Parts of the UK saw two sharp rises in Islamophobic and antisemitic hate crime respectively over the last year-and-a-half, new figures show.
Hate offences targeting Jewish people recorded by three major police forces spiked in the weeks after the Israel-Hamas conflict broke out in October 2023.
The same forces recorded a surge of hate offences targeting Muslim people after the Southport stabbings and subsequent riots in July this year.
The forces were the Metropolitan Police, Greater Manchester, and West Midlands, which cover many of the UK’s biggest Muslim and Jewish communities.
Charities and campaigers condemned the abuse, and said their own work had uncovered similar trends.
The figures were obtained from police forces using Freedom of Information requests.
Greater Manchester Police, for example, recorded 85 antisemitic offences in October 2023 and 68 in November 2023, up from an average of 13 per month over the first nine months of the year.
West Yorkshire Police recorded a similar increase from six a month (average) to 44 in October.
Islamophobic offences recorded by the force rose from an average of 33 a month in 2023 and 39 a month in the first half of 2024 before rising to 94 in August, then 73 in September.
Other forces including Merseyside, South Yorkshire and the British Transport Police also recorded rises, though overall numbers were lower.
Different forces record hate offences in different ways, so an overall picture for the whole of England cannot be painted using this data alone.
The government said it was ‘determined to stamp out the toxic vitriol which is spread by a minority of people’.
Iman Atta, head of anti-Muslim hate monitor Tell Mama, said the organisation alone has ‘assisted over 5,000 British Muslims this year and the number keeps rising’.
She added: ‘Anti-Muslim hate or Islamophobia spikes repeatedly when there are international issues and when there is far-right agitation, extremism, continued finger-pointing at a political level against Muslims, and even post the Brexit vote. So these figures are not surprising.
‘Yet we are not seeing the action needed to tackle this problem. In fact, we are seeing anti-Muslim hate or Islamophobia being treated as though it is not the significant problem it is.’
Dave Rich, of Jewish charity the Community Security Trust (CST), said: ‘These figures show similar trends as CST’s own antisemitic data, with a sharp rise in anti-Jewish hate crimes following the October 7 attack last year to levels that have still not returned to what used to be considered “normal”.
‘The increases are even more shocking when set against the relatively small size of the Jewish communities in some of these places.
‘This kind of anti-Jewish hatred should be unacceptable to all, and we will continue to work closely with police and the CPS up and down the country, alongside local Jewish communities, to reduce the impact of this hatred.’
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