Dear IRR News subscriber,

Over the last couple of weeks, national media interest in the post-Brexit surge in racist incidents has declined. But the local media continues to give us a picture of the situation across the country, showing that acts of abuse and intimidation of people perceived as ‘foreign’ and with ‘no right to be in the country’, is continuing. The IRR publishes today a snapshot of incidents highlighted (mainly in the local press) over the last few weeks (following on from a similar overview, published on 7 July). The majority of incidents reported are abuse, such as the Portuguese woman in Maidstone told to ‘f**k off back to your own country’, the Lithuanian woman in Doddington told to ‘go home’, or the family of asylum seekers racially abused in Stoke, before being relocated by the local authority. Threats of another kind were in evidence when several Islamic centres were sent packages containing white powder (later discovered not to be noxious), with a worshipper at one mosque saying the package had a crossed-out drawing of a mosque on it along with the word ‘P**i filth’.

Some of these incidents have involved physical attacks, including a man reportedly being racially abused, spat on and head-butted in Folkstone. Others, meanwhile, have involved damage to property. After a shed in a garden belonging to a Polish family was burnt down in an arson attack in Plymouth, for example, the family later found a note on their doorstep saying ‘Go back to your f*****g country’. The summary of incidents is available here. And our regular calendar of racism and resistance, highlighting key events in the UK and Europe, can be viewed here.

IRR News team