Welcome to Harlow ... the home of hate crime, racism and xenophobia
IN THE WAKE OF THE MURDER OF A POLISH MAN, AND OTHER RACIST ASSAULTS, THE ESSEX TOWN OF HARLOW HAS BECOME SYNONY MOUS WITH POST-BREXIT XENOPHOBIA.
EVEN on a sunny Friday lunchtime the Essex town of Harlow looks grim and feels tense. And there are a lot of angry people. “It’s all crap – this wasn’t a hate crime – it was just a group of lads having a go on a Saturday night,” says Jordan, 24, with a pint outside the William Aylmer pub.
“Now everyone in Harlow is being labelled racist and all the Poles are walking around being able to do what they want and say what they want because they can say they’re the victims and we’re supposed to be the problem. It’s our country. The world’s gone mad.”
The “crap” he’s talking about is the vicious murder of 40-year-old Polish factory worker Arkadiusz Jozwik.
Two weeks ago the married father-oftwo was attacked in the street and died in hospital two days later. A friend is still recovering and six teenagers have been arrested, questioned and released on bail pending investigation.
Jozwik had been in the UK for four years and initial reports have suggested he was targeted because he was speaking Polish with his friend. Then two Poles were attacked last Sunday, just hours after a march and vigil to honour Jozwik.
The attacks have shone a spotlight not just on Harlow but on what many see as the atmosphere of hate that remains in the wake of the Brexit vote.
Figures released by the National Police Chiefs Council show that in the first week of August there was a record 58 per cent increase in reported hate crimes in England compared with the previous year. A freedom of information request has also found that southern English constituencies with the largest “leave” vote have also recorded the biggest rise in reported hate crimes since the referendum.
Kent – which voted two-thirds in favour of leaving the EU – has seen a 143 per cent increase in hate crime since the vote to leave. More than 6,000 such incidents have been reported since the Brexit vote.
A report collated by social media sites including PostRefRacism found incidents including London restaurant diners refusing to be served by Eastern European waiters and people in Sussex telling a six-year-old girl to “f**k off home. ARLOW voted 68 per cent in favour of leaving. Many of the shops are boarded up; the ones doing best are pawnbrokers and cash converters. The owner of a large Polish deli in the centre of Harlow is a friend of Jozwik’s family but doesn’t want to be named because his shop has already been targeted.
“I came here 11 years ago, started picking cucumbers for three pounds an hour, got my bus driver’s licence, saved some money with my wife and rented a little shop here,” he says.
“Now we have two shops. I love England – we speak English, my kids go to school here. Last month, we had graffiti on one of our shops – the usual stuff: Go home you Polish c**ts.
“The first and second times I cleaned it up but the third time I called the police. They were very good – they got the CCTV footage. I was really shocked as it was a middle-aged woman who knew us and my family. She was drunk when she was doing it. She was fined but she didn’t apologise to us. It’s like she didn’t see us real people.”
Ethnic minority journalists coming to Harlow to cover the story have been racially abused and while local people may feel the town is being scapegoated it is clear there are serious problems.
Last month, John Hennigan, 50, from Harlow, hit the headlines after he told a female judge she was “a bit
H” Pole Arkadiusz Jozwik, 40, was murdered in Harlow of a c**t”. He was being sentenced for a ninth breach of a 2005 Asbo for racist abuse. His crimes have included painting a swastika on his front door, making Nazi salutes in a pub and verbally abusing a black woman and her two children.
The police say they are taking hate crimes seriously. But despite the rise in reported incidents, prosecutions have fallen by 10 per cent year-on-year.
Yesterday, Essex Police held a community meeting in Harlow to discuss “crime and antisocial behaviour” but failed to mention hate crimes.
Mark Hamilton, the assistant chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the lead officer on hate crime for the National Police Chiefs Council, says: “The figures show that clearly there has been a significant rise in hate crime since the referendum.”
The Institute of Race Relations claimed that police forces may be relying on increasing logging of offences to show they are taking the issue seriously while failing to actually act on abuse.
At the other end of the spectrum, Roger Tilbrook, chair of the fringe right-wing English Democrats party, believes the police are being “politicised” and forced to focus on hate crime.
Hamilton denies this. “This is not about politics. It is not a crime to be racist or Islamophobic in your beliefs. We are not becoming Big Brother or banning free speech.
“What we are doing is saying that if your behaviour results in people being attacked or feeling they can’t walk down the street without fear, we will do something about it.”
Back in Harlow, brothers Gavin and Terry Tyler are running their fruit and veg stall in the market square.
They’re angry: not just about the way the town has been portrayed, but also about how immigrants have been treated.
“I don’t think this [murder] was about racism – it’s about kids not being disciplined by their parents,” Terry says.
“Teenagers are just being allowed to roam free. That’s what the police and parents need to do something about.
“It’s not the Poles or the Eastern Europeans who are a problem. They work hard. The problem is these young white men – they all want the TOWIE lifestyle but they don’t want to work or learn and then they blame people like that Polish guy for everything.”