Khan office funds group whose director ‘denies Uyghur genocide’
City Hall promises to stop giving taxpayers’ money to anti-racism group whose board members support Xi
LONDON taxpayers’ money is being given to an anti-racism group with two directors who have waved Chinese Communist flags and denied the Uyghur genocide.
The Monitoring Group has received up to £55,000 a year from the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (Mopac) via its Catch anti-hate partnership.
A doyenne of the London anti-racism scene since the 1990s, it has also benefited from hundreds of thousands of pounds in grants from philanthropic organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and Open Society, founded by the billionaire George Soros, in addition to significant Lottery funding.
However, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal that leading members of the group appear to have supported one of the world’s most racist regimes, and the office of Sadiq Khan, the London Mayor, has said it will curtail its funding if they continued to do so.
Ping Hua, one director, has published articles in which she appears to question the Chinese Communist Party’s repression of the Uyghurs, and endorse the crackdown on democracy and human rights in Hong Kong.
A Southampton University academic, Ms Hua was formerly the president of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association UK (CSSA), a body accused of attempting to shut down criticism of Beijing on British educational campuses and of maintaining close links with China’s UK embassy.
Meanwhile, Bobby Chan, a fellow director, who also appears on the Monitoring Group’s list of its senior activists, was filmed in 2019 picketing a concert in Smith Square, London, by Denise Ho, a pro-Hong Kong democracy singer.
A video shows him and supporters waving large red CCP flags and placards depicting cockroaches, while shouting “cockroaches” in Chinese at concertgoers and trying to film them entering.
The Monitoring Group staged an anti-Asian hate rally in London’s Chinatown in November, alongside CSSA and No Cold War, another pro-Chinese group.
Mr Khan’s association with the Monitoring Group goes back years. As cohesion minister in Gordon Brown’s government in 2009, he threw his weight behind a report published by the group’s Min Quan project on racism experienced by the UK Chinese community.
A spokesman for Mopac said it recognised “the seriousness of the concerns presented” and promised it would “not work with or fund organisations if they do not share our unwavering commitment to ensuring the highest values are upheld”.
Though not directly funded by the mayor, the Monitoring Group is one of a panel of eight charities in the Catch partnership, an initiative commissioned and funded by City Hall. In the year ending March 2020 it received £55,560 for its Catch-referred casework.
In documents submitted to the Charity Commission, it describes one of its key responsibilities under the Catch partnership as fighting anti-Asian racism, stating: “The Chinese community suffered disproportionately, given the negative images created about China.”
Jawed Siddiqi, vice-chairman of the Monitoring Group, said: “We have a proud track record of challenging racism, in all its forms against BAME communities and prejudice against other social groups in the UK, our geographical area of operation.
“Our core group values would not allow us to support the incarceration, maltreatment or oppression of any minority groups across the globe.
“Comments made by individual board members in their personal capacity do not represent the view of the group. We take these allegations very seriously and we are currently reviewing all our policies and practices.”