THE Bishop of St Albans, Dr Alan Smith, has called for a national strategy to handle the rise in religiously aggravated hate crime, after Home Office statistics published last week showed a rise of 25 per cent up to now yr.
In the House of Lords on Tuesday, Dr Smith asked what motion 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 number of plans, moving forward”.
In response, Dr Smith said that “a lot of us are deeply nervous” concerning the rise in religious hate crime since last yr’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’d produced a document that was being promoted in schools and that was “making quite an impact”, Dr Smith said.
“I ponder whether the Minister and his officials are aware of this and other initiatives, and whether or not they are being integrated right into a national strategy in order that we will try to handle this on the youngest age possible,” he said.
Home Office statistics published on Thursday of last week suggest that, overall, hate crime had reduced barely, but that there had been a marked increase in religious hate crimes: 25 per cent greater than within the yr to March 2023.
The report put the rise all the way down to a doubling in hate crimes against Jewish people, alongside a smaller increase in hate crimes against Muslims, because the start of the most recent war between Israel and Hamas.
A complete of 10,484 religious hate crimes were recorded, up from 8370 the previous yr. 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 general variety of followers of every 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 whole of spiritual hate crimes, which rounded all the way down to zero incidents per 10,000.
The recent report captures the yr ending March 2024, and so covers lower than half of the period because the Hamas attack a yr 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 massive majority of recorded hate crimes: almost 100,000 incidents were logged.
There was a recorded decrease within the three other classifications of hate crime utilized 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 yr; and 11,719 hate crimes based on an individual’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 within 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 wouldn’t result in “backdoor blasphemy laws or assaults on free speech and bonafide criticism, and even ridicule, of faith”.
