Religious hate crime is rising in Britain, including against Muslims. But the monitoring organization Tell MAMA’s dramatic figures raise questions about the true scale of the increase.
Muslim women walk through London. Reports of anti-Muslim hate have risen sharply in the capital, although official crime data paints a more complex picture. Photo: Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images.
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When Boris Johnson joked in 2018 that women wearing burqas looked like “letter boxes” and “bank robbers”, he was swiftly accused of Islamophobia and faced demands for an apology. Yet Johnson, then the former foreign secretary, was actually arguing against banning the face veil.
In typical Tory fashion, he condemned the burqa as “oppressive” and “ridiculous” while opposing the kind of ban already adopted by several European countries. Eight years later, such restrictions have become even more widespread, with Portugal among the latest European countries to approve a ban on face coverings in public spaces.
Tell MAMA, the NGO that monitors anti-Muslim hate, claimed that the Johnson column had been followed by a 375% increase in abuse and attacks on Muslims. In practice, this meant that it had recorded eight offline incidents in the week before the column and 38 in the week after. Whether that increase was caused by Johnson's comments was never established. Tell MAMA's own annual data showed that eight was an unusually low weekly figure, making the subsequent rise appear particularly dramatic.
This week, the BBC reported new data from Tell MAMA showing a rise in reports of anti-Muslim hate in London. The organization recorded 1,031 incidents in the capital during the first half of 2026, already surpassing the total for the whole of 2023.
Tell MAMA described the figures as “alarming”, saying the annual number of reports was more than six times higher in 2025 than in 2021 and pointed to a “sustained escalation of anti-Muslim hate”.
A woman wearing a niqab in East London. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson criticized Islamic face coverings but opposed a ban while in government. Photo: Sam Mellish/In Pictures via Getty Images
How Reliable Is Tell MAMA?
There is reason to treat the figures with caution. Tell MAMA is not an official crime statistics body but an advocacy and monitoring organization. Much of its work has been financed by the government. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government made up to £1m ($1.35m) available to Tell MAMA through its parent organization, Faith Matters, in 2024–25.
The organization's government funding ended on 31 March 2025, after the organization declined an offer of a six-month extension. In July the same year, the government appointed the British Muslim Trust as its new funded partner.
Tell MAMA has also long occupied a contentious position within the politics of anti-Muslim hatred. More than a decade ago, The Spectator reported that founder Fiyaz Mughal had left a Whitehall working group on anti-Muslim hatred, citing concerns about the associations of some members and the organizations they wanted brought into government.
Tell MAMA itself subsequently faced a boycott campaign from Muslim critics, some of whom objected to its willingness to work with Ahmadis, liberal Muslims, Jewish organizations and gay rights campaigners.
More important when assessing its statistics, however, is how they are collected.
Dodgy Data and Fake Facts
Tell MAMA's figures cannot be treated as a representative survey of Britain's Muslim population. They are based primarily on incidents reported by victims and witnesses, meaning that those who contact the organization constitute a self-selecting sample rather than a random one.
There have also been disputes over the accuracy and presentation of its numbers. In 2013, Tell MAMA claimed that the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby by Islamist terrorists in Woolwich, London, had been followed by a “wave of attacks” on Muslims and that a “sense of endemic fear” had gripped British Muslims.
When the journalist Andrew Gilligan examined the figures, he found that more than half of the incidents had taken place online. In fact, only 8% of those logged involved the physical targeting of people and none was serious enough to require medical attention. There were, however, four serious attacks on Islamic buildings.
Tell MAMA also claimed on social media that a Muslim woman in Bolton had been “knocked unconscious”, but the story turned out to be false. The organization's founder Mughal complained about Gilligan to the Press Complaints Commission, which ruled against him.
The broader problem is not that Tell MAMA’s reports are worthless, but that changes in the number of people contacting the organization cannot automatically be translated into equivalent changes in the prevalence of anti-Muslim hatred. As Tom Chivers argued in UnHerd, publicity surrounding Tell MAMA itself can encourage more reporting.
Tell MAMA says anti-Muslim incidents in London rose from 313 in 2021 to 1,031 in the first half of this year. That means the 2026 figure is already more than three times the 2021 annual total. It should not, however, be confused with Tell MAMA’s separate claim that its 2025 annual figure was more than six times its 2021 total.
Although Tell MAMA says the incidents include “street-based aggression”, “xenophobic rhetoric” and the targeting of Islamic buildings, it does not provide a full breakdown of the 1,031 reports by type.
In response, the organization has called for more recording and prosecution of anti-Muslim crimes by police, greater funding for community groups and stronger action against anti-Muslim content online.
Metropolitan Police data also shows fluctuations rather than an uninterrupted rise. There were 2,318 hate crimes recorded in July 2026, above the recent monthly average of 1,949 but below the 2,614 recorded in November 2023.
Ministry of Justice data provides another measure. There were 6,163 convictions for principal offenses classed as racially or religiously aggravated in England and Wales in 2025, up 13% from 2024 and the highest number since 2017.
Some 70% were for public order offenses, 15% for violence against the person and 2% for criminal damage and arson. Offenses involving words or writing accounted for 3,996 convictions, or 65% of the total. These can include threatening or abusive speech and graffiti.
The Ministry of Justice does not break these figures down by religion, so they cannot tell us how many of the 6,163 convictions involved anti-Muslim offenses.
Home Office data provides the strongest evidence that anti-Muslim hate crime is rising, although it points to a far less dramatic increase than Tell MAMA's headline figures.
The Home Office found that police-recorded religious hate crime increased by 3% in the year ending March 2025, while race hate crime increased by 6%. Anti-Muslim religious hate crime rose considerably faster: 19%, from 2,690 offenses in 2023–24 to 3,199 in 2024–25.
Crucially, those comparisons exclude the Metropolitan Police. The force changed its crime-recording system in February 2024, meaning its newer figures are not directly comparable with those of previous years, and the Home Office therefore excludes it from its trend analysis.
The national figures including the Met nevertheless provide useful information about who is being targeted. In the year ending March 2025, there were 4,478 religious hate crimes targeting Muslims and 2,873 targeting Jews. But relative to the size of each population, Jewish people experienced by far the higher rate: 106 religious hate crimes per 10,000 people, compared with 12 per 10,000 Muslims.
The Home Office also found a spike in anti-Muslim offenses around the Southport murders and the riots that followed in August 2024, before the increase subsided.
Even official police figures need to be handled with care. The Home Office warns that changes in recording practices and public reporting have affected the statistics over time, so police-recorded hate crime does not provide a straightforward measure of the underlying prevalence of prejudice.
The evidence nevertheless points to a real increase in anti-Muslim hate crime. On the comparable official measure, it rose by 19% in a year, a substantial rise, but a very different one from the dramatic increases reported by Tell MAMA.
Reports to a monitoring organization, crimes recorded by police and criminal convictions all measure different things. Treating them as interchangeable may produce alarming headlines, but it does not tell us how much anti-Muslim prejudice has actually increased in Britain.
