It was a toss a coin job whether I put the OP on here, rather than on the politics board. I suppose by using the words "entirely predictable" I could be accused of politicising things, but if you read my message, you can see that it is, in essence, a neutral conveying of the results of a Freedom of Information Act request.

Although we keep on being told that shouldn't think of politics in right v left terms any more, that's still very much how I think of it and I'm pretty sure it always will be. I'd say that, mostly, race and religion hate crimes would be thought of in terms of the political far right, but seeing the problems the Labour party have had with the Jewish community in recent years, the left are not spotless when it comes to intolerance against other races either - so, although I thought there was every chance that the thread may turn political. my opening post was meant to be neutral in right v left terms.

I see one of the contributors we have on here who only ever contributes on one subject took the chance to use the report as an excuse to go on a Muslim bashing jaunt. Eric's fine post largely dealt with that, but I would add a couple of things. First, I accept that some of the crimes that make up the reported increase since the Referendum have to be a response to the actions of some Muslim extremists, but JDerrida misses the point that a portion of the report is taking up by responses to crimes, including murder, committed on EU nationals who I suppose may be Muslims, but are more likely not to be.

The second point I'd make is that in both the Referendum and General Election there is strong evidence that parts of the country which would be termed working class are voting in a particular way. The bigger cities in England and Wales may have tended to vote Remain, but densely populated areas of the North West, North East, West Midlands, Yorkshire and South Wales were solidly Leave areas.

Although the last mentioned stuck with it's Labour roots last month when the choice became party political, Corbyn's mob didn't match their performance in other parts of England in large parts of the other areas I mentioned - the working class are not supporting the swing back to Labour in the numbers I would have expected and my guess is that there are very many people in those areas who feel completely disenfranchised. It's easy to say that they are a bunch of thick racists living out in the sticks, but I don't believe that - there's far more to what's going on than that.

Returning to my use of the words "entirely predictable", the overriding reason why I did note vote Leave was because I did not want to be on the same side as the, I believe, pretty small racist minority that were voting that way. I have always thought that the win for Leave provided an opportunity for these racists to, completely wrongly, believe that their views now represented mainstream public thinking and that they had a licence to commit hate crimes that they hadn't had before.

To those who would like to put the rise in offences down to recent events in London and Manchester, that just won't wash I'm afraid - the killings at Westminster Bridge occurred in late March I believe and so the killings by Muslims in this country have all occurred in the last three months, whereas there are plenty of on line sources that were already reporting rises in race and religious hate crimes in the months immediately following the Leave vote.

Finally, given the way this thread has developed, maybe it would be best to put in on the politics board?