Not long after the shock European Union referendum result in 2016 there were reports of thugs tearing headscarves off the heads of Muslim women. “F*** off to Poland” letters were posted through the doors of eastern Europeans. People were assaulted on public transport. And worse.
Police reported a surge in racially motivated hate crime. Many linked it to the xenophobic rhetoric of the pro-Brexit campaign, with its naked and rather desperate scaremongering about refugees and Turkey’s supposedly imminent accession to the bloc.
Brexit casualties
Pro-Brexit media organisations sought to rubbish the link, even the statistical reality of the spike itself.
But it was clearly there in the official figures. And the consensus, accepted even by the Home Office, is that it was not just an artefact of a greater willingness of people to report such incidents to the police.
So why did it happen? Did the British public’s attitudes suddenly become more hostile overnight towards immigrants and ethnic minorities? It’s not impossible. But it’s likely that something more subtle happened.
A new economic paper by Facundo Albornoz, Jake Bradley and Silvia Sonderegger, all from Nottingham University, explains the disturbing spike through a framework of a theory of “social norms” and “information shock”.
“The referendum revealed that anti-immigrant sentiment was more widespread in the UK than was previously believed,” argue the authors. “Following the referendum, people who had so far concealed or repressed their private views for fear of appearing politically incorrect felt empowered and started adopting a behaviour more in line with their true preferences.”
Somewhat counterintuitively, they discovered that the biggest spikes in hate crime tended to occur not in areas that voted strongly for Leave but in majority Remain areas. A one percentage point increase in the Remain vote of an area was associated with a 0.5 per cent increase in the level of local hate crime.
Why would that be? The researchers hypothesise that latent xenophobes in Remain areas had been influenced by local norms about…
