In 2026, one might expect Britain, and the world at large, to be more diverse, accepting and enlightened. In an age of unprecedented connectivity and cultural exchange, differences should be bringing communities closer together. Yet, as the UK marks National Hate Crime Awareness Week (October 10–17), the reality tells a deeply troubling story.
Police-recorded hate crime in England and Wales has risen by seven per cent year-on-year, with both race- and religion-related offences reaching record highs. Home Office figures show that 146,825 hate crimes were recorded in the year ending March 2026.
Religiously motivated hate crime increased by 13 per cent, from 10,067 to 11,419 offences, while race-related hate crime, the largest category, climbed by nine per cent, from 98,890 to 107,926 offences.
Changes to the Metropolitan Police Service's crime-recording system affect year-on-year comparisons. However, even excluding the Met, police forces across England and Wales recorded 123,957 hate crimes, a seven per cent increase on the previous year. Religiously motivated offences outside the Metropolitan Police area also reached their highest annual total since records began in the year ending March 2012.
These are more than statistics. Behind every figure is someone who may have been threatened, abused, intimidated or attacked because of their identity, faith or ethnicity. And beyond the incidents that make it into police records lies a far wider experience of prejudice, exclusion and the persistent feeling of being treated as an outsider.
Ilyas Nagdee, Racial Justice Lead at Amnesty International UK said, “The shocking rise in hate crimes show that racism, violence and fear are tragically becoming a day-to-day reality across the UK. Behind these statistics are stories of children who are afraid to go to school, families who are scared to leave home and communities divided. When there are over 10,000 racially or religiously aggravated offences record in a single month, and hate crimes are increasing in double digits year on year, we are in a genuine emergency.
“The UK government must act now and resource hate crime investigations to cut down the delays present between hate and non-hate offences, hold perpetrators to account, and send an unambiguous message that racism and all forms of hate will not be tolerated.”
Yet, another dimension of this conversation remains underrepresented: anti-Hindu hate and the experiences of British Hindus, whose encounters with racism and religious prejudice are often overlooked in wider discussions about minority communities. While anti-Muslim hate rightly receives attention, there is a need to recognise that Hindus, too, can be targets of racial and religious hostility, and that their experiences deserve to be heard rather than assumed to be less significant.
At a time when National Hate Crime Awareness Week should be an opportunity to recognise progress and look towards a more inclusive future, the past few years have instead felt like a setback. British society appears increasingly divided, with differences that should enrich communities being used to fuel hostility, suspicion and hatred.
But to understand the rise in hate crime, it is necessary to look beyond the figures and examine a question that has become increasingly contentious in public life: who gets to call themselves British?
When Britishness becomes a question of race
The debate over British identity is hardly new. What is increasingly striking, however, is the extent to which arguments about belonging are being framed around skin colour, ancestry and how long a person or their family has lived in the country.
Writing in his regular Sunday Times column after delivering the Marylebone Cricket Club's Cowdrey Lecture at Lord's last month, Rishi Sunak reflected on his experience as a British-born Hindu of Indian heritage and raised an uncomfortable question facing modern Britain: can someone be fully English if they are not white?
He warned that Britain risked creating “different classes of Briton”, in which people who migrated to the country more recently, or whose parents and grandparents did, were regarded as somehow less British than those whose families had lived here for generations.
Amid these concerns, he identified another danger: “a risk that we start equating skin colour with nationality”.
It is a warning that speaks to a wider anxiety among minority communities: that citizenship, birthplace and a lifetime of contribution may still not be enough to establish an unquestioned sense of belonging.
Professor Imran Awan, Professor of Criminology at Birmingham City University and an expert on Islamophobia and countering extremism, believes the rise of far-right rhetoric has brought questions of national identity to the forefront of public debate.
“At present, there is a wave of far-right rhetoric based on trigger events such as Southport and immigration, which are dominating certain right-wing narratives. These have now spilled over into debates around national identity.
“Ultimately, it is creating a process of ‘othering’ of local communities, mainly focused on ‘in-group’ versus ‘out-group’ narratives, where some communities are perceived to be threatening ‘our way of life’.
“I would argue it is about scapegoating certain communities because, when things are difficult, people will strike out at a convenient target.”
The hostility that statistics cannot capture
Professor Jon Garland, Professor of Criminology at the University of Surrey, who sits on the board of the International Network for Hate Studies and the steering committee of the British Society of Criminology's Hate Crime Network, believes the latest home Office figures reflect a worrying increase in hostility towards minority communities, “especially as hate crimes are severely under-reported, meaning that, in reality, these figures are likely to be much higher than those published,” he says.
Prof Garland points to international conflicts and domestic political rhetoric as contributing factors, highlighting the impact of the war in Gaza and the “stop the boats” campaign, which he says have triggered backlashes against certain communities.
Pointing towards the increased attacks on Muslims and Jews, accounting for nearly half of all religious hate crimes recorded, Prof Garland says the figures demonstrate how “the conflict in the Middle East spills into tensions on the streets here”.
The statistics, however, tell only part of the story. Hate does not always take the form of a physical attack or an incident reported to the police, “it's also about the ‘drip drip’ cumulative effect of being discriminated against, harassed or ‘othered’ that can be so damaging to victims,” Prof Garland says.
Prof Awan similarly warns that police-recorded offences cannot capture the full extent of prejudice. “Anti-Muslim hate crime, like other forms of hate crime, remains massively underreported for a variety of reasons, such as the normalisation of being a victim of hate crime and fear of consequences or retaliation,” he says.
“Part of the problem is that it is so normalised that it becomes a normal aspect of life for certain groups.”
The impact also reaches beyond the individual targeted. Prof Awan describes hate crimes as “message crimes” because, even when one person is attacked, the incident can send a warning to an entire community that it is not welcome.
He also warns that online hate has become normalised on social media platforms, amplified by far-right actors and others seeking to deepen divisions and that this has led to real-world, offline incidents that start with conspiracy theories online but then quickly move into offline aggression.
Pointing at the Southport riots he shows an example of how online misinformation can spill over into real-world violence.
Who is considered ‘truly British’?
The argument over belonging is not confined to questions of immigration policy or public safety. At its heart lies a deeper disagreement about how Britishness itself is understood.
Prof Garland believes political rhetoric that was once considered marginal has increasingly entered mainstream debate. He points to far-right activists such as Tommy Robinson and political parties including Reform UK and Restore as contributing to a climate of hostility towards immigration.
“These voices have found a receptive audience that has grown in size since the bitter and divisive Brexit referendum campaign in 2016,” he says.
Prof Garland argues that anti-immigration rhetoric from senior politicians has helped normalise attitudes that were previously more marginalised. “They are now part of mainstream political debate, indicating that, for significant parts of the population, Britishness is now conceived in narrow and exclusive terms based around ‘whiteness’,” he says.
Dr Bindi Shah, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, has previously told Asian Voice that the immigration debate is fundamentally a question of race, culture and who is perceived to belong in Britain.
“The current debate about immigration is absolutely a debate about race, culture and who is perceived to ‘belong’ in Britain,” she said.
Shah argues that the boundaries of national identity are often constructed around a racialised idea of whiteness, sustained by myths of a historically uniform white majority culture and common ancestry.
This understanding overlooks the complexity of Britain's history and the many influences that have shaped its population and society over centuries.
What needs to change?
The figures demand attention, but so does the everyday prejudice that often goes unreported. Prof Garland argues that monitoring incidents such as verbal abuse, bullying and racial harassment can help identify community tensions before they escalate into more serious violence. Meanwhile, Prof Awan says understanding hate crime requires looking beyond just statistics but to also consider how prejudice shapes people’s everyday lives. The country's diversity is not a departure from its identity, but an integral part of the story that has shaped it.
Anti-Hindu hate: The experiences often overlooked
One dimension that remains underrepresented in discussions about minority communities is anti-Hindu hate and the experiences of British Hindus, whose encounters with racism and religious prejudice are often overlooked.
Hindus, too, face religious hostility, racial discrimination and, at times, violence. On the streets, the distinction between being British Hindu or British Muslim may matter little to those intent on targeting people because of their skin colour, ethnicity or perceived background. Prejudice is often driven by assumptions about identity rather than a person’s actual faith, leaving many ethnic minorities feeling like outsiders in the country they call home.
The 2021 Census recorded approximately one million Hindus (1.7 per cent of the population) and 3.9 million Muslims (6.5 per cent) in England and Wales. Home Office figures for 2025/26 show that recorded religious hate crimes targeting both communities rose by 15 per cent year-on-year, with 210 offences recorded against Hindus compared with 5,132 against Muslims. While the numbers differ significantly, the equal percentage increase highlights the need to examine anti-Hindu hate, particularly given the Hindu community’s smaller population.
In an attempt to address this gap, the Anti-Hindu Hate Monitor (AHHM) was launched in May to document, understand and confront anti-Hindu hate across the UK through consistent, evidence-based reporting.
Krupesh Hirani AM highlighted the problem of underreporting at the time of the launch, warning that many incidents never make it onto official records. “Far too many people I speak to have experienced anti-Hindu abuse or intimidation, yet so many of these incidents go unreported,” he said.
“At a time when religious hate crime is clearly rising, limited reporting makes it difficult to understand the scale of anti-Hindu hatred and ensure the police have the data to target the issue.”
Documenting these experiences is an important step towards recognising the scale of anti-Hindu hate and ensuring that victims are heard, supported and protected.
