A frenzy of hatred’:
how to understand Brexit racism
Campaigners and
victims are reporting a rise in racist abuse since the referendum.
Has it always been there under the surface – and will this
‘celebratory racism’ cause lasting damage?
Homa Khaleeli
Wednesday 29 June
2016 17.07 BST
Brexit was a
political earthquake, but its shocks were felt on our streets even
before the polls closed. Lakshmi D’Souza felt the early fallout
from the bitter battle over the EU referendum while pushing a pram
through east London early on Thursday morning. D’Souza passed a
woman who warned her to “be careful”. A man in the street was
shouting racist abuse at a shopkeeper and passersby. As D’Souza
walked past with her baby son, he looked at her and spat on the
floor. D’Souza says that she fears the referendum has unleashed “a
frenzy of hatred”.
“It takes a lot
more than some idiot to bother me,” she says. “But the
implication that this sort of behaviour will get worse because of a
political decision … just blows my mind.”
True Vision, a
police-funded hate-crime-reporting website, has seen a 57% increase
in reporting between Thursday and Sunday, compared with the same
period last month. This is not a definitive national figure –
reports are also made directly to police stations and community
groups – but Stop Hate UK, a reporting charity, has also seen an
increase, while Tell Mama, an organisation tackling Islamophobia,
which usually deals with 40-45 reports a month, received 33 within
48-72 hours.
In Great Yarmouth,
Colin Goffin, who is vice-principal of an educational trust, was told
about taunts and jeers being directed at eastern European workers by
10am on Friday morning – just hours after the results of the
referendum had been announced. Goffin went to see a Kosovan-born
friend, the manager of a car wash, to discuss the vote. In the
Norfolk coastal town, 72% had voted to leave.
“I wanted him to
know that I didn’t agree with the decision, or the way that the
issue of immigration had been used in the campaign,” Goffin says.
But when he arrived, the abuse against the multinational staff had
already begun. “He told me people were slowing down to laugh at his
staff, wave and mouth ‘goodbye’,” Goffin says. “They had
clearly not wasted any time in deciding to be hateful.”
Unsurprisingly,
European staff members were worried by the vote. “What was most
shocking was that these guys are well liked and go out of their way
to help people – up until then, they would have felt part of our
community. Suddenly, people felt it was OK to suggest they should
clear off ‘home’. I am angry and embarrassed by the way people
from my home town acted.”
Architect Toni (a
Spanish citizen living in Brighton) had barely touched down in the UK
after a weekend in Alicante when he came across a group of men
causing a disturbance at passport control. “There were four of
them,” he said. “One of them shouted: ‘Why are these bloody
immigrants in the same queue as we are?’ His friends were laughing.
They were saying it loudly so people would hear. It was very
uncomfortable. I have been here four years and I have never
experienced anything like this.”
Although another
British passenger challenged the men, Toni said he was shaken by the
incident. “I am questioning whether I should stay – will I be a
second-class citizen now?”
Reports of
xenophobia and racism have piled up in the media: the firebombing of
a halal butchers in Walsall, graffiti on a Polish community centre in
London and laminated cards reading: “No more Polish vermin”
apparently posted through letterboxes in Huntingdon. Asked about the
rise in hate crimes during PMQs on Wednesday, David Cameron said the
government would be publishing a hate-crime action plan.
Racist cards sent
in Huntingdon.
Racist cards sent
in Huntingdon. Photograph: Huntingdon Living Facebook
Why this sudden
explosion? Paul Bagguley, a sociologist based at the University of
Leeds, points to the gleeful tone of the racism: “There is a kind
of celebration going on; it’s a celebratory racism.” With
immigration cited in polls as the second most common reason in voting
for Brexit, “people are expressing a sense of power and success,
that they have won,” he says.
“People haven’t
changed. I would argue the country splits into two-thirds to
three-quarters of people being tolerant and a quarter to a third
being intolerant. And a section of that third have become emboldened.
At other times, people are polite and rub along.”
Bagguley stresses
that it wasn’t racist to vote leave, and that many people were
voting about “political control”, yet the Brexit campaign’s
relentless rhetoric about “controlling our borders” has led
people who might previously have kept their intolerant views to
themselves to feel legitimised. A spokesperson from campaign group
Hope not Hate points out that, while not all Ukip voters are racists,
it does “swallow up the ‘respectable racist’ vote that might
have once gone to the BNP”. Bagguley agrees: “People have to be
prepared to be more critical of them and the implicit racism that
runs through much of what they say.”
Brexit has given
voice to racism – and too many are complicit
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Read more
Simon Woolley, the
director of Operation Black Vote, goes further. “The Brexiters,
with their jingoistic rhetoric, have put the country on a war
footing. By framing the debate as ‘we want our country back’,
they have made immigrants the enemy and occupiers who need to be
expelled.”
The turmoil that
followed the vote – with sterling in freefall, and the leadership
of Britain’s two main political parties in disarray – has also
played a part, according to Bagguley. “At times of generalised
social crises, people think they can get away with things in public
that they would not normally do.” On Tuesday, video footage emerged
that appeared to show a mixed-race man being racially abused on a
Manchester tram. Police have made three arrests over the incident.
Corinne Abrahams,
24, witnessed a similar incident in London as she made her way home
from the Glastonbury festival on Monday. As she sat on the tube at
around 2pm, a man “began shouting things such as: ‘Russians are
all scumbags’ and ‘Poles should all leave’”. Another
passenger protested and the argument grew heated. Other travellers
moved away, but Abrahams, who has Jewish heritage, says she could not
stay silent. “My people have gone through all this before. I don’t
want it to have to happen to others. I said: ‘You are an
embarrassment to the country. No one else here agrees with what
you’re saying.’ He replied: ‘I’m a real British man. This is
my country.’ It was unprovoked and disgusting.”
A National Front
banner in Newcastle.
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A National Front
banner in Newcastle. Photograph: Emma Foster
Bagguley says that
what makes the recent attacks unusual is who they are directed at.
Central to the anti-EU discourse in the media over the past decade
has been a sense of British people being fundamentally different from
Europeans. As Scottish politics and identity moved in a new
direction, this mutated into a white English nationalism “that has
a resonance with racial ways of thinking”, he says.
“This has been the
bedrock and basis for this xenophobia, directed at everybody who is a
little different. It is unlike the backlash after terrorist attacks,
which targeted Irish people in the 70s, or Muslims and those thought
to be Muslims, more recently. It is a very generalised kind of racism
oriented against any groups perceived not to be in that narrow
category of white English identity.”
The hate crimes
recently reported to Operation Black Vote seem to confirm this. “Two
Muslim women in Bethnal Green, east London, had eggs thrown at them
on the street,” says Woolley. “A black woman on a bus had a bunch
of bananas placed on the chair next to her and was told to ‘fuck
off back to your country’. It is not just women. An Italian man was
punched to the ground for asking another man which way he voted in
the referendum.”
Racist incidents
feared to be linked to Brexit result
Read more
Nor are attacks
confined to areas that voted strongly to leave. A British Asian
doctor in Urmston, Greater Manchester, tells me she was told to “go
back to your own country” in a petrol forecourt at the weekend by a
woman annoyed she had not driven away from the pump quickly enough.
“You just don’t expect this in Manchester. I have never had that
before,” she says.
In Edinburgh, Lauren
Stonebanks, 36, was on a bus on Monday when she says a woman shouted:
“‘Get your passport, you’re fucking going home.’” She
believes she was targeted because she is mixed race. “As I got off
the bus, the woman started making threatening gestures, like punching
gestures. It made me feel absolutely terrified.”
In Cobham, Surrey,
British-born Saima, 46, was shopping for her elderly mother when she,
too, experienced her first brush with racism. “There was a man in
his mid to late 30s ranting in the street about ‘making Britain
great again’. I looked over and he pointed at me, saying: ‘People
like you will be out of here soon.’ It reminds me of the 70s with
the National Front, when I remember being scared for my family. I
feel as if we have gone back in time.”
Neo-Nazi stickers
in Glasgow.
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Neo-Nazi stickers
in Glasgow. Photograph: Eoin Palmer
Woolley is clear, as
is Tell Mama, that hate crimes have never gone away. Tell Mama’s
annual report, released on Wednesday, states that anti-Muslim hatred
reported to them rose by a staggering 326% in 2015. Women, especially
those who wear hijabs or niqabs, bear the brunt of this. Hope Not
Hate points out that it has been arguing for some time that far-right
extremism is not getting the attention it deserves. Yet the
Brexit-inspired racism seems slightly different in that slurs are
focused on ethnicity over religion. A report to Tell Mama included an
incident of a man shouting: “Brexit, you Paki” at a taxi driver,
before assaulting him.
Writer Nikesh Shukla
was in Bristol on Tuesday when he witnessed an argument between a
white man and a black man. As they separated, the white man shouted:
“Well, it’s not your fucking country, is it?” On Friday, a
tweet about the far right in the US resulted in him being told to “go
back to brownland”. “The tool of the racist, more recently, has
been to make you feel you have a chip on your shoulder. Now it is
barefaced: ‘Go back to your country.’”
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BBC journalist Sima
Kotecha interviewed a leave voter in her home town of Basingstoke who
used the word “Paki”. Afterwards, she tweeted: “Haven’t heard
that word here since the 80s!” For many British Asians, it is a
reminder of a darker period in British history. Anna Rahman, a
psychiatrist, posted on Facebook: “The first time I heard the word
‘Paki’, I was five and people were pelting eggs and stones at our
windows. My father told me no one had the right to make me feel I
didn’t belong here, telling me: ‘You are as British as the
Queen.’ It makes me want to sob that, in this climate, I may need
to have this discussion with my own kids.”
Stop Hate UK’s
Rose Simkin cautions that about 80-99% of hate crimes go unreported,
making their prevalence hard to estimate. Woolley thinks this could
be “because they want to cleanse themselves of the experience and
forget that it happened”. Bagguley is confident that after a spike
in incidents, things will calm down. Yet he also warns that if these
attacks go unchallenged, the damage to our social fabric could be
lasting, making attacks more frequent in the future. “It is the
residue that is the problem. If people get away with [racist
attacks], then the next time there is a reason to have a go, they
will.”
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