Jason Arday: J'Accuse the British Media

The public interest is not the same thing as the public being interested.

Prime Minister, You have been in office for less than a month. It would therefore be absurd to hold you responsible for the events that preceded the death of Professor Jason Arday. But you have already said something about his death that makes what happens next your responsibility. You called it a tragedy 'on so many levels'. More importantly, you said this was a moment for 'reflecting on how things came to this.' You are right to say this, and right to say it now, because you entered Downing Street promising a politics that might work again: government conducted seriously, rationally and in the interests of the public rather than as another theatre for the manufacture of attention. You have made a reasonable beginning, and whatever our misgivings about the mood music that's piped you into No 10, we wish you well: why wouldn't we?

There are Russian warships in the Channel and a hebephrenic in the White House, and while nothing you've said so far suggests you have a true apprehension of the scale of the crisis this country is facing, or the changes necessary not only in institutions, but in the individuals they incubate, nonetheless: you have asked the right question about Jason Arday, we propose to take you seriously. So, while you muse—we roll up our sleeves and get to work: this may not be a murder investigation in any straightforward sense, but there is genuine culpability here, and anyone who has ever been involved in investigating a crime will tell you that if the perpetrator or perpetrators are to be brought to justice, speed is of the essence. So, while you merely ask: How did things come to this? We intend to find out.

Because reflection cannot terminate in reflection—and it needn't: the history of public inquiries in this country is an index of failure in an important respect: justice is seldom seen to be done, because the underlying moral consensus simply isn't present. So, while facts are gathered in great quantity, and they do eventually result in conclusions; and yes, in the course of time—sometimes years, in the case of Hillsborough, decades—conclusions entail judgments; and those judgments entail consequences, the consequences for the individual malefactors have become necessarily a diminished thing: the sheer amount of time has shifted the entire social situation so completely.

Kafka's aphorism captures perfectly the diseased condition of the British state's capacity for self-reflection: 'Leopards invade the precincts of the temple and desecrate the sacred vessels; this happens so regularly it becomes incorporated in the ritual.' If what happened to Jason Arday discloses a systemic failure involving our universities, newspapers, digital media and the treatment of vulnerable people, then this country requires more than condolences, and much more than an interminable inquiry. I believe the gravamen may well exist for members of the media circus who, laughing at their own 'jokes', tapped away steadily, and in the process psychically drove nails into this vulnerable man, to face prosecution.

We call upon your government to establish a full independent public inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the treatment and death of Jason Arday: into the conduct of the institutions involved; the warnings given concerning his vulnerability; the decisions taken after those warnings; and, above all, the interaction between the legacy media and the digital attention systems with which they have become coupled. However, even before this is done the CPS should be examining the matter, and the police should be impounding computers. This is not an attack upon a free press—it is a necessarily immediate defence of one. Nor is this an attempt to establish Jason Arday's innocence of allegations concerning plagiarism and other academic misconduct: on this matter we need to be absolutely clear: He may not have been innocent.

Be that as it may, every single person who contributed to the harassment of Arday should now be feeling guilty, which in turn should—quite possibly for the first time in their lives—give them the basic orientation necessary to understand that: you don't have to be innocent to possess a right not to be collectively destroyed. That distinction—fundamental to the exercise of justice—is where we begin. Which leads us in turn to our first observation: Arday was the quarry—perfectly true; but more importantly, his accuser, Nathan Cofnas, had an agon with Cambridge University before Jason Arday ever became his quarry. Cofnas is a philosopher—of sorts—and self-described race realist. He has argued for what he calls a 'hereditarian revolution'. He has publicly contended that in conditions he considers genuinely meritocratic, the number of Black professors at an institution such as Harvard would approach zero.

This isn't merely an eccentric contribution to the philosophy of education: Black academics have called Cofnas's views racist, and we emphatically agree with them. Before Nathan Cofnas ever opened Jason Arday's thesis, he had already constructed an intellectual scheme (I can't dignify it with the ascription 'theory') in which the presence of Black people in elite academic positions was itself liable to be interpreted as evidence of the corruption of merit by diversity policies. And here came the lamb to the slaughter—or, more disgustingly, the ace entered the hole—for Jason Arday was not just any Black academic: he was a celebrated Black professor at Cambridge: autistic, socially disadvantaged in childhood, the possessor of an extraordinary biography of difficulty overcome; precisely the sort of figure through whom universities have liked to advertise their commitment to widening participation.

Arday was a living affront to Cofnas's quasi-theory. Then Cofnas found plagiarism. We are not going to evade this fact—on the contrary, it is indispensable to our accusations. It's perfectly conceivable that a politically motivated investigator can discover something true; or that a racist can uncover genuine wrongdoing. It follows that a defective institution can be exposed by somebody who has defective reasons for wanting to expose it. Then the very nature of what Cofnas was doing changed, in so doing revealing the white hood veiling Cofnas's white face. If Cofnas were in good faith plagiarism would have remained plagiarism: he would have reported it to the relevant authorities and let their disciplinary procedures do the necessary work.

Instead, he presented what he had discovered as a social media post entitled 'DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge.' The question became not simply whether Arday had plagiarised, but whether Arday was a 'real scholar'. Moreover, the coupling of diversity, equity and inclusion with fraud was already a dog-whistle for Cofnas's underlying prejudice: for him there can be no equality with genetically-determined stupid Black people. The person had begun to replace the offence: and the fact that he was a Black person was material: the quarry was loose—but it was a quarry Cofnas already hunted, a quarry that was already in his sights. There were—and remain—entirely legitimate questions for Cambridge to answer. British academia is not in good health. I should know: I worked in the British higher education sector for fourteen years, until taking early retirement due to my cancer.

When I began teaching, I was shocked by the illiteracy of the students; when I finished teaching, I was shocked by the illiteracy of the academics. The promise of the Blair government to send fifty per cent of the population into higher education could have been the dawn of a new age in cognition, intellection and imagination. However, all political desiderata need to be set against the unforeseen consequences of technological innovations. The objective of colossally raising the educational attainments of Britons coincided with the inauguration of a technological assemblage whose wide—indeed, universal—use resulted in a progressive deterioration of just those faculties. I watched these cognitive and ethical deformations in real time.

But even if we don't want to consider at this stage quite how the Academy went belly-up to digital, and in so doing sacrificed its most integral quality for quantity, there's another way of looking at this civilisational debacle. British university managements, possessing the freedom to seek fee-paying customers in their new role as quasi-autonomous corporations, opted to maximise business sponsorship, student-loan revenue and fee revenue from overseas students in a way that was entirely invidious in respect of academic standards. For anyone with a conscience who's worked in academia over the past twenty years, the fact that it's the right wing that have made the running in terms of understanding what has gone wrong with academia is itself an indictment. In fact, the deterioration of academic and intellectual life in this country is everyone's responsibility—including yours, Prime Minister.

Not least because you yourself are a Cambridge University graduate in English literature, and therefore possess precisely the right skill set to parse the gibberish of contemporary social-media discourse, analyse it properly, and therefore comprehend what it represents. It pains me to write this, but the usual poisoned-pen portrait of woke academics who don't understand that they are hypocrites in promoting ideas of diversity, equality and inclusion is, comparatively speaking, restrained. The real hypocrisy lies in the fact that academic salaries have come from links with business, foreign students' fees and other sources whose revenue streams are predicated on the deterioration of just that trio of collective social virtues.

Over a decade ago I was told by a senior professor at Cambridge that the majority of students in his seminars were placements paid for by Big Pharma and that they in turn paid absolutely no attention at all to what he had to tell them about the history and philosophy of science. It's these doctoral students who go on to produce pseudo-peer-reviewed papers that provide the fraudulent justification for the rollout of their paymasters' nostrums. British academia's bureaucratisation, managerialism, precarious employment, degraded standards, ideological conformities and dependence upon public relations have indeed created precisely the circumstances in which figures may be elevated for reasons that have insufficient connection with scholarship, but personal plagiarism is merely the shitty tip of an excremental iceberg—no: a fatberg of greasy concupiscence between academia and corporate finance, private donors and extractive fee structures.

We have written about this before and will do so again, because nothing in what follows requires us to pretend otherwise than that the situation overall is parlous in the extreme. Nor does opposition to racism oblige us to subscribe to every doctrine concerning race circulating through contemporary universities: we emphatically do not. That is precisely why Jason Arday is a signature case. The allegations Cofnas made were investigated; more allegations followed—Cambridge announced an investigation, and Arday duly resigned. But unlike other notable plagiarists—academic, journalistic, literary, scientific—the investigation did not stop there, having defined its object: rather, its object embiggened—it gorged itself on its own yummy appetite for malfeasance. So, the review of his scholarship became a postmortem on his career.

Then, in a further grotesque mutation, he and his career became synonymous, such that what was now being litigated was his autobiography. This entailed digging into his charitable activities, and through this his sporting claims were disinterred and sifted through; next, in a further deformation of the quest for justice into a racist, disablist manhunt, Arday's claims about racist intimidation became material for investigation. On a personal and judgmental note, I can tell those journalists who undertook these investigations that they were trespassing on some of the most sensitive areas in an autistic individual's life and being. Autistic people are not like neurotypical people in one important and perenduring respect: the relationship between autobiographical memory, social identity and the continuing sense of self may be differently constituted.

Neurotypical biography is continually reconstructed through live social situations; autistic identity may be less securely mediated by this continuous social reconstruction, while autobiographical memory and the interpretation of defining events can bear an unusual weight in maintaining a sense of continuity across a life. To challenge wholesale an autistic person's account of the facts of their life can therefore amount to something considerably more invasive than ordinary fact-checking: it can become an assault upon the narrative structures through which that person understands who they are. And all the while another production was underway: one inexorable due to its taking place in a hall of mirrors, and with a cast of narcissists. The name of the show? 'People Are Watching'. Billy Wilder understood this seventy-five years ago.

In his film, Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas plays a typically unprincipled hack, Chuck Tatum, who discovers a man trapped underground and realises that his predicament can be converted into a story. Once published, the story attracts a physical crowd: the size of the crowd embiggens the story; and because the story is bigger, prolonging the predicament becomes valuable. A human calamity becomes an asset—sound familiar? But Wilder's production was a primitive mid-twentieth-century one: Tatum could see the crowd gathering outside the mine—so he filed another piece; contemporary journalists can see the crowd forming everywhere and nowhere: minute by minute, graph by graph, share by share by re-share by tweet and re-tweet... until, like, man, everyone's buzzing! Although the more common expression for this state is 'going viral'.

I wonder how many of those who use it as an approbation realise that the condition they are invoking is inherently diseased. The reason being that editors in the legacy media may still consider whether the news is fit to print; but since they believe all the news is already printed, they look not into their conscience as to what should be said about it, but rather into what is termed nowadays 'the grid'; namely what went viral yesterday; what provoked anger; what was screen-shotted; mocked; reposted and contested; what 'really' got people worked up—and no doubt the hacks get worked up in the process of considering those worked-up potential readers (the organic component of their revenue stream, their status, their own immiserated sense of self), and then they take a look at what rival newspapers and websites are publishing and that gets them worked up still more.

And here an old and indispensable distinction collapses: the public interest is not the same thing as the public being interested. Heidegger observes that interest derives from 'inter-esse', being-among or being-in-the-midst-of things; yet the merely 'interesting', he argues, is precisely what may become indifferent to us in the very next moment. The paradox of the grid is thus that the more interested everybody becomes, the less anybody need remain concerned. Public interest requires us to remain with things; the interesting requires only that we click on them before moving on. But the contemporary media system increasingly cannot tell them apart, such that—you guessed it—the public interest becomes, definitionally, what the public finds interesting. It turns out it's actually the bread and circuses that tell you you're living in a decadent and increasingly evil empire.

One in which the newspaper publishes, social media responds, the newspaper measures the response, the measured response becomes an input into the next editorial decision, another article is commissioned, the grid responds again, the response becomes larger because the story has become larger, the story becomes larger because the response has become larger. Throughout all of this no editor needs to command the process, no conspiracy is necessary, everybody is simply responding to everybody else. Everyone is only responding, so their consciences are as pellucidly clear... as their computer screens; because nobody could possibly be held accountable, no one needs to hold themselves responsible. However, the inconvenient truth is that somebody wrote every word, somebody commissioned every article, somebody wrote every headline, somebody pressed send, knowing fine well someone else would publish.

They knew this while at the same time also being in full possession of these facts: they knew Jason Arday was autistic, they knew he was Black, they knew he was vulnerable; and by this stage nobody involved could plausibly have been unaware that the attention was hurting him. At least one 'journalist' 'investigating' Arday had been explicitly told by a police officer not to contact him again because the contact was affecting Arday's mental health. How obscene is this, exactly? Even without the additional vulnerability of neurodiversity, persisting in unwanted contact with somebody when you have been expressly told that the contact is affecting their mental health begins to look less like investigation and more like abuse. For precisely this reason, people around Arday have said that warnings were given to the media about the risks of continuing.

On 31st July, Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen—Arday's friend and colleague, and one of this country's foremost researchers into autism—publicly asked the media to leave him alone. Baron-Cohen said he could hear that Arday was struggling; identified him explicitly as a vulnerable autistic man; and warned that his own research showed autistic people to be at heightened risk of suicide. Thereafter nobody participating in the pursuit could plausibly claim that the danger had not been publicly identified. Yet they did not stop. Scrupulous to a virtue, Baron-Cohen did not deny the necessity of investigating academic misconduct. That is why his intervention matters; he said, in effect: investigate the plagiarism, certainly—but stop kicking the autistic man who is already on the ground.

And that's how I picture it: a small crowd of largely white, comfortably middle-class journalists—indeed, in the case of many of the women columnists, such is the disproportion of their emolument, expensively shod—kicking a prone Black disabled man; and surrounding them a much larger, largely white crowd of onlookers, egging them on to look still more. Nice. It reminds me of a still more terrible scene in William Faulkner's Light in August. Joe Christmas, a man whose supposed Black ancestry remains radically uncertain, is hunted down by Percy Grimm, shot, and then castrated as he lies dying. Faulkner allows Christmas his moment: as the blood rushes from his body, his face and eyes retain their own impenetrable composure before the men who have destroyed him. The scene is not an analogy of scale or atrocity; it is an image of the racialised object returning the gaze of those who have made him one. Arday can no longer stare back at them.

I can—and I intend to. J'Accuse. You may not have the erotic potential to die like President Faure was rumoured to've done, but, Prime Minister, while there is no sense in claiming that Jason Arday was in some direct equivalent sense the Dreyfus of our era, there is no doubt in my mind that Simon Baron-Cohen is our Picquart, so make him yours. There was an honourable insider; there was somebody who understood both the legitimacy of the investigation and the vulnerability of its object and who—unlike the kickers and the castrators—recognised that the one had emphatically ceased to justify the other. Moreover, he said so publicly and loudly. What followed therefore cannot simply be described as ignorance, even if it discloses the British media to be populated, to a remarkable degree, by moral aments.

The chilling conclusion is that many individuals in contemporary Britain who consider themselves to be entirely ordinary men and women are themselves also moral aments. Christopher Browning called his great study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 Ordinary Men. It was a comprehensive account of Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of the German Order Police whose members participated in mass shootings and deportations of Jews in occupied Poland. Browning set out to discover whether the Nazi murderers were psychopaths or ordinary individuals placed in extraordinary situations. Although nothing done to Jason Arday is commensurable with the crimes Browning described, and no historical equivalence is intended between the activities of the British legacy media and Himmler's SS, nonetheless there is a revealing congruence.

Browning's question was how ordinary human beings participate in collective wrongdoing without each participant needing to be an extraordinary monster. Our question is different but investigates precisely the same phenomenon: what happens when ordinary journalists, ordinary editors, ordinary readers and ordinary social-media users become components in a system which rewards each participant simply for continuing? They knew it hurt him, so they did it again. They knew it would hurt others, so they did it again. Crucially: they knew that hurting others made other people feel good, so they did it again. And eventually the necessary alteration in their own psyches had taken place: the conditioning had worked, they believed Big Brother, and so they did it because making other people feel good made them feel good—meanwhile, in an unsurprisingly inverse correlation, nothing else began to make them feel good, especially actually being good.

This explains why nobody had to want Jason Arday dead—they only had to want to feel good. And we all want to feel good, don't we? The columnist receives the pleasure of applause, the reader receives the righteous pleasure of pay-per-rant indignation, the editor receives the pleasure of having made a successful—i.e. popular—commission. Meanwhile, the social-media participant receives the pleasure of recognition: but that's enough, because the newspaper receives traffic, the platform registers engagement, each node in these networks receives a tiny reward, even as the bytes are packet-switched, so these tiny rewards concatenate. This is what we mean by distributed pseudo-intentionality: no individual participant needs to intend the aggregate outcome, given the network coordinates locally gratifying acts into behaviour possessing the appearance of a monstrous collective intention.

The next iteration is generated because the previous iteration generated attention. And then something still more sinister happens: evidence that the pursuit is hurting its object itself becomes content, such that his pain becomes another story, and objections to the coverage—no matter from whom—become another controversy. The controversy generates another commission. We have received eyewitness reports that The Times went further still, advertising its Arday investigation on London's buses. If confirmed, the investigation had ceased merely to report upon its object: the pursuit itself had become a product, publicly advertised in the city in which its object lived. The attempt to stop the machine feeds the machine.

This makes the intervention of the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, even more significant: the moral clarity of his language comes as a welcome relief after the almost complete failure of the legacy media—with the notable exception of Matthew Syed in the Sunday Times—to get anywhere close to an admission of culpability. Syed's intervention is interesting precisely because he admits to a sin of omission rather than commission. He tells us that, through his sister, he knew Arday; that she had urged him to intervene, to call for the coverage to stop and to make a statement in Arday's support; and that he failed to do so. His mea culpa therefore consists in acknowledging that, confronted with something he believed had gone too far, he remained silent. His own newspaper, however, in its institutional editorial voice, has completely failed to undertake the same exercise.

Rather, it doubles down on the proposition that the public interest warranted the continuing investigation of Arday's alleged malfeasance, instead of turning that same investigative attention upon its own conduct. To reiterate a trope long established in British journalism for explaining just such snafus: you couldn't make it up. This is the devilish diplopia of contemporary media: legacy media staring at social media while social media stares back at legacy media, each seeing its own reflection in the other's eye and mistaking that reflection for independent evidence of what matters. This is how the metric becomes an emotion; such that eventually nobody knows whether they are producing the crowd or merely joining it. So let us begin to name names. This list is preliminary: our investigation is beginning, not ending, and we will correct factual errors, we will publish substantive answers.

Anyone named by us is welcome to explain their conduct. But we will not accept the proposition that because responsibility was distributed, responsibility disappeared. J'accuse Nathan Cofnas of selecting Jason Arday as an object within a pre-existing racial and political agon concerning Cambridge, merit and Black achievement; and of converting evidence of plagiarism into evidence for his larger contention concerning DEI and Black academics.

As we've already noted, but must here reiterate: Cofnas had already publicly argued that genuinely meritocratic elite universities would contain virtually no Black professors, so Arday did not arrive in his field of vision as an intellectually neutral object: he arrived as an apparent living contradiction of a theory Cofnas had already formulated, and the discovery of plagiarism then became for him not simply evidence of plagiarism, but evidence that the racial and institutional theory had been right all along. J'accuse Allison Pearson of converting the destruction of an individual academic's reputation into ideological entertainment, presenting 'the Cambridge fantasist' as evidence that 'stupid intellectuals are poisoning Britain'; which, en passant, is self-evidently the oxymoronic formation of a moron. Nor does this language occur in isolation.

Pearson has repeatedly represented contemporary social liberalism as a pathology: she has written of an 'evil trans ideology', of schools indoctrinating children, and of immigration and Islam through a register of civilisational threat; in 2024 she notoriously misidentified a photograph of Pakistani political supporters as involving 'Jew haters', prompting a police investigation into an allegation of stirring up racial hatred—an investigation later dropped. Arday thus enters a pre-existing Pearsonian theatre in which minority claims, progressive institutions and the people associated with them are habitually represented not merely as mistaken but as contaminating the national body. J'accuse Camilla Long of converting Arday into an emblem through which to sneer not merely at academic misconduct but at the very categories—Black, deprived, marginal—through which his life had been publicly understood.

The method is hardly anomalous in her journalism: even today she can write of asylum seekers that 'we must now also give them our women, our bodies', ask why Britain should be 'turned into Mogadishu', and move from the arrival of male refugees to rape, harassment and danger to British women. One need not dispute every factual concern about migration to recognise the rhetorical technique: populations become types, types become threats, and individual complexity is dissolved into a cartoon whose emotional utility lies precisely in its capacity to provoke. Arday underwent the same conversion from person into exemplary type: it's called dehumanization, Camilla-baby, and it's a lot worse than being patronised. J'accuse Sarah Ditum of personalising ridicule even while acknowledging concerns about the effect journalistic pursuit was having upon Arday's mental health.

Ditum's case is yet more remarkably confused than this: because she cannot plead ignorance of the machinery in which she was participating—Ditum recognises she is an organic component of inexorable processes: she's written an entire bloody book, Toxic, about the cruelty inflicted upon vulnerable people when a ravenous press pack couples itself to an emergent digital attention economy. Ditum's protected minority were famous women who, in her publisher's description, were never more vulnerable than when they were in crisis. A crisis that takes the form of the destruction of privacy by means of stimulating the public consumption of breakdown. And she isn't immune to this blood-craze delirium, as we've seen: her own newsletter announces that the internet has driven her 'insane'. Hear-hear! But you can't, like many another modern malefactor, simply convert being bad into being mad, Ditum: you're bad. Now get offline.

You knew the machine because you anatomised it—yet confronted with Jason Arday you couldn't acknowledge that another journalist had been told by police that contact was affecting his mental health without turning even this into 'a joke' about whether you ought to hand yourself in before publishing a hostile review. You should have: because whether or not you experienced attempts to exclude you from public discourse because of your controversial opinions; nothing you experienced prevented you, when another much more vulnerable and unpopular person became the object of the machine you understand so very well, from buckling up for this highly-popular and exterminatory mission. Are you laughing now, Ditum? Taking another sip of wine, and exchanging a mal mot with some other member of this debased and rotting commentariat? J'accuse Madeline Grant of also treating the affair as comedy: another 'hilarious' story about charlatan academics.

Her own published record makes the framing of her perverse ideological perspective unusually explicit. She has written of 'peak woke' as the high-water mark of 'Americanised racial politics dictating every aspect of public life'; described post-BLM institutional responses as exercises in self-abasement; attacked Church of England slavery reparations; written of an 'ADHD racket'; and complained of an 'elite empathy problem' in which comfortable England supposedly lavishes sympathy upon migrants while refusing to hear communities frightened by them. Arday therefore appeared in a body of work already organised around a recurrent comic drama: credulous institutions, fashionable minorities, bogus victimhood and the brave writer who sees through them. Her description of his downfall as a summer amusement was not an aberration from that drama but its consummation.

It's the summer of tittering, it would seem—and we know who 'titterers' are: people who take blood sports seriously, because they don't take anyone's life seriously enough. J'accuse Melissa Kite of turning Arday into a lovable conman, an entertainment through whom the supposed obsessions of contemporary education with minorities and disability could themselves be mocked. In her case I make the charge more narrowly: I have not found the same sustained quasi-ideological programme visible in Pearson, Grant or Green, but rather a recurrent journalistic persona that converts public questions into farce and treats credulity itself as the joke. That is precisely why her 'Go on my son!' response to Arday matters: the human subject vanishes behind the entertainment value of the imposture, and disability and minority status become merely components in the elaborate scam she invites the reader to enjoy.

I wonder if she also enjoys meeting her readers: getting together so they can all make each other laugh about 'cripples' and n—s: it doesn't seem remotely implausible to me. J'accuse Dominic Green of calling Arday a 'mythomaniac' and making him an exemplary figure in a larger ideological narrative concerning the destruction of institutions. Green's larger corpus leaves little doubt about that narrative. He has described major writers on critical race theory as 'imposters', compared exposure to their ideas to getting cancer or crashing an aeroplane, characterised intersectionality as racial grievance grafted onto Marxism, and described DEI professionals as a 'priesthood' imposing a faith upon everyone else. Writing about Zohran Mamdani, he moved readily from affirmative action to the language of fakery, describing the structures of racial preference as incentivising people to 'make it by faking it'.

Jason Arday could hardly have been designed more perfectly for this pre-existing theory: the Black academic whose alleged personal falsifications become proof that the entire institutional dispensation which admitted him was itself fraudulent. What I find most extraordinary about many of the accusations against Arday is that, quite frankly, they could be made against almost any of the academics that I have come across in the arts and social sciences in the past twenty years; need I add that the vast majority of these people were, as I believe, the fashionable ascription puts it 'White British.' J'accuse Nigel Biggar of passing from criticism of conduct to diagnosis of the person, writing of a man trapped in fantasy and 'awaiting Nemesis'—a Nemesis Biggar was implicitly summoning.

Biggar, too, arrived with an established agon: his later career has been substantially devoted to combating 'decolonisation', 'woke' academic culture and what he regards as ideological corruption within universities; his new book is explicitly entitled The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win the Culture Wars, and his public interventions repeatedly present contemporary universities as abandoning truth for ideology. Whatever one thinks of his revisionist arguments about empire, this matters because Arday was immediately legible within Biggar's already constructed morality play: the institution captured by identity politics, the scholar advanced under its auspices, and Nemesis arriving when reality finally breaks through. Biggar did not merely scrutinise evidence; he placed Arday into an eschatology of academic decadence in which the man's humiliation could appear as moral restoration.

He egged on a blood-crazed mob he'd been transfusing himself for some time. J'accuse Kathleen Stock of helping convert an allegation of academic misconduct into the story of 'Cambridge's DEI darling', thereby making Arday's institutional and racial symbolism integral to the accusation. There's no need to label Stock transphobic: she's done it herself, whatever the nonsense she spouts about 'gender criticality'; just as there's no need to demonstrate that her personal agon is that she hasn't been allowed to peddle her own prejudices in return for status and prestige: that, too, she has amply confirmed through her writings and public statements. She, and her supporters clearly feel they are winning: I wonder if they know what that will look like, or how high the body-count will have to go before they're satisfied.

J'accuse all those columnists, reporters and editors who transformed plagiarism into licence to excavate the entirety of Jason Arday's existence. Yes: all of you: you sat in editorial conferences where people dog-whistled racism and disablism, and you turned a blind eye, or else participated. J'accuse all those who decided that the appropriate response to disputed academic work was to investigate the speech of an autistic child decades earlier—so that very likely includes you, Kath Viner, editor of the Guardian. I've had plenty of dealings with you already: why don't you retire, I believe your hubby isn't short of a bob or two. You can spend your retirement watching him spend a penny: sitting down. I also hope your journalists, together with all the men and women who conducted those interviews are sitting at home nauseated by the blood on their hands—because I am, and I never did anything of the sort.

J'accuse those who knew that a vulnerable person was suffering and nevertheless regarded the demonstrated appetite for further material about him as a reason to produce further material about him, whatever place on our Möbius strip of a political axis you locate yourself. And therefore J'accuse, as I say, not just Viner, but all the editors responsible—not some metaphysical algorithm, not Elon Musk's spunk-fuelled testostero-servers, not 'the discourse', not History, not Society, but actual editors sitting at actual desks—of forgetting that metrics measure attention and not morality. I've only confined myself to the print media because to cover the broadcast media and the socials as well would prematurely foreclose the necessary forensic examination. Rest assured: I'm not merely 'interested' in Arday's witch-hunting: I'm hunting the hunters, as are the whole SITREP community.

Although I note that legacy media operations, individual journalists, and those who have made potentially actionable posts regarding Arday are now scrambling for the delete button, so their etch-a-sketch consciences can be wiped clean. Then once the funeral's done—they'll resume. But most of all J'accuse every man, woman—and I'm afraid to say, child, who spends too much time online, and wastes that time, while expending their own very being in mediations that are uncritical, unthought through, and unconsidered in any modality whatsoever. I accuse everyone who read, listened, and watched this grotesque spectacle: you are all Pharisees and Sadducees—you all passed by, and guess what: anyone who has the guts to watch Arday himself now—the interview he gave to Martin Bashir on C4 News is exemplary in this respect—and who hasn't had their capacity to love wholly extinguished, will acknowledge that Arday was a ringer for the Good Samaritan.

J'accuse you all: because by doing so you have already rejected unilaterally the ethical requirement to resist prejudice in our society: prejudice that is rapidly becoming its ichorous lifeblood. Don't worry: this is, I stress, a provisional list—there are more to come: we will establish what was commissioned and when; we will find out what warnings were received; we will ask what risk assessments were conducted—and most of all, we'll extend our antennae to capture the after-whispers of that newsroom and editorial conference bantering: the joking commissioners, who then got Ditum et al. to so royally amuse the Great British bigots. We will demand to know what exactly happened after Jason Arday resigned. We will ask why allegations concerning plagiarism licensed investigations into childhood disability.

And we will compare what happened to Jason Arday with what happened to other prominent people exposed for plagiarism and related intellectual misconduct. Because there have been others: some were rich, some had friends, some had friends who were also powerful editors, publishers, institutions and patrons. Some went into retreat and returned with new careers. Some converted their own disgrace into material for a second act: they were permitted an afterlife, so long as they complied with the necessary tit-beating. Why? And why was Jason Arday afforded so little space in which to have one? Jason Arday was not Alfred Dreyfus, and this matters. Dreyfus was innocent of the crime for which the French state destroyed him.

Arday may have committed serious academic misconduct, although my personal suspicion is that like many academics working intensively, even before bi-directional computers, he fell victim to a phenomenon known as 'prosthetic writing', whereby researchers who assemble their argument from other texts, become progressively blind to the extent to which they are eliding two expositions, rather than referencing one in another. It's also very easy to understand why autists in particular could fall prey to this: and this is also something we will return to, because the progressive deterioration of literacy in all its forms is the main driver of all of this—and the academy has proved to be one of the most remarkable institutions for cultivating illiteracy: universities have, so to speak, been actively encouraging it.

Be that as it may: we must refuse the comforting simplification in which the victim has first to be clad in white samite before his persecution can be condemned. The rights we accord people in Britain are not—and should never be—prizes for good behaviour. (Which makes it somewhat bizarre that people can legitimately purchase citizenship.) Nor is human dignity conditional upon a clean curriculum vitae: a plagiarist remains a human being, as Johann Hari has been squealing ever since he was arraigned for far more systematic and damaging plagiarism than Arday was accused of. A liar remains a human being, a fantasist remains a human being—elsewise, I would employ some of the dehumanising language deployed by Fleet Street on its own denizens. Because the ethical standard is this: an autistic Black professor who has done things deserving investigation remains a human being.

Because—it bears repeating again and again—you don't have to be innocent to possess a right not to be collectively destroyed. Indeed, a civilisation demonstrates its moral seriousness precisely in the treatment of the culpable. The mob's oldest argument is that its victim deserved something—perhaps he did. But this tarring, this feathering, this lynching? J'accuse you all. Prime Minister, you asked how things came to this: we are demanding that you never stop asking. A proper inquiry will, of course, examine Cambridge University's appointment, supervision and response to allegations concerning Arday. It must not become an exercise in protecting academia from legitimate scrutiny. It must examine the conduct of the press without becoming an instrument for suppressing legitimate journalism: but then, there's precious little of that about nowadays, so perhaps you should also look at what both legitimates and delegitimates this discourse.

An inquiry must also establish what editors and journalists knew about Arday's vulnerability and when they knew it—we're already working on that. It must find out what warnings were given, ask if the continuation of the pursuit after particular warnings was justified by any identifiable public interest. It must examine the distinction between the public interest and measurable public attention. And it must investigate the dyadic relationship between legacy journalism and social media: the extent to which editors use digital engagement as a signal for further editorial investment, and what safeguards exist when the subject generating that engagement is an identifiable vulnerable human being. Because this case is not simply about racism, or disablism; nor merely about plagiarism and the recondite realm of academic status, which in turn means it cannot only concern Cambridge.

The old joke in academia is the disputes are so savage because the stakes are so low, but this case proves that the adage is now defunct for the stakes couldn't possibly be higher, because the Arday case is not about right-wing extremism or its galvanising by social media's ability to suck intellection out of the human brain with its pixellated straw. Those explanations—contributory though they may be—remain fundamentally facile. We are looking at something more amorphous: a hazy but steadily-resolving shape, a hideous formation that's a function of institutional behaviour generated through the recursive interaction of people, platforms, ideologies, pleasures, resentments, professional incentives and machines. Racism enters it—disablism, too. Political grievance comes on to the mind-stage and dances there leadenly: commercial appetite keeps it hopping.

Meanwhile, academic dereliction does its bit, and human weakness and cowardice are reliable partners in the enterprise—collective character defects this society operationalises by providing cowardly, weak people with the endless repression provided by ceaseless distraction. We're moving on, right? No: we're staying right here, because SITREP regards Jason Arday as a signature case for dromodronology: acceleration does not merely make an existing persecution happen faster. It alters the nature of the persecutory agency itself. Prime Minister, Émile Zola addressed the President of the French Republic because the Republic meant something larger than the man temporarily occupying the Élysée Palace. The office you now occupy means something a lot larger than you: not least because in line with recent history, you're unlikely to be there for long.

Nevertheless: the British res publica depends upon the possibility that facts can still be established; that reasons can be given; that wrongdoing can be distinguished from unpopularity; that freedom of expression does not mean freedom from responsibility; and that powerful institutions can be required to account publicly for their conduct. You have asked how things came to this: and we've begun answering you—we will pursue this story for as long as necessary, we will follow the chronology, we will identify the participants, we will examine the comparators. Most importantly: we will distinguish facts from allegations and allegations from fantasies.

And yes, to my quondam colleagues I say: come on if you think you're hard enough—and by that, I mean hard enough to write at length, and to provide an ideological spine to your writing, rather than the bone in your hackery that sticks in the craw of every feeling rather than bottom-feeding person in the realm. Most importantly: we will not lose interest. Jason Arday was crucified on yesterday's grid—I want you all on tomorrow's. His death was not your direct responsibility: and that makes it worse. You're ordinary people, not machiavels—the machines have harmonized you, and now you don't sing like birds, you croak like carrion-feeders. Whether Britain chooses to understand how this degradation in the human environment came about now is your responsibility, Prime Minister: reflection is no longer enough. Establish the inquiry.

Because in deciding whether to investigate how this happened, you will be making a judgment not only upon the institutions implicated in Jason Arday's treatment. You will expose something about your own government: whether it possesses the intellectual grasp necessary to understand the new forms of collective agency operating in this country, and the moral courage necessary to govern them. There will be a vigil for Jason Arday on Monday evening in London. People have been invited to assemble on the steps of the National Gallery at six o'clock: a significant venue, Prime Minister, especially for a municipal socialist such as yourself, given the gallery was founded with the explicit intention of making artistic treasures accessible to ordinary working people. I will be there—I expect to see You, as well as all the accused there: for you it will be a wake-up call—for them, the beginning of what we call making amends.

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Originally published as SITREP No. 023 on X on 17 August 2026. Read the original on X.