Britain must crack down hard to contain hate crime: Yvonne Ridley
The only way for Britain to tackle rising hate crime in the country is to launch a crackdown on those who feel free to attack others for their color of skin or religion, British author and journalist Yvonne Ridley says.
“The only way in which we can address the issue is by cracking down hard on these sorts of individuals who feel emboldened to be able to let their odious views be known quite vocally,” Ridley said in an interview with the Press TV on Monday.
The analyst said the rise of far-right politics in Britain and other parts of Europe has encouraged many hate crime perpetrators to easily insult and abuse others.
“We now see that this sort of incident is happening more frequently and people are being targeted in Britain for their skin color, for their religion, it seems to coincide with the rise of the far-right in Britain as well as across Europe,” she said.
The comments came after two major hate incidents in Britain in which black people suffered harsh verbal abuses. Both incidents were recorded by bystanders and sent online.
A first incident on a Ryanair flight from Barcelona to London involved a white man who hurled abusive shouts at an elderly black woman only because the man did not want her to sit on the same row in the plane.
The video, watched more than a million times on the internet, has sparked widespread criticism about inaction of the Ryanair staff on board the plane while they were attending to the incident. The budget airline has announced that it had simply referred the case to the police.
In her interview to Press TV, Ridley called the Ryanair hate incident “shocking”, saying the elderly black woman was “abused in the wildest way verbally”.
“This video was extremely damning and it showed this man shouting at this poor black woman while her daughter was trying to tell him that her mother was disabled and he did not just want her sitting next to her. It was extraordinary and shocking as well,” said Ridley .
Britain has seen a dramatic surge in the number of hate crimes committed across the country over the past years. The Home Office (interior ministry) announced in a recent report that hate crime cases recorded in the UK had risen by almost 17 percent. The report also admitted that religious hate crimes in Britain, especially those targeting Muslims, had increased by almost 40 percent.
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