The EU Referendum - The social impact

Part of the EU Referendum series.

There is a scary side to post-referendum UK, an increase in hate crimes being seen post-referendum.

This was brought home to me as I stood waiting to march in solidarity with my community at Pride - London, when I received a message from a friend who was approached by three thugs telling him "we'll get you out soon" and pushing him around. Since then I have heard of numerous other incidents. THIS HAS TO STOP!

Throughout this referendum campaign, I have been worried that we are normalising prejudice, we are providing a respectable face of prejudice. I have been worried about this for many years, worried about the language our politicians and our media use to "other" people to drive policy through. Over many years I have been worried about the media scaremongering and outright lying in their headlines (a convenient clarification is posted in a small section deep in the next day's paper) to carefully direct people's anger towards the wrong targets. The language of austerity, the language of this referendum, have made me deeply concerned and so far my fears are coming true.

I truly believe that the majority of people voting Leave did not intend for this to happen but the racists and xenophobes have been empowered by this, they now believe that 52% of the country agrees with them and it emboldens them to take their campaign to the streets, to threaten and terrorise people in our community.

We now, as a country, have to stand up against this aggression and we have to ensure that it does not continue. If you see, or have been affected by racism or xenophobia report it to the police, we have to have a zero-tolerance approach to this. I will stand by those who feel this country has turned against them, if we all do, if we all stand up to the hate we can stamp it out.