Boris Johnson’s comments on women wearing the veil led to a surge in anti-Muslim attacks and incidents of abuse, the monitoring group Tell Mama has said.
In its annual report, the group said two significant spikes occurred in 2018. The first, in spring, reflected the “Punish a Muslim day” incident when letters were sent to Muslim homes, institutions and places of work. The letter suggested people could win “points” for a range of activities aimed at Muslims, including removing a headscarf from a woman or beating a person up. Muslim MPs also received the letters.
However,a second, more significant spike occurred in August after Johnson wrote a column referring to veiled Muslim women as “letterboxes” and “bank robbers”.
In the week following that article, Tell Mama said anti-Muslim incidents increased by 375% – from eight incidents the previous week, to 38 in the following.
Of the 38 anti-Muslim hate incidents, 22 were directed at Muslim women who wore the niqab, or face veil.
The group recorded a total of 57 incidents in the three weeks following the publication of the column by the former foreign secretary and current prime minister, 32 of which were directed at Muslim women. It said that between 5 and 29 August, 42% of the street-based incidents reported to Tell Mama directly referenced Johnson and the language used in his column.
Johnson was widely criticised by senior Tories after making the remarks, with demands for an apology from the then party chairman, Brandon Lewis.
In the article in question, Johnson had said he felt “fully entitled” to expect women to remove face coverings when talking to him at his MP’s surgery. He also said schools and universities should be able to take the same approach if a student “turns up … looking like a bank robber”.
Johnson had called the burqa “oppressive”, adding it was “absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes”.
Johnson was subsequently investigated over the comments by an independent panel and was cleared of breaking the Conservative party’s code of conduct. The investigation into whether he broke party rules was triggered automatically after the receipt of a number of complaints over the column.
A spokesperson for Tell Mama said: “The rising instances of discrimination, hate speech, and anti-Muslim literature indicate that a more general intolerance and hatred is growing. These typologies are seldom prosecutable by law and have proven more difficult to achieve satisfactory outcomes and solutions for victims.
“Similarly, this year we analysed the trends in verbal abuse, finding a common theme whereby perpetrators use language attacking Islam and religious practices alongside, for example, anti-Muslim hate incidents that range from abusive behaviour, discrimination, or threats.
“We therefore emphasise the gravity of attacks on Islam in tandem with hatred directed at individuals or institutions. The two are interconnected, thus hatred and intolerance must both be challenged simultaneously.”
In total Tell Mama recorded 1,072 verified anti-Muslim or Islamophobic reports. Of the 1,072 cases, 745 occurred at a street level and 327 were online.
Over the three years to 2018, the group said it recorded a steady annual increase in street-based anti-Muslim incidents. However, this year demonstrated an 11% reduction in street-based incidents compared with 2017.
TimelineBoris Johnson - three decades of sackings and giving offence
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Fired by the Times after landing a job at the newspaper through his family connections. In an article about the discovery of Edward II’s Rose Palace, Johnson allegedly invented a quote from his godfather, the historian Colin Lucas.
Discussed plans to have a tabloid journalist beaten up with his fellow Old Etonian Darius Guppy. Johnson said he would try to obtain personal details of the News of the World journalist Stuart Collier. Guppy talked of hiring a contact from south London to assault Collier.
In a Telegraph column he predicted that when Tony Blair arrived in Congo “the tribal warriors” would “all break out in watermelon smiles”. He added that the Queen loved the Commonwealth “partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies”. It was written the year after he became an MP.
Compared same-sex marriage to polygamy and bestiality in his debut book, Friends, Voters, Countrymen. “If gay marriage was OK – and I was uncertain on the issue – then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog,” said Johnson. Four years before, Johnson described gay men as “tank-topped bumboys” in his Telegraph column.
Condemned for publishing an article as editor of the Spectator in which Liverpool fans were blamed for the 1989 Hillsborough disaster. While the article says the event was “undeniably” a tragedy, it added: “That is no excuse for Liverpool’s failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon.” It also claimed that people in Liverpool “wallow” in their “victim status”.
Fired by the then Tory leader, Michael Howard, from positions as shadow arts minister and party vice-chairman for lying about his extramarital affair with Spectator columnist Petronella Wyatt. When it transpired that tabloid reports, which Johnson had dismissed as an “inverted pyramid of piffle”, were true, he had refused to resign.
Suggested that a rise in the number of Malaysian women attending university was down to their desire to find a husband.
Suggested the “part-Kenyan” US president Barack Obama had an “ancestral dislike” of the UK.
Won “most offensive Erdoğan poem” competition, two months before he was appointed foreign secretary. The limerick, for which he was handed £1,000 by the Spectator, described the Turkish president having sex with a goat.
Caught on camera reciting a colonial-era poem by Rudyard Kipling in front of local dignitaries while on an official trip to Myanmar. Johnson, who was accused of “incredible insensitivity”, had been inside the sacred Buddhist site the Shwedagon Pagoda when he began murmuring the first verse of Mandalay, a later verse of which includes the line: “Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud, wot they called the Great Gawd Budd”.
Criticised for making incorrect statement that the jailed British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been “teaching people journalism” rather than being on holiday in Iran. The then foreign secretary condemned her conviction for spying but his comments were later cited as proof by Iran that she was engaged in “propaganda against the regime”.
Came under fire for describing Muslim women in burqas as looking like “bank robbers” and “letter boxes”. Making the comments in his Telegraph column, Johnson also called the garments “oppressive” but added that Britain should not follow other countries in banning them in public.
Media firestorm ensued after a neighbour recorded a loud altercation at the home Johnson shared with his partner, Carrie Symonds. Johnson refused to answer questions about the circumstances of the tape, which featured screaming, shouting and banging. A picture of the couple posing happily subsequently appeared in the media, but Johnson repeatedly refused to say who had taken or released the photograph, or whether it was an old picture.
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The group added it should be noted that there were four major terrorist attacks in the UK in 2017, which led to sharp spikes of reported anti-Muslim hate incidents.
In 2018 anti-Muslim attacks and incidents most commonly took place in public areas. Incidents which took place within the victim’s household or private property increased by 11%, and those at the victim’s place of work rose by 8% since the previous year.
Consistent with previous reports, the majority of victims were female at 57% and the main perpetrators were male.
Iman Atta, the director of Tell Mama, said: “We are in a period of instability, politically and socially. Even in 2018, when there were no major terrorist attacks in comparison to 2017, when there were four of them in the United Kingdom, levels of anti-Muslim hatred or Islamophobia have remained stubbornly high. In fact, levels in 2018 equalled those of 2017 when the major terrorist attacks took place.
“Anti-Muslim hatred has become an issue that is not going away and which has been growing since we started supporting victims of anti-Muslim hate in 2011. We ask all politicians to reflect on the future of our country.”