Spoiler alert – it predates it.

Last para makes appropriate warning, however, not to dismiss those who voted leave:

Matthew Collins, a researcher for the anti-racism group Hope not Hate, says he has observed virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric seeping into the mainstream for years. Part of his job involves monitoring far-right online media in the U.K. But in recent years he has found himself checking national newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Express, which have been using language and symbolism that was once considered taboo. In 2015, an editorial cartoon by the Mail was criticized as using 1930s Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda as it seemed to equate migrants fleeing wars into Europe with rats.

Traditional far-right groups have collapsed in the U.K. due to their language being “mainstreamed” and used by populists like UKIP, Collins says. “When David Cameron was elected as Prime Minister for the second time [in 2015] he promised things like being tough on immigration, he promised people a referendum on E.U. membership. That is when we really saw a real hardening of language in reporting.”

The bigotry that has emerged has different roots to the popular ethno-nationalism of the 1970s, says Collins, who was a member of far-right groups like the National Front before he “grew up” in 1989 and began helping anti-extremist organizations. The xenophobic schisms in today’s Britain, he says, have less to do with “ideas of [racial] superiority and more and more of it is just based on desperation.”

Collins suspects today’s hate crime perpetrators largely come from marginalized white communities who largely voted for Britain to leave the E.U. in the referendum. These communities exist in a constant “fight for resources” caused by years of austerity, he says, where the struggle to find jobs and get doctors’ appointments, school places and housing can seem exacerbated by migration levels.

The question now becomes how to fix the levels of distrust and fear among certain sections of the British population. The U.K.’s equality watchdog, the Equality and Human Rights Commission will look into how race policy in the U.K. must be strengthened. Speaking to TIME, its chair David Isaac says that projecting the message that diversity is a source of opportunity in the U.K. should be supported. “The referendum has created all sorts of splits and schisms, and that’s why getting the message across that diversity can enhance what the U.K. has to offer…[is] important.”

But Collins says it’s important for anti-racism campaigners not to widen the empathy gap that opened up during the referendum campaign. Dismissing the 52% of voters who elected to leave the E.U. as “fuddy duddy and racist” could exacerbate tensions even further, he says. “If you victimize someone, if you go around calling someone a racist for long enough, they will become a racist.”