Any unprovoked violent attack is disturbing. Thuggish behaviour is repellent, all the more so when an individual is targeted by a group. When a person is singled out because of their political beliefs, or due to their assailants’ hatred of a particular group or minority, the crime has additional significance. With a police investigation ongoing, it is too soon to draw conclusions about the motives of the men who attacked Guardian journalist and activist Owen Jones outside a London pub in the early hours of Saturday. But given that Jones has previously been accosted by far-right activists, targeted with threatening social media posts and subjected to homophobic abuse, there was already cause for concern.

On this occasion Jones was thankfully not seriously injured. But there is no cause for complacency when police believe the threat from far-right terrorism is growing, and official figures and polls offer evidence of increased levels of racism and other forms of intolerance. It is important not to overstate recent changes when for many people across the UK life continues as usual. Hatred must be distinguished from stupidity and rudeness. But evidence of an increasingly ugly public mood, including last month’s attack on a BBC crew in Westminster, must be taken seriously, particularly in light of increased far-right activity in the US and elsewhere.

The threat to journalists globally is growing and clearly those working in the UK do not face anything like the degree of risk of those in many other countries, where imprisonment and even murder can be the price of integrity. No senior UK politician has stooped as low as President Donald Trump’s verbal attacks on the press, although Boris Johnson, when himself a journalist, passed on the details of another reporter to a friend who had spoken of wanting him beaten up. But it remains difficult to imagine a reporter in the UK being physically attacked by a senior politician, as happened in the US when Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs was punched in May 2017 by the Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte (who was praised for his actions by Mr Trump).

Still, Mr Johnson’s choice of words is increasingly irresponsible. The phrase “terrible collaboration”, for example, which he used last week to describe pro-EU MPs, appears deliberately to echo the term used for Nazi allies. Bearing in mind the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016, and now that parliamentary colleagues such as Anna Soubry and Dominic Grieve are frequently derided as “traitors” by far-right activists, such demagoguery is unworthy of a prime minister. The attempt to recast our politics as an existential struggle being waged on behalf of “the people” is dangerous as well as cynical.

The deep divisions now apparent across our society far predate 2016’s vote for Brexit. Whatever happens next, our national identity crisis will take time to resolve. Every increase in politically motivated violence can only make things worse.