Dave Hill alerts me that the long-running festival sometimes referred to as “Kenstock”, but more officially known as “Rise: London United Against Racism”, seems to have been rebranded this year, to remove all references to opposing racism.
When I made the Rise-based Stop Boris campaign poster in March, I must admit I didn’t seriously entertain the possibility that Boris could continue the festival but attempt to pretend it had nothing to do with anti-racism. This is an extraordinary and offensive change to a long-standing and successful festival.
And lest anyone believe there is any doubt that Boris might be undertaking a thoroughly intentional and deliberate rewriting of history, compare and contrast the following two links, describing last year’s festival after it had taken place:
The closest it gets now to the full name is, in one place on the site, ”Rise: London United”. What is Boris trying to tell us by deleting the last two word of its name? That he is not, and would not want anyone to think he were, “against racism”?
* N.B. The <title> of the current page (which appears in your browser’s title bar) does still contain the original full festival name. This is almost certainly an oversight, as the site usually appears in a frame, hosted at www.risefestival.org, which has had its <title> changed to lose the anti-racism name. Because I wanted to link directly to the specific page linked above, I’ve had to use a URL which wouldn’t normally be used, and thus enabled you to see a <title> which you - and evidently Boris’s Delete-button-wielding employees – wouldn’t normally see.
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If push comes to shove I suppose Johnson can pretend it’s still an anti-racist festival. Look! he’ll exclaim, ‘we’ve got black youngsters on the promotional material and everything!’
“If push comes to shove I suppose Johnson can pretend it’s still an anti-racist festival.”
Not just an anti-racist festival, but a real anti-racist festival (see the latest post).
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