Is racism really on the rise in Britain?

It keeps being said that racist ‘hate crime’ has increased as a result of the referendum. One must bear in mind how the public authorities define these things, as confirmed this week by Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions. The Macpherson report on Stephen Lawrence set the current rule. It defined a racist incident as ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. The police are instructed to log all such incidents as racist incidents. So you only have to have more people reporting what they see as racist incidents for an exactly corresponding rise in the number of recorded racist incidents.

There is no independent way of judging whether these incidents really were racist (or indeed, ever happened at all), so the uninvestigated figures tell you nothing whatever, except about the number of people who, for whatever reason — good, bad, mad, political — complain.