Wireless Festival, which is hosted yearly in London, is receiving backlash for having booked Kanye West as a headliner. Several sponsors have pulled their participation in the event, while British government officials have condemned West’s past pro-Nazi comments.
Major sponsors pulled out of Wireless Festival due to Kanye West’s headlining act
Wireless Festival is set to take place in London this upcoming July. Kanye West was booked as a headliner by the event’s organizers, which has led several brands to pull their sponsorships.
Diageo, the company that owns liquor brands Johnnie Walker and Captain Morgan, said it will no longer sponsor the event “as it stands,” according to NPR. Pepsi and PayPal also confirmed they were withdrawing their sponsorships of the festival.
The news comes after West made several antisemitic comments in recent years and claimed his allegiance to Nazi ideology. The artist released a song titled “Heil Hitler” in 2025 and has sold T-shirts featuring swastikas on his website. Earlier this year, West took out an advertisement page in The Wall Street Journal to publicly apologize for his behavior. He said his comments were due to his bipolar disorder, which he has referenced in the past.
Recently, West dropped a new album, Bully, for which he performed two sold-out shows in Los Angeles. The last time he performed in the U.K. was in 2015 at Glastonbury, where he headlined.
The British Prime Minister condemned Wireless Festival’s decision to book Kanye West
“It is deeply concerning Kanye West has been booked to perform at Wireless despite his previous antisemitic remarks and celebration of Nazism,” he told The Sun. “Antisemitism in any form is abhorrent and must be confronted firmly wherever it appears. Everyone has a responsibility to ensure Britain is a place where Jewish people feel safe.”
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey called for the government to ban West from entering the country: “We need to get tougher on antisemitism,” he said, according to The Guardian.
Labour MP Rachael Maskell reiterated a similar view, saying that West should be banned from the country. The organization Campaign Against Antisemitism aligned itself with Starmer’s stance and called for West’s ban from entering the country.
“The prime minister is right to be deeply concerned that Wireless festival wants to headline someone whose anti-Jewish bigotry has gone as far as recording a track titled ‘Heil Hitler’ less than a year ago,” the organization wrote on X, according to The Guardian. “But the prime minister is not a bystander. The government can ban anyone from entering the UK who is not a citizen and whose presence would ‘not be conducive to the public good’. Surely this is a clear case.”
Several antisemitic attacks have been committed in the U.K. over the past few months. Ambulances from a Jewish community-run service were set on fire in London in March, while two men were killed in an attack on a Manchester synagogue in October 2025.
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