Hate crime has no place in our country, regardless of whom it is directed against.
Police in England and Wales recorded nearly 150,000 hate crimes in the year to March 2026, a rise of seven per cent, with race hate crimes up nine per cent and religious hate crimes up 13 per cent.
We should all be worried by this.
These figures reveal alarming trends about the treatment of a number of communities, including Muslims and Jews.
The third anniversary of the October 7th massacre was just days ago, and the figures show antisemitic offences in our own country rose by ten per cent to 3,162 a year.
Jewish people were targeted at a rate of 117 crimes per 10,000.
The numbers spiked last October after the terror attack on Heaton Park Synagogue, and anyone who has walked through central London on a Saturday afternoon will have seen the poison seep from the fringes onto our streets.
It is being normalised, and the normalising has respectable accomplices.
The Green Party cannot bring itself to confront the antisemitism within its own ranks, and at their last week conference openly told Jewish people they were not welcome.
Which makes the rest of the picture all the more infuriating. From the hate crimes police flagged as having an online element, nearly four in ten were malicious communications, offensive posts and messages.
Then there is that peculiar invention, the non-crime hate incident, by which officers log behaviour that breaks no law against the name of someone who has committed no offence, which is a complete waste of police time. If we cannot distinguish between a brick through a synagogue window and a remark on social media, we have lost the ability to protect the people who most need protecting.
There has to be a far tougher line between real hate crime and online squabbles, because every hour an officer spends policing social media is an hour not spent catching real criminals.
Only one in ten hate crimes recorded last year ended in a charge or summons. Rising numbers are always worrying, but they demand that we ask what the police are doing with them.
The Conservatives would put 10,000 extra police officers on the beat and create hotspot policing zones, so that where trouble flares, the police are there to deal with it.
We would scrap non-crime hate incidents outright, rather than rebrand them as Labour are doing. And we would end the absurd spectacle of officers policing tweets when there are criminals to be caught.
The people of this country do not want their police acting as the internet’s hall monitors.
They want them out on the streets, catching criminals and protecting our communities, and that is precisely what British Jews, and every other law-abiding community in this country, have every right to expect.
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