After nearly four decades in Britain, Ali Haydor says there are now days when he wishes he could hide his brown skin.
Haydor is 44. He came to Britain from Bangladesh aged five and works as a private hire driver in Southampton.
He told Reuters that racism had become less common in his life from the middle of the 1990s onwards, apart from periods of political tension such as the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Recently, he said, that had changed.
Passengers had started questioning him about the murder of Southampton student Henry Nowak. Two told him Muslims were not compatible with Britain or the West.
"Anybody of colour is at risk at the moment," he said.
One man's experience cannot establish a national trend. There is measurable evidence moving in the same direction.
The latest comparable police figures show race hate crime up 6 per cent in a year. The Royal College of Nursing says reported racial abuse or discrimination involving nursing staff increased by 78 per cent between 2022 and 2025 among NHS organisations able to supply comparable data. Over roughly the same period, British Social Attitudes recorded a substantial fall in the proportion of people who thought migration was good for the economy or enriched British culture.
None of those datasets establishes that immigration politics caused racist abuse. They do establish that attitudes towards immigration have become less positive while some measures of racial hostility have risen.
Police in England and Wales recorded 137,550 hate crimes in the year ending March 2025.
The Metropolitan Police changed its recording system during the period, so the Home Office excludes the Met when comparing the latest year with the previous one. On that comparable basis, total recorded hate crime increased by 2 per cent.
Race hate crime increased by 6 per cent to 82,490 offences. Religious hate crime increased by 3 per cent. Within the religious category, offences recorded as targeting Muslims increased by 19 per cent outside the Met. The Home Office identified a spike following the Southport murders and the disorder that followed.
Those figures need handling carefully. Hate crime recorded by the police is affected by reporting behaviour, police practices and changes in crime recording. The Home Office itself says the police series does not provide a reliable measure of long term trends because improvements in recording contributed to much of the increase seen during the previous decade.
The Crime Survey for England and Wales gives a different picture. Using surveys conducted between April 2022 and March 2025, it estimates an average 176,000 hate crime incidents a year. That is not statistically significantly different from the previous estimate of 190,000. Over a much longer period, the survey measure has fallen: the latest estimate is 43 per cent below the 307,000 incidents estimated from surveys conducted between April 2007 and March 2009.
So the evidence does not support saying hate crime is at a historic high. It supports a narrower finding: the latest comparable police figures show a recent increase in recorded race and religious hate crime, while the more stable victimisation survey does not show a statistically significant overall rise.
The evidence from nursing staff is harder to explain through changes in police recording.
In May, the Royal College of Nursing published the results of Freedom of Information requests to NHS trusts and health boards across the UK. The responses contained 21,725 reported incidents of racial abuse or racial discrimination involving nursing staff between 2022 and 2025. For organisations able to provide comparable figures at both ends of the period, incidents increased by 78 per cent.
The RCN's own advice service shows a separate increase. Ethnic minority nursing staff seeking help after racial abuse or discrimination generated an average 58 calls a month in 2022. By 2025 that had risen to 98 a month, an increase of 70 per cent. During the first part of 2026, the average had reached 118 calls a month.
Those numbers have limitations too. Not every NHS organisation could provide usable data. Some trusts recorded incidents differently, and others supplied figures the RCN regarded as implausibly low. An increase in reporting can reflect greater willingness or ability to record abuse as well as an increase in the behaviour itself.
But the direction appears in both the employer data and the union's advice line. A separate Nursing and Midwifery Council survey of almost 38,000 professionals found that 40 per cent said they had experienced discrimination during the previous year, most often involving ethnicity or age. Internationally educated staff reported discrimination more frequently than staff educated in the UK.
This is happening in a workforce that has become increasingly ethnically diverse. At March 2025, 277,716 nurses, midwives and nursing associates on the NMC register were from Black, Asian or other minority ethnic backgrounds, representing 32.5 per cent of the register.
Public opinion on immigration has moved sharply since its recent high point.
British Social Attitudes found that in 2022, 50 per cent of people thought migrants were good for Britain's economy and the same proportion thought they enriched its cultural life. By 2025, both figures had fallen to 32 per cent.
It is not a return to the attitudes of the early 2010s. In 2011, only 21 per cent thought migration was good for the economy and 26 per cent thought it enriched British cultural life; 42 per cent thought it was bad for the economy and 40 per cent believed it undermined cultural life. Views have hardened significantly since 2022, but remain less negative overall than they were fifteen years ago.
The numbers of people entering Britain have meanwhile changed in different directions depending on which part of the immigration system is being measured.
Long term net migration fell to a provisional 171,000 in the year ending December 2025, down from a revised 331,000 a year earlier and from a peak of 944,000 in the year ending March 2023. The ONS says the latest fall was driven mainly by a reduction in nationals from outside the EU arriving for work.
Small boat arrivals moved the other way. There were 41,472 small boat arrivals in 2025, 13 per cent more than in 2024, although still 9 per cent below the 2022 peak of 45,774. Small boats accounted for about 89 per cent of the roughly 46,000 detected arrivals through irregular routes during the year.
Net migration and small boat arrivals are not competing estimates of the same thing. One measures the difference between long term immigration and emigration across the whole migration system. The other counts people detected arriving through one irregular route. In 2025, one fell sharply while the other increased. That helps explain why an overall fall in migration has not removed immigration from political debate.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood made the government's argument for tighter controls explicitly in March. She described the scale and nature of migration after 2021 as destabilising and linked it to pressure on social housing and the NHS. She also argued that the system should reward contribution and continue to distinguish between those who follow the rules and those who do not.
Criticism of immigration is not in itself racism. People can favour lower migration, oppose small boat crossings, object to particular visa policies or demand stricter border control without hostility towards somebody because of their race. Nor does the behaviour of individual offenders tell us anything reliable about immigrants generally.
The harder question is whether increasingly hostile political and public debate can spill over onto people whose only connection to immigration is how they look, their religion or where their family came from.
Reuters interviewed representatives of 10 trade unions who reported increasing racist remarks, workplace abuse and cases in which patients refused care because of a worker's race. Union leaders and experts told Reuters they believed political rhetoric had helped make overt racism more acceptable.
The Royal College of Nursing has made the same argument, accusing politicians of using rhetoric against migrants that it says has emboldened racist behaviour.
Those are assessments by organisations dealing directly with affected workers. They are not proof of causation. The available statistics cannot tell us how much of the increase in recorded abuse is attributable to political language, particular crimes, social media, changes in reporting, immigration levels or other factors.