Home Office funding causes festival withdrawal

Six writers and activists have pulled out of the Bradford Literature Festival, protesting against the event receiving funding from a government counter-extremism programme.

It has been revealed that the 10-day event, which was founded in 2014, has accepted money provided as part of the Home Office’s Building a Stronger Britain Together strategy for the first time.

Bradford-born poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, the first to withdraw, claimed that the government strategy treated all Muslims as potential criminals and that she could not endorse community organisations working with counter-extremism funding and support.

Speaking to the Guardian, she said: “It is not the fault of practitioners that there have been cuts to community spaces. I want to make a broader point about accepting money from a government who could choose to end austerity, but instead awards money to Muslim or BAME communities under a counter-extremism lens.”

Lola Olufemi, Waithera Sebatindira, Malia Bouattia, Sahar al-Faifi and Hussein Kesvani are also set to boycott the event.

The event director, Syima Aslam, said that, whilst it was regrettable that the artists saw it necessary to withdraw, the use of the funding to run a pre-festival education project focused on raising aspirations and literacy levels was appropriate.