Poles and other eastern Europeans living in Britain fear there will be a fresh spike in hate crime when the Brexit process is formally triggered before the end of March, MPs have been told.
Polish community leaders told the Commons home affairs committee that since the EU referendum a small minority of people in Britain had been emboldened to launch verbal and physical attacks against migrants in public places, at work and in schools.
“Every statement and every political activity around Brexit negotiations brings a spike in inquiries to our organisation. We expect when article 50 is triggered it will bring another level of discontent,” Barbara Drozdowicz, of the East European Resource Centre, told the MPs.
Police figures show reports of hate crime rose by 46% in the immediate aftermath of the vote last June and a second spike occurred in the last week of July, before incidences settled back to a weekly level 16% above those seen in 2015.
Community leaders say complaints to the police receive a mixed response and some schools turn a blind eye to incidents on their premises.
Joanna Mludzinska, chair of the Polish Social and Cultural Association, told MPs of her shock when her west London cultural centre was covered in graffiti, and said only a government guarantee on the post-Brexit status of the 3 million EU nationals in Britain would give them the confidence to reply to such attacks.
Tadeusz Stenzel, the chair of trustees at the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, said of those responsible for the attacks: “They feel there is a less of a brake on them and they think if the people involved are migrants it is not a racist situation.”
Drozdowicz said her resource centre had experienced an “explosion of calls” since the referendum result. She said there were incidents of teams of Polish construction workers being told to “go home”. A mother with a child in a buggy in the street had been told to “take your Polish bastard back home”.
In a secondary school in west London, teachers had seen a Polish boy being beaten and had failed to respond. When his mother had complained to the school she was told that if he had been black it would have been treated as a racist incident.
Drozdowicz said not all police forces were ready to respond to those who wanted to report hate crime. “They are sometimes waved away as employment issues about discrimination. Others are told that if they do not speak fluent English they are partially to blame for what happened,” she said.
Drozdowicz said the pace of change had been too much for some communities, and people were turning on their neighbours. She said integration policies were not yet in place to help them respond, with east European communities often regarded as a problem rather than an asset.
She stressed that hate crime victims were more likely to be poor east Europeans who were working in low-skilled jobs rather than middle-class professionals such as doctors, managers and lawyers.
Yvette Cooper, the committee’s chair, said the details of hate crime incidents they had heard were appalling. “Hate crime is appalling, unBritish and should have no place in our country,” she said.
