From attacks on synagogues and mosques to graffiti across shopfronts and garden walls, racism appears to be overt in the UK today. Never before when out reporting, as I was in the ex-mining town of Mansfield in Nottinghamshire a few weeks ago, have I heard an ordinary member of the public – a mum rocking her baby outside a shopping centre – tell me, unprompted: “I am racist.” Gone is the sheepish “I’m not racist, but…” prelude to mutterings against immigrants. The caveats have dropped as masks have slipped.
In a year of protests against asylum hotels, politicians have been piling in with increasingly hostile language about immigration, from Keir Starmer labelling Britain an “island of strangers” to Nigel Farage likening the arrival of asylum seekers to an “invasion”. The language of public figures has consequences: I remember Muslim women in 2019 telling me they had been called “bank robbers” and “letter boxes” in the street after Boris Johnson used those terms about women who wear the burka in a Telegraph column.
Since the 2010s era of Islamophobia passing Sayeeda Warsi’s “dinner-table test” of socially acceptable behaviour, racism has cleared the dining table, put its boots on and marched out the front door. You could call it the “bus-stop test” or “train carriage test” now. For nowhere is the rise of everyday racism more visible than on public transport.
Racially and religiously aggravated crimes have risen 67 per cent on transport networks since 2022, according to British Transport Police stats I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Police recorded 1,578 crimes from 1 January-21 September 2022, and 2,638 in the same period this year up until 21 September (the latest date for which stats are available). There was a 46.6 per cent rise between 2022 and 2024, and a 10 per cent rise from last year to the same period this year of 1 January-1 September.
The details of these crimes are shocking: they include battery, sexual assault of girls and boys, theft, threatening with a blade, death threats, indecent exposure, grievous bodily harm, attacks on police and beating up emergency workers. And this is just a snapshot. The British Transport Police only covers the railways and some tram networks. I requested data from every police force in the UK on racist, religion-based and anti-migrant attacks, but most refused to supply it on the grounds that it would have been too expensive to collate.
When asked what could be behind this dramatic rise in recent years, the British Transport Police didn’t respond directly to my question. A spokesperson told me, “Everybody deserves to feel safe when they travel on the rail network… abuse, intimidation, and violence – especially that which is motivated by hate – will never be tolerated, and we have acted swiftly and decisively when we receive reports of hate crimes on the network.”
Chandra, a 23-year-old engineering student who also works at McDonald’s, was attacked on a bus in Newcastle city centre earlier this year. At 7.30pm, when travelling home from playing a match at his cricket club, he took a backwards-facing seat at the back of the top deck of the number 37. A white man in his mid-twenties kept throwing sweet wrappers at the back of his head. When he turned around to ask him to stop, the man repeatedly called him a “fucking Indian” and squared up to him, asking for a fight. Chandra stayed calm and descended the stairs at his stop – on his way down, the man punched him on the top of his head. He had swelling there for days. The bus driver said he couldn’t help, and Chandra had no luck following up with the police or bus company either, despite CCTV capturing it all. No one on the bus defended him.
“I’ve noticed a lot of racist posts and casual racist jokes on Instagram – on all social media – lately,” Chandra told me when we spoke over the phone. “The other day when I was on a McDonald’s shift, these ten-year-old kids were making stereotypical jokes about me – imitating Indian music and doing a fake accent. I was shocked. I haven’t had that before; people here in Newcastle are generally tolerant and friendly.”
While he doesn’t feel unsafe, he told me that next time he would defend himself more robustly against racist remarks rather than maintaining a dignified silence. “I saw that no one else [was] going to say or do anything, not even the police.”
Others have also noticed a shift towards open racism. Sophia Choudry, a businesswoman whose TikTok video went viral last month when she was repeatedly called a “P**i” on the Elizabeth Line, told the Metro newspaper: “I have not heard that word in 25 years.”
Shaky smartphone videos of racist abuse on trains and buses fly through our social media feeds every day. Outrage fuels the spread; if you spend too long on these platforms, you could begin to believe every journey is marked by such hate. It’s not, and often these same clips show bystanders stepping in to help. But the police stats I’ve seen reveal a grim trend that cannot be dismissed as a simple uptick in reporting. More than 40 years ago, Stuart Hall contrasted “overt” with “inferential” racism in the British media in his 1981 essay “The Whites of Their Eyes”. Today it looks as if the inferences from our political class are unleashing the overt in the world around us.
[Further reading: Does Reform already have more members than Labour?]
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This article appears in the 23 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Doom Loop