Hate crime in London has risen dramatically – but was Brexit the cause, or anti-disability propaganda?
Jeremy Corbyn addresses a Rally Against Hate Crime demonstration in Highbury Fields, London, in July last year [Image: Jeff Blackler/Rex/Shutterstock].
But these figures from the Metropolitan Police show a larger proportional increase, in London alone, in just a single year.
The Independent, reporting on the figures, attributes the increase to the “toxic language” of the Brexit debate, but This Writer isn’t buying it.
Religious and racist hate crime has risen by almost 20 per cent – a large rise in normal circumstances, but negligible next to the tripling of hate crime against people with disabilities.
And there has been a 12 per cent increase in homophobic hate crime – how does that fit in with Brexit?
This isn’t fake news – the Independent isn’t deliberately trying to feed us falsehoods and make us believe them. We have no reason to think the statistics are wrong.
But they have been badly misinterpreted, it seems to me – possibly in accordance with political bias.
After all, at a time when the Tory government is being accused of discrimination against the disabled in its plan to change the criteria for the Personal Independence Payment (PIP), it would be damning to show that disability hate crime had tripled.
The Metropolitan Police statistics reveal an increase in almost all forms of hate-related crime, including incidents linked to disability, racial and homophobic motives.
Numbers of disability hate victims have increased by 216 per cent in the last year alone, up from 251 in 2015-16 to 794 in 2016-17.
The number of victims of religious and racist hate crime has risen almost 20 per cent, from 14,004 to 16,618, and victims of faith hate have seen an 18 per cent increase from 1,699 to 2,000 within the same time period, when the issue of Brexit dominated national debate.
The figures also show homophobic incidents have increased by 12 per cent, from 1,816 to 2,033.
Source: Huge rise in hate crime across London, new figures reveal
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I would suggest it is a combination of both factors. Brexit and the vindictive campaign of nastiness against disabled and poor people. Both are nasty divisive Tory tactics which they pursue relentlessly.
I said, before, that racist attitudes, since the referendum, had not changed on the ground, which suggests something else but people were too eager to blame “Brexit” (or Jeremy Corbyn) for everything.