‘We voted for you to go home.” Those were the words flung at 34-year-old Tinni Guha Roy, a former member of the GB rowing team, on a London train in the aftermath of Britain’s EU referendum. “I now feel sad at how naive I was to feel so proud to represent GB,” she tells me.

A 20-year-old Essex University student tells me about his father, who owns a minimarket in Basildon. “After the referendum one of his usual customers came kicking things down at the front of the shop, yelling, ‘This place is ours now. Go back to your country.’”

Towards the end of August, in central London, 21-year-old Kyam was called “a terrorist, al-Qaida scum, a Paki and …to go back where I came from”. No one intervened. “A whole line of white male black-cab drivers were watching from across the road, and found it amusing.”

Lasting rise in hate crime after EU referendum, figures show Read more

A week after the referendum, the mother of 17-year-old JJ Fadaka was told by a colleague that it was time for her “to get back to Africa”. Twenty-two-year-old Lewis, a Yorkshireman of Jamaican heritage, was abused by two white men on the streets of Leeds. “They repeatedly shouted: ‘We voted out and we get this? People like you should be out of here. We don’t need you n****** around.’”

An Iraqi-born writer and performer, Amrou Al-Kadhi was on London’s underground system a few days after the referendum. He says: “A drunk elderly white man on the tube was looking in my direction throughout the entire journey, and as I was getting off the tube, he shouted ‘Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. Get out, get out, get out!’”

These are just a handful of the stories I’ve been sent. These crimes are a matter of national shame. Figures released last week by the National Police Chiefs’ Council revealed that hate crime reports, after a jump of 58% in the week following the nation’s endorsement of Brexit, are still 14% higher than a year ago. But note: these are reported incidents. Almost none of the people who got in touch with me reported their abuse to the police. One said the process took too long; another said the police were “actively unhelpful” when they had previously reported mugging and homophobic abuse; another: “It was late, and I just wanted to get home and forget it had happened, to be honest.”

Nineteen-year-old Fatima – whose attacker tried to rip off her hijab, yelling “You’re in Britain! Fucking take that shit off, here we get naked” – said she just felt ashamed, and that it would be wasting police time. We can only guess at the true scale of hatred on our streets.

Some allegations have been far worse than those described here. In August Arkadiusz Józwik was allegedly beaten to death in Harlow, Essex, by a gang of teenagers after being heard speaking Polish in the street. In Milton Keynes a 34-year-old pregnant woman was said to have been racially abused and then kicked in the stomach, losing her unborn child. Last Friday night a Polish man was violently attacked in Leeds.

Discussing the post-referendum wave of racist and xenophobic abuse can provoke a rather dispiritingly defensive reaction. The issue is being politicised – so the retort goes – in order to undermine the referendum result. So let this column be clear: nothing of the sort is happening. The British people voted to leave the EU, their verdict must be respected and accepted, and the debate now focuses on ensuring a just Brexit.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Those who led the leave campaign made a strategic decision: to transform a referendum on the EU into a vote on immigration.’ Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA

Another objection is that, by discussing this tidal wave of hatred, the motive of people like me is to smear leave voters as racists. This is completely untrue. Our quarrel is with those who led the leave campaign. They made a strategic decision: to transform a referendum on the EU into a vote on immigration.

To win such a vote, they opted to use inflammatory rhetoric: portraying immigrants as potential rapists, murderers and terrorists; unveiling posters showing a line of dark-skinned refugees, and warning we were at “breaking point”; claiming leave was necessary to stop millions entering Britain after Turkey joined the EU (a lie), and that we would be consequently left at the mercy of Turkish criminals.

Our new foreign secretary, Boris Johnson – a joke now lacking a punchline – suggested that Barack Obama’s opposition to Brexit was motivated by his Kenyan heritage.

And here is what happened. The small minority of people in this country who believe it is acceptable to yell racist abuse at strangers getting on with their lives felt emboldened. Their intolerance now seemed to have official sanction. They believed that, given the politicians’ rhetoric, the British people had voted to drive foreigners out of the country – that, for the first time, they had a democratic mandate.

The killing of a Polish man exposes the reality of post-referendum racism | Jakub Krupa Read more

This perceived mandate now has to be destroyed. Polling shows, for example, that 77% of leave voters believe EU migrants already living here should remain. We need a coalition of remain and leave figures to come together to confront this tide of racism and xenophobia.

They need to make it clear that every shout of racist abuse, let alone act of violence, is a disgrace to this country. They need to appeal to the great traditions of British activists, led by minority ethnic people, who confronted racism in all its forms. They need to show their solidarity with minority Britons and EU migrants who now feel besieged.

Of course, racism is not simply about sickening, random attacks. From the disproportionate stop-and-search of black people to the increased poverty and unemployment rates among ethnic minority Britons, racism is systemic, with a heritage that goes back centuries.

Defeating it is a struggle that still has so far to go. But in the here and now, the security and safety – the lives, even – of our fellow Britons are imperilled. Pointing that out is not an attempt to subvert the democratic will of the British people. We all have a responsibility to speak out, however we voted in June. If we remain silent, the racists will treat this as tacit endorsement – and history will damn us for it.