Antisemitic hate incidents have reached a record level in the UK, with the Jewish community targeted at a rate of nearly four times a day last year, figures indicate.
There were 1,382 antisemitic incidents recorded nationwide in 2017 by the Community Security Trust.
This was the highest tally that the trust, a charity that monitors antisemitism, has registered for a calendar year since it began gathering such data in 1984. The figure rose by 3%, compared with a total, in 2016, of 1,346 incidents – a tally that itself was a record annual total.
There was no obvious single cause behind the trend, the trust said. “Often increases in antisemitic incidents have been attributable to reactions to specific trigger events that cause identifiable, short-term, spikes in incident levels. However, this was not the case in 2017. Instead, it appears that the factors that led to a general, sustained, high level of antisemitic incidents in 2016 continued throughout much of 2017.”
The report pointed to a rise in all forms of hate crime following the EU referendum as well as publicity surrounding alleged antisemitism in the Labour party. These factors may have caused higher levels of incidents as well as encouraged more reporting of antisemitic incidents from victims and witnesses in the Jewish community, the trust said.
The trust’s figures showed a 34% increase in the number of violent antisemitic assaults, from 108 in 2016 to 145 in 2017. The most common single type of incident in 2017 involved verbal abuse randomly directed at Jewish people in public.
There was a fall in the number of incidents that involved social media, from 289 in 2016 to 247 last year. Three-quarters of all the antisemitic incidents were recorded in Greater London and Greater Manchester, home to the two largest Jewish communities in the UK.
The trust’s chief executive, David Delew, said: “Hatred is rising and Jewish people are suffering as a result. This should concern everybody because it shows anger and division that threaten all of society. We have the support of government and police, but prosecutions need to be more visible and more frequent.”
The home secretary, Amber Rudd, said antisemitism was a “despicable form of abuse” which had “absolutely no place in British society”.
She said: “I welcome this report’s findings that the rise in reported incidents partly reflects the improving response to these horrendous attacks and better information sharing between the CST and police forces around the UK. But even one incident is one too many, and any rise in incidents is clearly concerning, which is why this government will continue its work protecting the Jewish community and other groups from antisemitism and hate crime.”
The shadow communities secretary, Andrew Gwynne, said the findings were extremely concerning and emphasised “just how important it is that we all make a conscious effort to call out and confront antisemitism”.
A spokesperson for advocacy group Hope Not Hate said the levels of antisemitism remained unacceptably high and it was concerning to see that incidents had not declined.
Stephen Silverman, director of investigations and enforcement at the Campaign Against Antisemitism, said the trust figures were indicative of official 2017 police statistics. “Antisemitic crime has been rising dramatically since 2014 and that rise is not explained by an increase in reporting, and we have seen no noticeable impact from Brexit,” he said.
Silverman added: “We believe that Jews are being singled out disproportionately and with increasing violence due to the spread of antisemitic conspiracy myths originating from Islamists, the far-left and far-right, which society is failing to address, as evidenced by the ongoing disgraceful situation in the Labour party, and because the Crown Prosecution Service declines to prosecute so often that antisemites no longer fear any consequences to their actions.”
Until the criminal justice system and political parties stopped “paying lip service to antisemitism,” he said, “the threat to the security of British Jews was at risk of reaching crisis point”.New data this week revealed that hundreds of hate crimes have been committed at or near schools and colleges in the last two years, most linked to race and ethnicity.