Hate crime is up – and Brexit is to blame. It’s a familiar story and one doing the rounds again today following the publication of Home Office statistics on the level of hate crimes last year. The numbers do seem troubling: these offences rose by a third last year, and there was a spike in hate crimes around the time of the EU referendum, as this graph shows:
But can this rise really be blamed on Brexit? Did people really turn on each other in the heady days after the referendum? There are a number of reasons to think not.
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Firstly, a rise in hate crime wasn’t isolated to last year. In 2015/16, hate crime was up by 20 per cent on the previous year. In 2014/15, it rose by 18 per cent; and in 2013/14, it also increased.
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