Speakers scheduled to appear at a literary festival have pulled out after learning the event is part-funded by a Government counter-extremism strategy.
Six figures - including writers, journalists and activists - have backtracked after learning the annual event was receiving funding from Building a Stronger Britain Together (BSBT), a Home Office programme which funds various community groups.
The programme has been criticised for unfairly targeting members of the Muslim community, leading to the decision to withdraw from six writers and speakers at the Festival.
Bradford-born writer Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan was first to announce she was pulling out, saying in a statement: "The government's counter-extremism strategy relies on the premise that Muslims are pre-disposed to violence and therefore require monitoring and surveillance, rather than that the material and systematic conditions of economic, racial and Islamophobic violence need addressing as causes of individual perpetration of violence." [Yorkshire Post] Read more
