Britain has witnessed a surge in the incidents of religious hate crime over the past few years, mostly aimed at Muslims, according to official figures released Tuesday.
The UK Home Office data revealed that 94,098 hate crimes were recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2017-18, an increase of 17 per cent on the year before.
This annual increase equates to a 40 per cent spike for “religiously-aggravated hate crime”, with 8,336 such crimes bring recorded in 2017-18 against 5,949 in the previous year.
The figures also indicate that most religious hate crime, 52 per cent of all offences, was aimed at Muslims or so-called Islamophobic hate crime.
“This increase is thought to be largely driven by improvements in police recording, although there has been spikes in hate crime following certain events such as the EU Referendum and the terrorist attacks in 2017,” the Home Office analysis says.