Brexit: Hate Crimes

Lord Ouseley Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I will get to the point about pre-referendum, because in fact the numbers of hate crimes reported are now down to pre-referendum levels. The reasons behind some of the hate crime were many and varied. The Polish community, for probably the first time in its history in this country, experienced in Hammersmith an unprecedented attack, and the Polish centre in Hammersmith was one of the first centres to benefit from the community demonstration project funding. As I say, the reasons that motivate people to provoke hatred against other people are many and varied, and it is generally based on certain characteristics of those people and those communities, and it has gone down to pre-referendum levels since then.

[Lord Ouseley (CB)]

My Lords, on 24 June we were all shocked by the level of responses of hate demonstrated by the recorded and reported incidents. I declare an interest in my work as chair of Kick It Out, where we monitor—and have done for the last 23 years—hate incidents that are at the lower level of everyday abuse. There is nothing new about the level of hatred that exists within our society. We have to tackle the issue of prejudice, which we are not doing sufficiently. To blame Brexit as a cause of what we saw on 24 June and since is delusional. Quite frankly, in the context of racial abuse, you cannot blame the levels of homophobic abuse and abuse of disabled people that we are witnessing specifically on Brexit. How are we taking action to effectively tackle prejudice, which is what feeds bigotry and hatred?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

The noble Lord raises a very important point, which is that it was not Brexit per se that was the cause of this hatred but Brexit was used as an occasion to promote prejudice and hatred. The Government have done many things since 2010 to try to tackle this. I mentioned the hate crime action plan that the Home Secretary produced upon becoming Home Secretary. We have made changes to legislation that offer further protection for transgender and disabled people, and those have led to the first convictions for the offence of stirring up hatred on grounds of sexual orientation. We have also improved the police recording of hate crime. Forces now capture data on all five of the monitored hate crime strands. We have also recently launched a funding scheme to help protect places of worship from hate crime and to tackle hate crime at a local level.