Update: A formal complaint has been submitted to Tower Hamlets Council and to local councillors, calling on the Council to suspend the booking by SXSW London at the Kobi Nazrul Centre and to investigate the matter as a racist incident, against Palestinians and Bangladeshis, under the Council’s own adopted policy. This piece sets out the substance of that complaint and the record behind it.
The Complaint
According to the complaint, SXSW London, the culture and technology festival running 1–6 June 2026, has a booking at the Kobi Nazrul Centre in Whitechapel, a Council venue at the heart of one of Western Europe’s largest and oldest Muslim communities.
The objection is not to the festival in the abstract. It is to its headline sponsor. SXSW London’s website lists Waymo as its single “Super Partner”, the top tier of sponsorship, above every other brand on the bill. Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, wholly owns Waymo.
That ownership matters because Google is among the corporations most directly named by the United Nations and human-rights investigators over the war in Gaza.
The Policy The Complaint Relies On
On 20 March 2019, Tower Hamlets became one of the first local authorities in the country, the second, after Newham, to adopt the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims’ definition of Islamophobia. The definition reads: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”
Crucially, the definition comes with a list of contemporary examples. One of them is:
“Denying Muslim populations the right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of an independent Palestine or Kashmir is a terrorist endeavour.”
The complaint’s contention is straightforward: by hosting, on its own premises, an event headlined by a company that UN investigators say is materially implicated in the denial of Palestinian self-determination, the Council engages this example and creates a prima facie breach of the policy it adopted.
It also leans on the Macpherson principle, drawn from the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry and applied by the Council, under which a racist incident is “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.” On that test, the complainant argues, the Council is obliged to record and investigate.
There is local precedent. In 2019, Tower Hamlets ward councillors wrote to a Council-linked organisation raising a possible breach of this same definition and called for a review of funding and lease covenants, showing the policy has been treated as having real operational teeth before.
Google’s Record, in the Words of the United Nations
The strongest material behind the complaint comes from the United Nations itself.
On 30 June 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, delivered a report to the Human Rights Council titled “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide” (UN document A/HRC/59/23). It names dozens of corporations across arms, tech, finance and other sectors that it says have profited from and sustained Israel’s occupation and its conduct in Gaza.
Alphabet (Google) is named directly. The report sets out how, in 2021, Israel awarded Alphabet and Amazon a $1.2 billion contract known as Project Nimbus, funding the report says was drawn largely from Israeli Ministry of Defence expenditure, to supply core cloud and AI infrastructure. According to the report and contemporaneous reporting, when Israel’s internal military cloud became overloaded in October 2023, the Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical capacity. The report describes the broader corporate web as a “joint criminal enterprise.”This is not a fringe characterisation. The same conclusions about Project Nimbus have been pressed for years by Google’s own staff through the worker-led No Tech for Apartheid campaign, dozens of whom were dismissed after protests at the company’s offices.
The Wider Context
The complaint situates Google’s role within findings that go to the highest levels of international law:
- In January 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled it “plausible” that Israel’s acts in Gaza could amount to genocide, and ordered six provisional measures requiring Israel to prevent genocidal acts and allow humanitarian aid. The principal order passed 15 votes to 2.
- In September 2025, a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.
- Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both accused Israel of genocidal acts, and intervened in UK litigation arguing that the risk of genocide triggers a legal duty on third parties not to assist.
- More than 67,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza since October 2023, according to Palestinian health authorities cited by international media. The Lancet published a non-peer-reviewed correspondence, which put the total deaths (direct and indirect) at 186,000 in July 2024. The authors cited that the ratio came from patterns seen in other recent wars.
The state of Israel and its supporters reject the genocide allegations.
But the complaint’s point is narrower than the legal debate: a public body in Tower Hamlets that has formally committed itself to a definition of Islamophobia naming the denial of Palestinian self-determination should, the complaint argues, ask hard questions before lending a Council venue to an event fronted by a company the UN has named in this context.
What Is Being Asked
The complaint reportedly asks the Council to do three things:
- Suspend the SXSW London booking at the Kobi Nazrul Centre pending review.
- Record and investigate the matter as a racist incident under the adopted APPG definition; and
- Confirm in writing what steps it intends to take.
It asks the councillors to raise the matter with officers and the Mayor.
The Question For The Council
Tower Hamlets adopted its Islamophobia definition as a statement of principle. The test of any such principle is whether it is applied when it is inconvenient, including against a high-profile festival and a global technology brand. Whether the Council agrees that this booking crosses the line is now a matter for an investigation. But the complaint has, by all accounts, been lodged. The Council’s response will show what its 2019 commitment is worth.
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