Tim Farron has rightly taken a stand against the upsurge of race hate crimes post-Brexit, but as a party Liberal Democrats need to develop a coherent response that does more than state how repellent racism is or how much it jars with liberal values.

The issue is not likely to disappear soon. Just yesterday Scotland Yard’s deputy commissioner Craig Mackey reported that race crimes in the capital had doubled.

The projection of all society’s ills on migrants and foreigners is nothing new. Yet the Leave result appears to have taken the cork off emotions around immigration, Islamophobia and paranoia over being ‘a minority in our own country’ which had been brewing for many years.

Post-Brexit racism, as it is being called, is pre-existing prejudice and fear seemingly legitimised, sanctioned and mainstreamed in the minds of the perpetrators. This has caused Black, Asian and other visible minorities, even second and third generation British citizens, to experience a sudden change in climate as the pollution of racism drifted in.

The immigration debate often carries a subtext which is about race and colour. Dog whistle newspaper headlines and government campaign posters have created a climate of suspicion of our neighbours and fear of ‘the other’ which extends to people of colour no matter how many generations their families have been in the UK. People I know, who had not heard the n-word or the p-word for many years, or even decades, are now being subjected to such abuse.

The spike in ‘post-Brexit racism’ is alarming but the ‘normal’ level of race hate goes largely unremarked each year. Before the referendum, reported race hate crimes were running at 130 every single day, or one attack every 11 minutes. In addition, estimates put under-reporting rate of between 40 and 50 percent.
Everyday racism is commonplace, even in multicultural areas. How many Muslim women, for example, can get through any given week without facing hostility on the streets? The everyday reality before Brexit was an affront to decency and modernity before we even approached the ‘spike’.

Many on the progressive side of politics have failed to challenge and change the direction and undertone of debates around immigration and Islamophobia, or the institutional racism that is responsible for British-born Black people being twice as likely to be unemployed as their white counterparts.

National action is part of the solution – laws, targets and national debate – but top-down initiatives cannot succeed alone without a local approach. Bringing local communities together through shared dialogue and decision-making, diverse devolution that welcomes and embeds newcomers into community life, can help bring people together and spread power downwards.

But such solutions need careful design to balance the self-selecting active citizens, who often make up un-diverse attendees at community forums, with more reluctant attenders.

There are other actions that we can take too. The Government needs a new national strategy on reporting and prevention, and to introduce a stand-alone offence for hate on social media. The courts can be encouraged not to feel obligated to disregard racially-aggravated circumstances of a crime if the defendant pleads guilty.

Anti-racism is a doing verb not a passive self-declaration. It is constant, not a fad. It involves working against all causes of racism, whether that be explicit racism on the streets and social media, institutional racism causing unequal outcomes. Anti-racism also implies challenging our own unconscious attitudes or challenging ourselves about mono-cultural spaces, opportunity and privilege.

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* Lester Holloway is a former councillor and member of the Equalities Policy Working Group, and a member of the Race Equality Taskforce