years later things may have improved. They haven’t. Angela is just one of many people who have experienced this first hand.
“’Shut the f*** up,’ was the first thing she said to me. My name is Angela, I’m 24 and a university student. My family comes from Colombia, and I was born here. Earlier this year I was racially attacked by a white-British woman at a bus stop who continuously told me to ‘shut the f*** up’. She told me “this is why we do not want people like this in our country.” She then proceeded to hit me.”
“[This is] a country which I’ve spent most of my life in. When this happened to me, I was shocked, and amazed that people still had this mind set in 2019 – how does anyone treat another human like that?”
“[This has happened before], but never where I was physically hit. I have had people call me a foreigner; heard people say ‘go
home’, but for me it never really bothered me. I know my home is here”
She added: “Where do these people expect me to go? I was born here; I’ve lived here my whole life. I grew up. It gets tiring when people think you’re not from England just because you don’t look like them or their idea of an ‘English person’”.
On Friday 15 April 2016 the EU referendum campaign started. The result was announced on Friday 24 June. Around this time there was a clear spike in hate crime and evidence implies there was an increase of offences around the time of the EU Referendum.
According to the Home Office, “in 2017/18, there were 94,098 hate crime offences recorded by the police in England and Wales, an increase of 17% compared with the previous year.” In an official report it says: “this increase is thought to be largely driven by improvements in police recording, although there has been spikes in hate crime following certain events such as the EU Referendum and the terrorist attacks in 2017.”
Statistics showing hate crime rates in thousands.
The Home office breaks down the headline numbers of hate crime offences into these five:
- 71,251 (76%) race hate crimes;
Statistics showing hate crime in percentages.
- 11,638 (12%) sexual orientation hate crimes
- 8,336 (9%) religious hate crimes;
- 7,226 (8%) disability hate crimes;
- 1,651 (2%) transgender hate crimes
The Home Office reported: “It is possible for a hate crime offence to have more than one motivating factor which is why the above numbers sum to more than 94,098 and the proportions to more than 100 per cent.”
“Incidents of racially and religiously-motivated hate crime increased by 44 per cent in July 2016, immediately after the EU referendum, compared with the same month the previous year.”
Many experts believe the Brexit effect has continued far longer than expected, because the vote changed society in a very fundamental way.
Jon Garland is the author of ‘Hate Crime: Impact, Causes and Responses’ a book which examines the nature, extent and harms of hate crime. He says the vote came as a shock to many people like him,
“I just like to think of England and Britain of being inclusive places that are outwards looking and embrace difference and diversity and just voting to leave the EU seems to send out that opposite message some way”
“It’s really sad. For some people, the albeit narrow vote, legitimatised their views, their almost like hidden racism. And so, after that, they felt so much more emboldened and confident in expressing racist views. It’s given people courage they didn’t have before. I have been ashamed of their views. They feel like they have a licence to be racist”
Whilst campaigning for Brexit, many people believed the tone of publicity material was inappropriate, the most controversial incident was the one with Nigel Farage’s breaking point poster. Many believed that the image on the poster was bound to fuel racial hatred.
It’s only made immigration more controversial. With this kind of ‘propaganda’ being made it only made the UK public angrier at the immigrants because they believed it and that is why so many voted leave.
Fatima is 20 and lives in London. Her family come from Ghana and like Angela she has experienced hate crime since the Brexit vote:
“I have been a victim of racial abuse, and this is one was very recent, so it was hard for me to talk about it but I’ll try my best.”
“I was out with three of my friends. We were just clowning about when we accidentally bumped into this couple. Then all of a sudden, they started shouting abuse at us. We apologised to them quite a few times, but they didn’t even care they continue to say horrible things to us, telling us to go back to our countries, calling us other very horrible words that I don’t even want to say.”
“This had never ever happened to me, growing up in London which is one of the biggest cities with a lot of different ethnicities, I had never encountered anyone like this. Like come on man, we’re literally the same people all that changes are our skin colour, so why should that matter? It made me so upset, I just went home and cried a lot, I just didn’t understand why… and I really still don’t, it’s f***** up!”
Jamal is 19 and lives in Walsall. His family come from Jamaica and England and like Angela and Fatima he has experienced hate crime since the Brexit vote:
“I’m half English and half Jamaican, my mother is English, and my dad is Jamaican. My grandparents immigrated to England in 1970, they moved straight to Birmingham, where I was also born”
“When I was still at school, it was lunch and I was talking to my friend and this group of boys just walked past me and shouted n*****, n***** and made monkey noises. My first reaction wasn’t the best, I just got up and started fighting the guy making monkey noises. I wish I had to just reacted better, I just wished I walked up to him and told him that he was wrong and not have fought him because that is what he wanted. They want us to fight back so they don’t seem to be doing any wrong. So that we look like the bad people.”
Jamal and many others believe the police should be doing something about these hate crimes but just last year Sara Thornton, head of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), warned, “investigating hate crime risks distracting police from their core role of handling emergencies, solving violent crime and burglaries and neighbourhood policing”.
Jon Garland agrees. Resourcing is a key issue for the criminal justice system:
“It worries me that in the current climate government money is very tight around policing the amount of money they put into combating hate crime I don’t think its large enough.
“There have been some promising papers on hate crime and some indication they understand it and get that there is an issue, it worries me sometimes when not making enough progress, that there isn’t enough money put into anti-racist initiatives. They haven’t got the money that they need to combat hate crime. They’re just really, really short on funding. I think the Government talks quite a good game, but in reality just doesn’t invest either nationally or locally the way it should.”
“It just needs to be tackled on all sorts of different levels and it just worries me that we haven’t made any sort of progress.”
So, what about the future? With Brexit unsettled, limitations on police resources and the prospect of more votes, it looks likely racial hate crime will continue to be an issue for some time.
You can report hate crime online. So, if you ever feel like someone has been racist towards you, you can report it quickly online or if its urgent ring 999. https://www.gov.uk/report-hate-crime
The Met policy have put up a page on their website about hate crime, telling people the type of assaults there are and how you can report them, they have also put it on GOV.UK.
