I meet Hayley Bennett in a café in Clapham, and she immediately asks to leave. Outside, she tells me the man at the next table was ranting to his friends that Muslims provoke violence by not respecting Christmas. “I don’t even know what point he was trying to make. He said it was a philosophical debate.”
I ask Bennett if she considered confronting him. “I was quite close to it,” she says. “But I always say, think about how safe you’re going to be. Given that there were three of them, you’d have to have some kind of way out.” In a safer environment, how would she advise challenging racism? “I would go into intellectual conversation, point by point,” she says. “I wouldn’t go straight in and be like, ‘you’re out of order’. It could flare up more anger.”