*Mayor of London cancels multicultural music festival Rise

Green Party London Assembly Member, Darren Johnson made the following statement.

"The Rise festival brought Londoners together in a celebration of multiculturalism.

Rise embodied the two underlying features that makes the capital such a great place to live; its diversity and its tolerance.

When the Mayor removed the festival's anti-racist message last year sponsorship was always going to be harder to find, but I am extremely disappointed that one of London's most entertaining and important cultural events will no longer be going ahead."

Ken Livingstone said:
'Boris Johnson's cancellation of London’s anti-racist music festival, Rise, is a blow to good community relations in the city. Rise was the biggest anti-racist festival in Europe and on that basis attracted significant sponsorship. It lost much of this when Boris Johnson dropped the central anti-racist message last year. It is no surprise that Johnson is now cancelling the festival altogether. But it is misleading for his administration to try to blame this on trade unions withdrawing sponsorship, when sponsors had signed up to an anti-racist festival and obviously saw no reason to fund an event with no coherent message. There is now a clear pattern of Boris Johnson cutting funding to events celebrating the contributions of different communities to London and promoting good community relations. And, as with the still-birth of the Mayor’s Fund and the loss of most sponsorship for the St Patrick’s Day festival, his claims that he will save tax payers’ money by bringing in outside sponsors have been shown to be just so much hot air.’