Some of the UK’s largest police forces have reported increases in religious hate crimes in the past 18 months, figures reveal, with the number of incidents rising after the start of the Hamas-Israel conflict in autumn 2023 and again after the Southport attacks in England this summer.
Forces including Greater Manchester, West Midlands and the Metropolitan police recorded sharp increases in antisemitic offences in the weeks after the outbreak of the conflict in the Middle East in October last year.
The same forces then saw an increase in Islamophobic offences after the knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport in July that left three young girls dead and several more injured, and led to violent disorder in towns and cities across the country.
The figures, obtained by the PA Media news agency using freedom of information requests, show that Greater Manchester police recorded an average of 13 antisemitic offences a month from January to September 2023, rising to 85 in October and 68 in November before falling back over the following months.
The same force recorded an average of 39 Islamophobic offences a month from January to July 2024 before a sharp jump to 85 in August, with numbers dropping again in September.
Similarly, antisemitic offences recorded by West Yorkshire police averaged six a month in earlier 2023, rising to 44 in October before falling again. Islamophobic offences averaged 39 a month in 2024 before rising to 94 in August and then dropping to 73 in September.
The Metropolitan police changed the way it records hate crime at the end of February 2024, but under the previous method an average of 54 antisemitic offences a month were logged in 2023, jumping sharply to 517 in October, 411 in November and 228 in December, while under the new method an average of 116 Islamophobic offences were recorded in 2024, rising to 190 in August.
Methods for capturing hate crime are not consistent across police forces, so the data cannot be used to compare directly the number of offences between different areas, or provide an overall total for the whole country. However, most forces recorded clear year-on-year increases in the total number of these crimes.
Dave Rich, a spokesperson for the Jewish charity the Community Security Trust (CST), said the figures were consistent with the organisation’s own data.
“The increases are even more shocking when set against the relatively small size of the Jewish communities in some of these places,” he said. “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.”
Iman Atta, the director of Tell Mama, which monitors anti-Muslim hate, said the organisation was not surprised by the findings. She said: “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. 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.”
Diana Johnson, the Home Office minister for policing, fire and crime prevention, said the statistics were “deeply troubling”. She said: “We are determined to stamp out the toxic vitriol which is spread by a minority of people, and perpetrators of hate crime should be in no doubt that they will face the full force of the law.”
