Matthew Doyle [Twitter account], a 47 year-old British man, has been charged with inciting racial hatred [backgrounder] after posting a series of Islamophobic tweets from his private Twitter account on March 23, following the attacks in Brussels [NYT report]. One post, where Doyle describes confronting a Muslim woman over the attacks, went viral [BBC report] on Wednesday. The tweet has since been taken down. The charge of inciting racial hatred is used in cases where “the accused person says or does something which is threatening, abusive or insulting and, by doing so, either intends to stir up racial hatred, or makes it likely that racial hatred will be stirred up.”

Home Office statistics [materials] revealed that hate crimes in England and Wales have risen by 18 percent in 2015. Police recorded [Huffington Post report] 52,528 hate crimes between 2014 and 2015, which were motivated by factors including race and religious hatred, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity. The Home Office suggested that this number did not necessarily reflect as dramatic an increase in assaults as it suggested, as “likely factors” in the rise also included improvements in the recording of such crimes, victims being more willing to report the crimes and a greater awareness of hate crimes throughout the community. The report followed an announcement by Prime Minister David Cameron that anti-Muslim hate crimes will be recorded [press release] as a separate category of crime in England and Wales.