A woman left "terrified" by alleged racism said she no longer feels like she belongs in her own country.

Lauren Stonebanks, 36, from Edinburgh, said she was on a bus when a woman shouted: "Get your passport, you're f****** going home."

Ms Stonebanks, who is half Indo-Caribbean and half white Scottish, has noticed an increase in racist slurs since the EU referendum result was announced.

She believes the Brexit vote has made people "bolder" and "changed the tone of things".

Ms Stonebanks told the Press Association: "They now think that 52% of people who voted agree with them, or at least some of them do. It's also changed the tone. Prior to Brexit there would be no point in her telling me I was going home.

"She might have said something like 'You lot should be going home, you lot don't belong here'. But telling me that I am going home, that is definitely a post-Brexit consequence."

Recalling the incident, which took place on June 27 and left her "shaking for ages", she said: "I was terrified. She was there, she had three people with her, two men and another woman, and I haven't had that sort of abuse since the 1980s.

"And that sort of abuse, the stuff I got in the 1980s when I was a child, usually came with physical violence. It took me back to then. I used to come home from school covered in bruises because the other kids would kick the shit out of me. I was the only non-white child in that school."

She added: "It used to be really bad in the 80s and the 90s and then it kind of tailed off, I didn't get very much, just maybe the odd thing, the odd racial slur here or there.

"As Ukip started getting more and more popular and (Nigel) Farage was spending more time on TV, the slurs started to increase again, and then since Brexit there's been this sort of stuff, so there's definitely been a rise recently, and I've noticed it."

Ms Stonebanks said some people "don't realise that there are some citizens of this country who are not white", adding: "They would like Britain to be all white. But it's never really been all white. I don't feel like I belong in my own country, and there's nowhere else for me to go."

She did not say anything to the woman that day, but she said: "There's a part of me that wishes I'd said 'Actually I don't need my passport to go home, I just need my bus ticket'. But that's not me, I tend to panic."

Almost a fortnight on, Ms Stonebanks said she is still "wary" of going out, adding: "I'm still a bit wary of large groups of rather vocal white people."

Chief Superintendent Barry McEwan of Police Scotland's safer communities department said the force has "not witnessed any increase in the level of reports being received", adding: "However we acknowledge that often these incidents go unreported.

"I would encourage any person who has been the victim of, or witness to, any type of hate incident to report it to Police Scotland."