The killing of Kriss Donald, a 15-year-old schoolboy, two years ago was met with a convulsion of horror across all of Britain. Yet everybody, even the boy’s mother, Angela, was quick to reject suggestions that the killing had a racial motive.

This weekend, with three Asian Scots starting life sentences for racially aggravated murder, a reappraisal of Britain’s easy assumptions about racial violence is overdue.

Kriss Donald had been walking from school to his home in Pollokshields with his friend Jamie Wallace, when a silver Mercedes pulled up beside them on a blustery Monday afternoon in March 2004.

The boy was snatched off the street and taken on a terrifying 200-mile journey before being thrown onto the bonnet of the car and repeatedly stabbed. He was doused in petrol and set alight. He bled to death during a desperate bid to remove his clothes and reach a muddy puddle to put out the flames.

On Wednesday last week, Imran “Baldy” Shahid, 29, his brother Zeeshan “Crazy” Shahid, 28, and 27-year-old Mohammed Faisal Mushtaq were given minimum sentences of 25, 22, and 23 years respectively.

The judge, Lord Uist, told the men, of Pakistani descent, their “premeditated, cold-blooded execution” was “truly an abomination” that had “rightly shocked and appalled the public”. Part of the shock was the fact that a child had been the victim of a deadly attack merely because of the colour of his skin — and he was white.

Home Office figures show that almost half the people murdered in racially motivated attacks are white. Between 1995 and 2004 there were 58 people killed because of the colour of their skin, of which 24 were described as white.

The British Crime Survey for 2004 reveals that 87,000 people who described themselves as black or minority ethnic had been victims of what they believed was a racially motivated crime. They had suffered 49,000 violent attacks, with 4,000 being wounded.

In the same year 92,000 white people said racism was the cause of an attack or crime they had suffered. The number of violent attacks against whites reached 77,000, while the number of white people who reported being wounded was five times the number of black and minority ethnic victims at 20,000.

Cases involving black and minority ethnic victims are widely reported, but there is an almost total absence of stories involving the white victims. Is this because newspapers fear their reports appearing on BNP leaflets, or because the police are less likely to issue appeals for help?

Peter Fahy, the Association of Chief Police Officers’ spokesman for race issues, has said: “The political correctness to discuss these things absolutely does play a factor. A lot of police officers and other professionals feel almost the best thing to do is try and avoid it for fear of being criticised. This is not healthy.”

The rugby player Lee Massey had been drinking with his friends in Northamptonshire when they stumbled into a gang of Iraqi thugs who were looking for a fight.

During the violence that followed, the failed asylum seeker Mohsen Sadiq mowed Lee down after mounting the pavement in his car in what was later described by the appeal judge Sir John Alliott as a “callous and wicked attack”, which took place after the Iraqis were “out looking for someone.”

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