THE head of civil-rights group Liberty has accused the UK Government of deliberately fostering a hostile environment for immigrants which has contributed to an increase in hate crime after the Brexit vote.

Martha Spurrier, who has taken over the high-profile role as director of Liberty from Shami Chakrabarti, suggested Prime Minister Theresa May had pursued policies as Home Secretary that had contributed to this.

May’ successor as Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, has just announced tougher sentences for those convicted of hate crimes and £2.4 million to help improve security at places of worship. However, Spurrier, a human-rights barrister, contrasted Rudd’s warning that there was now a climate of hostility towards immigrants, with May’s comment in 2013 that she sought to create a hostile environment for illegal immigrants.

Spurrier said: “Over the last five years, the Tory Government have openly said that they would create a hostile environment for immigrants. Their own language, their own policy, is called hostile environment. They make no bones about it.

“Yet, when they see it pay off in a rise in hate crime, they then say ‘What they really do not want is this hostile environment’. The language is really telling. You reap what you sow.

“Calling it a hostile environment says to people ‘You can play a part in that too’.”

Spurrier said that immigration-law changes under May had turned citizens into immigration officers by placing an onus on people such as private landlords to check the immigration status of people they do business with. The Liberty director called this a sea change. She said other factors, such as Britain’s failure to take in more refugees and over-simplified, prejudiced rhetoric during the London mayoral election all points in one direction.

She said: “I am not saying the Government are causing hate crime but I do think you have to be alive to (the fact that) if you raise the temperature and create a certain environment and you look like you are licensing discrimination, then that is, in the end, going to have a life of its own.”

Spurrier said May’s record as Home Secretary had a liberal vein but also an underbelly of illiberalism, such as the treatment of immigrants detained awaiting deportation, which she called an astonishing stain on the UK’s human-rights record and a black mark against the new Prime Minister’s name.

May used a visit to Warsaw last week to condemn shameful and despicable attacks on Poles in Britain which have formed part of a surge in hate crime since the narrow Leave victory in the EU referendum.

Official figures showed that more than 6,000 alleged hate crimes and incidents were reported to police in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in the four weeks from the middle of June.

The daily rate peaked at 289 reports on June 25 ­— the day after the referendum result was announced.

However, a UK Home Office spokesman stressed that May’s hostile-environment comment related to illegal immigration, rather than immigration more generally.

The spokesman said: “It is categorically untrue to say the Home Office has called for a hostile environment for immigrants.

“However, the British public expect us to take decisive action to prevent immigration abuse and make it harder for people to enter or live here illegally. That is why we have introduced new legislation through the Immigration Acts in 2014 and 2016.

“We are clear it is unacceptable for people to suffer abuse or attacks because of their nationality, ethnic background or colour of their skin.”