Mayor Sadiq Khan pledges £300,000 from London to help preserve Auschwitz camp, though concerns remain over his role campaigning for antisemitic Labour Party leader

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has committed £300,000 from London to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, which manages the site, in order “to help ensure that the horrors of the Holocaust are never forgotten.”

The grant will reportedly support the preservation of the gas chambers, crematoria, barracks and other exhibits. The UK sends the most international visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau, with some 300,000 people, including schoolchildren, visiting each year.

The Mayor also confirmed that he would join commemorations at Auschwitz later this month marking the 75th anniversary of its liberation.

Mr Kahn observed that “the Holocaust was one of the darkest times in human history and we must never forget the atrocities committed,” adding: “These lessons are all the more significant as we see antisemitism and hate crime on the rise.”

However, Mr Khan also faces criticism for campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister, despite Mr Corbyn’s antisemitism. Mr Khan is the most senior elected Labour official in the country and remains in Labour despite its degeneration into institutional antisemitism.

On 28th May 2019, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a full statutory investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.

In the first release of its Antisemitism in Political Parties research, Campaign Against Antisemitism showed that Labour Party candidates for Parliament in the 2019 general election accounted for 82 percent of all incidents of antisemitic discourse by parliamentary candidates.