THE Bishop of St Albans, Dr Alan Smith, has called for a national strategy to address the rise in religiously aggravated hate crime, after Home Office statistics published last week showed an increase of 25 per cent in the past year.
In the House of Lords on Tuesday, Dr Smith asked what action the Government was taking against religious hate crime and to “strengthen community cohesion”.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Lord Khan, said that the Government was developing “an integrated, cohesive approach”.
“We will say more soon,” he told peers, assuring them that the Government had “a lot of plans, moving forward”.
In response, Dr Smith said that “many of us are deeply worried” about the rise in religious hate crime since last year’s 7 October attacks in Israel.
The situation had, though, “spurred” community initiatives, and Dr Smith referred to dialogue between imams and rabbis in St Albans. Together, they had produced a document that was being promoted in schools and that was “making quite an impact”, Dr Smith said.
“I wonder whether the Minister and his officials are aware of this and other initiatives, and whether they are being integrated into a national strategy so that we can try to address this at the youngest age possible,” he said.
Home Office statistics published on Thursday of last week suggest that, overall, hate crime had reduced slightly, but that there had been a marked increase in religious hate crimes: 25 per cent more than in the year to March 2023.
The report put the increase down to a doubling in hate crimes against Jewish people, alongside a smaller increase in hate crimes against Muslims, since the start of the latest war between Israel and Hamas.
A total of 10,484 religious hate crimes were recorded, up from 8370 the previous year. Of these, 38 per cent were against Muslims, 33 per cent against Jewish people.
The report also expressed these statistics as a proportion of the overall number of followers of each religion, with 121 hate crimes per 10,000 Jewish people, and ten per 10,000 for Muslims.
Christians made up the third most targeted group, at seven per cent of the total of religious hate crimes, which rounded down to zero incidents per 10,000.
The new report captures the year ending March 2024, and so covers less than half of the period since the Hamas attack a year ago, and Israel’s subsequent bombardment of Gaza. The highest ever monthly total for incidents of racially or religiously aggravated harassment occurred that October.
Race-hate crimes fell by five per cent, but still made up the large majority of recorded hate crimes: almost 100,000 incidents were logged.
There was a recorded decrease in the three other classifications of hate crime used by the Home Office: sexual orientation, disability, and transgender.
There were 22,839 sexual-orientation hate crimes recorded, down by eight per cent on the previous year; and 11,719 hate crimes based on a person’s disability — a fall of 18 per cent. Transgender hate crimes fell by a smaller margin of two per cent: 4780 incidents were recorded.
In further discussion in the House of Lords, Lord Singh said that there had been a failure of “open dialogue between religions on the actual teachings” that underlay religious hate crimes. Fluctuations in hate crimes which were connected with political events were “serious”, but “transitory”.
Baroness Fox sought reassurance that concern about religious hate crime would not lead to “backdoor blasphemy laws or assaults on free speech and legitimate criticism, or even ridicule, of religion”.
