The Wireless Festival fiasco has been embarrassing, baffling — and entirely predictable. It’s been a nasty look under the rock of the mercenary entertainment industry, at the cowardice of Sir Keir Starmer’s government, and our inability to differentiate between corporate apology and restorative justice. Let’s unpack the whole sordid affair.
Last week, Ye, the American rapper formerly known as Kanye West, was announced as the headliner for a three-day music festival in Finsbury Park. Tickets were already on sale before the blindingly obvious backlash blew up in the organisers’ faces.
Sponsors such as Pepsi, previously happy to have their brand name next to West’s on the posters, scuttled for the exit. Starmer started wibbling about being “concerned”. Melvin Benn, boss of promoter Festival Republic, doubled down on his support for West, preaching forgiveness. Finally, after a week of everybody arguing, the Home Office pulled the plug by revoking West’s electronic travel authorisation (ETA). Who could have predicted this mess? Anyone with half a brain cell.
West is obviously still popular enough to sell out three nights in a park. He could probably sell out 365 nights; there is no accounting for people’s willingness to overlook violent rhetoric when they’re not the target. But this is not the case of an artist who misspoke once or twice, or whose lyrics look a bit rude if you squint.
In the 10 years since West’s Saint Pablo tour was cancelled when he began ranting on stage (West later spent time in hospital), he has espoused awful, racist, misogynistic and antisemitic things. Once hailed as a musical genius and passionate activist, Ye spent a decade being as vile and hateful as possible.
Risk assessment not found
He cosied up to Donald Trump during his first term and deeply wounded his black American fans by claiming slavery was a “choice”. Two years after the murder of George Floyd, he was strutting around Paris Fashion Week 2022 in a top proclaiming “White Lives Matter”.
He threatened to “go defcon three” on “Jewish people” and proudly announced “I am a Nazi” on Infowars, the far-Right podcast. He was banned from X for posting swastikas.
In 2023, he briefly apologised for his behaviour — but by 2025, West was releasing a song called Heil Hitler (the lyrics of which are unprintable) and selling T-shirts emblazoned with swastikas. Oh, and posting “I BEAT WOMEN” while fending off lawsuits alleging he sexually assaulted an employee and a model.
If I were drafting a risk assessment for a north London music festival dedicated to uplifting black artists, all the above might give me more than a moment of pause. Can you really ensure the safety of London’s Jewish community, particularly the very visibly religious Orthodox community in Stamford Hill — literally right next to Finsbury Park? What about black attendees? The women?
Apparently, none of this was flagged when Wireless booked West. Nobody thought to reach out to local Jewish community groups beforehand. Everyone was all too ready to make a quick buck. After all, West had taken out a full-page paid advert in the Wall Street Journal in January (just before his new album, Bully, dropped), explaining his behaviour was the result of untreated bipolar disorder and an undiagnosed traumatic brain injury. “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite,” he wrote. “I love Jewish people.” Perhaps he’ll put that on a T-shirt one day.
Not the place for rehabilitation
Jewish Londoners, understandably, weren’t sold on being the test case for West’s international rehabilitation. “The Jewish community will want to see genuine remorse and change before believing the appropriate place to test this sincerity is on the main stage at the Wireless festival,” said Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
Instead, West offered some vague day-late-and-a-dollar-short idea to do a meet-and-greet with UK Jews, and Benn insisted “giving people a second chance is a lost virtue”. Arguably, the lost virtue here is a bare bones safety plan. Not least for a clearly vulnerable artist who is at the start of a journey of therapy and medication.
People pointed the finger at Haringey council, but all that local authorities can do in an attempt to plug the gaping holes in their budgets is rent out community resources such as our parks to private event organisers. They had zero say on West’s travel plans. Likewise, Sir Sadiq Khan has little power as the Mayor to intervene in this obvious disaster-in-the-making, beyond noting that West’s comments “are simply not reflective of London’s values”.
Instead, it was up to the Government to finally pull its finger out and bar West from coming to the UK. But Starmer didn’t exactly go to the mattresses for British Jews. One might have expected him to have displayed the same energy he had for condemning Bob Vylan and Kneecap over last summer's festival season. Their calls to Free Palestine had the Government tattling to the police with haste. But his officials went ahead and approved the ETA for an artist who put out a jingle about Adolf Hitler less than a year ago. Does Starmer care about antisemitism, the scary full-fat Holocaust denial stuff West engaged in? Or is it only when Israel gets offended that he is quick to act?
In the rush to slap West’s name on the poster and sell tickets, Wireless shot itself in the foot. Now the whole thing is cancelled, leaving performers and vendors out of jobs and an estimated £30 million dent made in the London economy. Pretty much nobody is happy, even me — I have to live with the fact I agreed with Wes Streeting on something — but at least I might get my park back for another weekend.
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