Anti-racism education in some schools will be scrapped after a city council now led by Reform UK ended its 30-year support for the charity Show Racism the Red Card.
Gary Bennett, the former Sunderland AFC captain and the charity’s head coach, said he was “shocked and disappointed” that Nigel Farage’s party had withdrawn vital funding.
Announcing the decision last week, the Reform leader of Sunderland city council, Christopher Eynon, said it would no longer support “politically charged organisations with an agenda”.
The move prompted a furious backlash from opposition politicians including Labour’s Bridget Phillipson, who described it on Tuesday as “misguided, cruel and in no way backed by the people of Sunderland”.
Bennett, who became only the second black player in Sunderland’s history when he joined the club in 1984, was a founding member of Show Racism the Red Card when it was established in 1996.
The former centre-back, who remains a cult hero on Wearside, said he was “surprised, shocked and disappointed” that Sunderland council – the first local authority to have supported it – was cutting its ties after 30 years.
Bennett said it would immediately disrupt the charity’s ability to teach local children in schools and provide workshops in prisons and workplaces.
He said: “We’re not a political charity – they’re trying to say we are but we’re not. Sunderland were the first council to come onboard to help fund us, that’s the annoying thing. For something like this to happen now, we just want to know the reasons why.”
Bennett said the racist riots across many English cities including Sunderland in 2024 showed there was “still lots of work to be done”. While Britain had come a long way since the 1980s, he said, there remained issues to confront around attitudes towards asylum seekers and migrants.
“You’ve got all different issues going on now. It keeps moving, it’s always something else which causes some form of racism,” he said. “It’s something that is challenging every single day and we’ve got to keep the fight. There’s still lots of work to be done and we can’t just ignore it and think it’s going to go away because it’s not.”
Eynon, whose party gained control of the council in May, said the authority was not “stepping back from its opposition to racism or discrimination” and that “racism has no place in Sunderland”.
He took issue with Ged Grebby, the chief executive of Show Racism the Red Card, describing Reform as a “very dangerous organisation”.
Grebby defended his right to express personal views and said the charity had support across the political spectrum.
Separately, Reform UK has been accused of “vice signalling” after its councillors in Bradford proposed to pull out of the Local Authority of Sanctuary scheme, which is intended to show a city is a safe place for migrant communities.
The Reform group that runs the council said it would be putting forward a motion at the next meeting in October to end the status, which it said has meant the council had “led Refugee Week engagement and utilised local libraries to celebrate all new arrivals into Bradford”, adding that “public services should instead be prioritised for Bradford residents”.
The Reform councillor Jayne Morgan said the move “may upset oversensitive political opponents” but was firmly in the public interest.
In response, Imran Khan, the leader of Bradford’s Labour group, said: “Reform failed to deliver on various promises they made to Bradford residents this summer, so instead they fall back on their usual toxic recipe of hate, victimhood and division.”
He said pulling out of the scheme would “do nothing to help a single person” in Bradford. “This is vice signalling from Reform and all it does is damage integration and promote division and resentment, which helps no one,” he said.
