LONDON: British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has said that anti-Muslim hatred in the United Kingdom is now “on a scale that I’ve never known in my lifetime”.
Speaking at a Spectator fringe event of the Labour annual conference, hosted by Lord Michael Gove, Shabana Mahmood said: “When I was a child, I think I was seven or eight years old, that’s the first time I heard the word ‘Paki’… so it’s not as if I haven’t been racially abused before. But what is happening now is something much deeper and much more pervasive, and it does feel like it’s everywhere at the moment. Members of my own family, just in the last couple of weeks, you know, a handful of them have been called ‘f**** Paki’ in Birmingham, in places that I go to regularly with my family.”
The “heirs to the skinheads and the Paki-bashers of old” were among those who took to the streets of London for the Unite the Kingdom rally, the Home Secretary said.