Published On 1/7/2026
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Wednesday that racism and intolerance have worsened in the country over the past ten years, warning that this harms social cohesion and discourages people from participating in public life.
Starmer’s statements came in response to a representative who expressed his concern that racism and incitement to violence related to it had become a normal thing, including by some politicians.
Starmer said: “We have to deal with this problem, because it is tearing our societies apart, and every person working in politics at any level in this country should denounce it.”
Politicians’ speech and the rise of racism
Yesterday, Tuesday, Reuters published a report concluding that Britain is witnessing an increase in hate speech and racist incidents related to immigration, amid warnings from experts and union leaders that the political rhetoric issued by the government and other politicians has helped create an environment more tolerant of explicit racism.
According to the report, these warnings come after rare incidents of violence, but they sparked widespread tension, and were exploited by right-wing activists and politicians to focus on crime and link it to immigration, in a country that for years has been viewed as a stable haven for many immigrants and ethnic minorities.
Britons from ethnic minorities fear the return of manifestations of racism linked to anti-immigrant rhetoric and the political focus on crime, according to Reuters.
At the beginning of this month, violent protests broke out in the coastal city of Southampton in southern England, a day after a Sikh man, born in Britain, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of student Henry Nowak.
The issuance of the ruling coincided with the publication of a video clip showing the police handcuffing the victim as she was dying, which sparked widespread anger and calls from various parties to cancel guidelines requiring police to take racial background into account while dealing with some incidents.
A week later, gangs of masked men roamed homes in Belfast, Northern Ireland, searching for immigrants, after a white man was stabbed and lost an eye in an attack by a Sudanese immigrant.
Hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales rose for the first time in three years in the year ending March 2025, and racially motivated crimes increased by 6% to reach 82,490 incidents.
