After nearly four decades in Britain, Ali Haydor says there are now days when he wishes he could hide his brown skin. He is 44 years old. He moved from Bangladesh aged five. He lives in Southampton. He is a private hire driver. He is as British as anyone reading this, and he is frightened.
Violent protests erupted in Southampton after a British born Sikh man, who had falsely accused his white victim of a racist attack, was jailed for murder on 1 June 2026. A video of police handcuffing the dying victim was released alongside the sentencing and sparked cross party demands to scrap police guidance on differential treatment by ethnicity. A week later in Belfast, gangs of masked men went door to door in search of migrants after a white man was stabbed multiple times and lost an eye in an attack by a Sudanese immigrant. In Edinburgh, a 36 year old man was charged after a series of attacks that Keir Starmer said appeared to have an anti-Muslim motive.
These incidents are rare. They have become a rallying point for politicians and activists whose focus on crime and immigration has tapped into tensions over national identity that have been building for years.
In the summer of 2024, riots erupted across Britain after the murder of three young girls at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport. The attacker was falsely reported online to be an asylum seeker who had arrived by boat. He was a 17 year old born in Britain to Rwandan parents. He pleaded guilty. The misinformation had already done its work.
Police recorded hate crime in England and Wales rose for the first time in three years in the year ending March 2025. The Royal College of Nursing reported a 55 percent rise in reports of racism to its advice line since 2022. A third of the nursing and midwifery workforce is Black, Asian or minority ethnic. Paul Rees, head of the Nursing and Midwifery Council, said many now say “they are today facing the kind of abuse they haven’t received in decades.” Reuters spoke to 10 trade unions whose members reported patients refusing care because of a nurse’s race, an increase in racist remarks in the workplace, and migrant workers experiencing abuse.
Twasul Mohammed, who fled Sudan’s civil war as a refugee in 2016 and lives in Northern Ireland, said: “Women and kids are terrified. I haven’t sent my kids to school since this has happened.” Marcia Dixon, 61, a child of the Windrush generation whose parents were invited to help rebuild post war Britain, said she feared the racism of the 1970s was returning.
The political context makes it worse. Immigration attitudes in Britain have hardened since 2022 according to the Migration Observatory. Net migration fell sharply in 2025, from 331,000 to 171,000, after tougher visa rules introduced by the Conservatives took effect. But small boat arrivals increased 13 percent to 41,000. The numbers are much smaller than legal arrivals. They dominate the political debate entirely. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood warned in March 2026 that record levels of immigration under the Conservatives had strained public services, and that people who settled decades ago risked being caught up in a backlash.
This is the point where immigration politics stops being about borders and starts being about something uglier. A nurse who has worked in the NHS for 20 years being told by a patient that they do not want to be treated by someone of her race is not a border control issue. A refugee mother in Belfast who will not send her children to school because masked men are going door to door is not an asylum processing issue. A British Bangladeshi man who has lived in this country since he was five wishing he could hide his skin colour is not an immigration policy failure.
It is a social fabric failure.
Politicians from all parties have helped create the conditions for this. The Conservatives spent 14 years escalating immigration rhetoric without delivering the control they promised. Reform and Restore Britain have built entire platforms on the argument that immigration is an invasion. Labour has tightened its own rules and hardened its language in an attempt to neutralise the issue. None of them have addressed the consequence: that when every political party treats immigration as a crisis, people who look like immigrants become the target, whether they arrived last year or were born here 44 years ago.
The hate crime data is rising. The union reports are consistent. The testimony from people living in these communities is clear. The question is not whether anti-migrant politics is fuelling racism. The evidence says it is. The question is whether any political party is prepared to say so.