I haven’t been able to shake the Jason Arday story since writing about it on Monday. The news that after weeks of being unrelentingly hounded in the press, an autistic, black, working class Cambridge professor had been found dead.

And yesterday, after a week of dwelling on it, I had a moving conversation with one of Jason Arday’s childhood friends. In the hundreds of articles before his death and after, no-one had reported on the kind, gentle, extraordinary man he and his friends knew. I’m not going to go into that here or what he has to say about his close-up view of his friend’s treatment by the press. I’ll do more on that in next few days.

I wrote this newsletter before that conversation and although he fleshes out so much more of what’s here, I thought it was worth putting it out first. Thank you, as ever, for reading.

Jason Arday wasn’t the first person to have been hounded by the UK press and he won’t be last.

We know that more certainly than ever by the response since his death from large parts of the British media class. I’ve been gobsmacked by the lack of humanity, by the knee-jerk defensiveness, by the silence from the senior leaders of these organisations. Are we just going to cover this up and move on? Really?

Have you noticed that it’s already fallen off the news cycle? Is that because it’s not newsworthy? If so, why is it still trending day after day on social media?

If a kettle had the same safety rating as the British press, it would be banned from sale. It’s not just a potential death trap. It is a death trap. That’s what this story tells us.

But what we’re still failing to acknowledge is the extent to which Jason Arday already knew that. He knew exactly how black academics are targeted, he not only understood it to be a “playbook”, he’d contributed to the literature on it. It was the same bad-faith process that had seen Claudine Gay, the first black woman to be president of Harvard, forced from her position. But she was not a one-off example and when Arday was asked to deliver a prestigious keynote lecture, it’s what he picked as his topic, titling it “Wanted Dead or Alive: the Playbook”.

That lecture title and topic is right there in the introduction of the Guardian article that marked an important turning point in the story. The day of its publication, August 5, marked the moment the story left the right-wing echo chamber, which Arday could rationalise and dismiss, and species-jumped into the wider media.

It was no longer a right-wing racially motivated witch-hunt. It was now a free-for-all, and this exposé that went beyond the claims of plagiarism to interrogate details about his personal life marked the moment.

Arday’s friend Kehinde Andrews said that he’d asked Arday at the beginning how long he thought the media attacks would last and he’d said two days, three days max. It was already seven days in when this was published, one day after his friend, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, a world-leading autism expert, said that he considered him a suicide risk.

It’s the final sentence that’s unbearable. Arday had an internal roadmap of where this led. He knew the stakes, the toll, the fall-out and the possible pathways.

I wrote a story, years ago, about a cluster of teen suicides in Bridgend, Wales, and in the process learned a lot about suicide contagion that’s never left me. It’s a powerful, poorly understood transmissible condition that collapses both time and space. It transmits down generations and across continents. It’s an idea, a permission, an almost algorithmic-like pathway. Jason Arday’s brain had already trod that path. It was a fact in the literature that he’d cited and footnoted. He’d already mapped the exit route that others in his position have taken.

This entire story is about shame. And maybe where you stand in your understanding of it is where you stand with your own relationship with it, with what is the most human emotion of all. Because we were all bystanders in the shaming of Jason Arday. We all witnessed in real time as he was ridiculed, mocked and undermined by an overwhelmingly white, middle-class academic and media establishment, many of whom come from generations of privately-educated privilege. Here was a black working class professor whose early life had been shaped by academic underachievement and cognitive disabilities being told, repeatedly, overwhelmingly, with no pushback from any quarter, that he wasn’t academically and intellectually good enough.

In the last few days, so much new information has finally come to light, including this which I posted on BlueSky yesterday morning, by Professor Jason Stanley. He points out that academia has easily quantifiable metrics that he said no journalist had apparently checked.

Stanley pointed out if a journalist had checked those metrics and then compared them against other scholars in the field, they would have reached this conclusion.

The unassailable fact that Jason Arday was cleared of plagiarism by Liverpool John Moores, the university that awarded him his PhD, is even now, almost entirely absent from the reporting. But then that’s because journalists haven’t bothered to find out what academic plagiarism actually is, in Stanley’s view:

Maybe he wasn’t such a dummy after all? He wasn’t “found guilty of plagiarism” as I read in one piece yesterday. And even some of the most sympathetic coverage is still calling him a “fabulist”, a “fantasist”, a “fraud”. Because that’s what the “responsible” “public interest” reporting told us. Yesterday’s leader in the Economist, the leading article in one of Britain’s most prestigious outlets, continued to mock the claims about Arday’s marathon running which it claimed he did on a “broken leg”.

Why would an outlet of this calibre and resource fail to fact check even the basics of this claim? The Guardian quote is with regards to a different claim, about the smear campaign and Arday never said he’d said he’d broken his leg. He said he’d kept running on a hairline fracture. And guess what? Long before he was famous, dead, an academic, accused of plagiarism, Cambridge’s youngest black professor, he was just a local lad inspired to raise money for others, as an entire list of local newspapers reported at the time, and yet, until this week, were cited nowhere.

Middle East Eye has tracked them all down here. But why on earth did no-one do so before?

It’s the punching down that’s got me. The bullying. That hasn’t let up since his death.

There are, of course, many thoughtful, intelligent, ethical journalists in Britain. But many are employed in news organisations that participated in the feeding frenzy, that failed in ways small or large. They are not free to speak out. And we’re all guilty anyway. I consumed the Jason Arday coverage even as recoiled at it. But what I didn’t realise, until late, was how suspect, how inadequate, how lacking the underlying reporting was. Commentators were feasting on partial, inaccurate, incomplete material.

And missing, from it all, of course, was Jason Arday. A day or two ago, I spoke to Hannah, my ex-partner’s daughter, who had been affected by the videos she’d seen in her timeline of a gentle, smiling, beautiful man “who seemed almost too pure”.

I was trying to explain to her why I was still so caught up in the story and she thought about it and said: “It reminds me of when I went to meet Alice Ruggles’ parents.” Hannah had a stalker in her 20s and two years ago, we made a BBC podcast where we’d tracked down the man behind it. Alice Ruggles was a girl who’d been in her class at school, who’d also had a stalker. In both of their cases, the police had failed them as they dealt with a terrifying situation outside their control. Hannah survived. Alice didn’t. She was murdered by her stalker. The episode in which Hannah goes to talk to her parents is profoundly sad and moving. You can listen to it here.

The visit to the parents had given her a shivering insight into where this could have led. And maybe, that’s what this story is for me. If I’d lost my defamation case, I would have been Jason Ardayed, I knew that. Just as, she could have been Alice Ruggled. We’d both survived but it wasn’t a given.

And Hannah had been through the painful experience of reckoning with how her stalker had preyed on her, the private anxieties that he’d exploited and the shame she’d carried from that and locked away for years. And that’s what Jason Arday faced too. A careful, skilled manipulative bully who knew exactly where to hit. That’s what Nathan Cofnas, a white supremacist who set the story in motion, did. This piece in Byline Times lays out the race science network of which Cofnas is part and which their previous reporting had showed has made significant inroads at Cambridge University, a subject unreported elsewhere.

We know now how carefully planned this was. But there was so much in the public domain. Professor Jason Stanley was calling out Cofnas’s eugenicist beliefs back in 2020 long before he got the Cambridge gig.

But the point I’m getting to is that the most hideous judgment of all is not delivered by your enemies, it comes from within: it finds a mark somewhere deep inside you, where it collides with the most damaging judgments you hold of yourself on your worst days. That’s what shame is.

Maybe it’s why I feel this story on a different vibration to some of my peers. As a middle-aged woman without the comfort and societal respectability of a nuclear family, I had different anxieties to Jason that were exploited and weaponised but no less painful.

I’ve had heat from calling Jason’s experience a digital lynching but I know of what I speak.

To be clear, social media abuse is downstream from press coverage. It’s not separate and distinct. All media is social media now. And it’s not just why this is a story that’s gotten so under my skin, Hannah points out. It’s also the involvement of the Guardian. Its leadership has issued what amounts to a cease-and-desist letter of anyone questioning anything about its decisions and is now gaslighting Jason Arday’s family and friends and anyone with a pulse who witnessed this entire episode in real time.

Its silence and defensiveness is also exposing its reporters to harm, in my view. They’re the ones with their names on the stories even though they have no power or control whatsoever over when or what is published. It’s editors who make these decisions collectively. These stories went through many hands and the young black and brown reporters whose names are on them are not culpable for any unintended consequences and I really hope that they know that.

I especially hope that the necessary safeguards to protect them are finally in place inside the organisation. This was from just last year:

All news organisations - and universities for that matter - need a Chief Safety Officer. A senior executive who is also an expert in the hybrid threat landscape that journalists and academics navigate. Someone within the institution with the expertise to understand the complexity of the information landscape and the bad actors within it, and how disproportionately black and brown people, women and minorities are at risk.

They would ask the same questions about the people its journalists report on too and they’d understand the news reports don’t exist in a vacuum. Mainstream media and social media are indivisible now, there’s no Chinese Wall. A Chief Safety Officer would have sufficient power and authority to step in when, as I wrote in the last newsletter, a world-leading expert in autism, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, has publicly stated that the autistic man they are reporting on is, in his view, a suicide risk. Because at no point was Jason’s neurodivergence, his autism, taken into account by, it seems, anyone at all though, as the writer, Will Self, who has two autistic children points out in a furious screed:

In 2019, I proposed the above to the Guardian’s senior management. It was my version of a desperate cry for help. I’d just disguised as a dry, quite academic memo. It was never acknowledged, let alone acted on but at some point afterwards I was invited for lunch with my editor, a kind, humane, overworked man with no financial budget and limited power within the wider organisation to help me in any meaningful way.

As we were leaving, he told me about a threatening phone call he’d received. Someone critical of the paper’s trans coverage had called his home phone and threatened his wife. The paper had made major mistakes in its coverage of the subject, as he’d be the first to admit, and he was unprepared for the ferocity of the backlash. “That’s awful,” I said. “I actually thought of you,” he said. “I thought it was probably a good thing that I got to experience a tiny taste of what you’ve been through.”

I so appreciated those words and they’ve stayed with me. If I had a magic wand I’d want all journalists to take a walk inside the Jason Arday Hate Machine in which I’d use AI to harvest their personal data, identify their inner weaknesses, and then blast personalised posts, articles, videos and tweets at them without respite. In this version, I’d have LLMs create stories that “ask questions” about their school records and their teenage sporting achievements. And I’d want them to remain in there, trapped, with no way out, for weeks, if not months. Though, as George Orwell knew, even two minutes of hate will do.

The lesson of the Arday scandal is that this could have been any of us, could still be any of us.

I mentioned my friend, Jess Search, last week. And I want to share her advice again, here, because maybe it will help someone in some way at some point when they need it most. But as we stood outside the court room on the first morning of my trial, I mentioned the shaming and humiliation that I felt so acutely was coming my way.

“Nobody can make you feel shame,” she said. “It’s what sexual survivors are told.” It comes from within and it’s up to you to decide whether you can and will be shamed. It’s what I would have told Jason Arday. It’s what Gisele Pelicot told the world, that shame has to change sides. Her resilience was truly extraordinary. But it’s a semi-magical quality that some people have and some people don’t and perhaps those who struggle most of all are people whose brains are built differently, like Jason’s.

But shame has to change sides. It’s the media’s turn now. We cannot allow the witch hunt to turn on others and that includes young journalists of colour. But we, the British media should be shamed. Need to be shamed. How else do we prevent the next death?

I feel ashamed. Don’t you? This was a collective failure born of the collective shortcomings of our industry that’s a foundation of our collective information space and what we’re witnessing in part is a collective refusal to acknowledge that it’s been re-shaped by the Silicon Valley-owned platforms that create the incentives that unleashed a click-driven cruel and animalistic bloodlust from the most primitive areas of our brains.

It didn’t just overwhelm Arday, but us too. Our frontal lobes, where we do our most complex reasoning, were hijacked. We lost our moral selves. This should be a moment of reckoning for the entire UK media industry and pretending otherwise is to gaslight his family, friends, the public and the very memory of Jason Arday himself.

Some people have suggested this is the press’s “Milly Dowler moment”, the day the nation recoiled in disgust when it discovered a murdered schoolgirl’s phone had been hacked and sparked a public inquiry. But she was already dead. This is so much worse. Jason Arday was alive. And maybe he still would be. If it wasn’t for us.

Which 1980s thinker has the most influence on today’s politicians? It’s not Hayek or Friedman or Rawls or Negri or Laclau. Nope. It’s Cher. “If I could turn back time” is the motto of much of our political-media class.

This is most obviously true of proposals for remigration and mass deportations, which are not a serious response to any socio-economic problem but merely a desire to turn back time to when the UK was more ethnically homogenous.

It’s also true of Burnham’s urge to turn back 60 years of deindustrialisation and to reindustrialise the country, despite the fact that the management and labour skills we need to do so have vanished, insofar as they ever existed in the first place.

The widespread indifference to the collapse of universities is another example. As are proposed cuts in targets for sales of EV cars, plans for more drilling in the North Sea and (in the case of Reform) a refusal to accept the realities of climate change.

We could add Brexit to this. It was never a solution to any problem but rather an atavistic urge to return to a time when Britain or the UK (Brexiters have never been clear about what our country actually is) stood alone in the world.

Granted, the government does have an AI strategy, but this might be less a sign of a realistic embracing of the future than it is like a bunch of children impressed by a conjuring trick.

Our political class want to return us to an era when white men would leave their factory shift at companies such as Tube Investments or Hawker Siddeley, get in the Austin Allegro and go home to wives wearing crimplene* who had their Findus crispy pancakes waiting for them.

This desire to return to the past is a sharp contrast to our most successful politicians who have instead looked to the future. Harold Wilson’s official government profile says “his main plan was to modernise”. He presented himself as a modern technocrat against the amateurish old-fashioned Old Etonian Douglas Home** who wanted the “white heat of the technological revolution” to sweep away “out-dated practices”. Thatcher opposed state intervention in industry in part because it protected “yesterday’s industries, yesterday’s processes and yesterday’s products”, and she wanted to break trades unions in order to give managers the opportunity to modernise workplaces and embrace new technologies. And Blair couldn’t open his mouth in the 90s without talking of modernisation. As Alan Finlayson wrote in Making Sense of New Labour:

If there is a single word that might capture the essence of New Labour’s social and political project then it is ‘modernisation’.

Why, then, are today’s politicians so keen to return to the past when their predecessors succeeded by looking to the future?

For all Burnham’s talk that “in the 1980s, Britain took some wrong turns”, I don’t think it’s because they view the 60s and 70s as a template. They don’t want the tax rates, strong trades unions or extent of nationalisation that we had then.

Instead, they’re looking to a selective picture of the past because they cannot face today. Michael Oakeshott got it right. “If the present is remarkably unsettled”, he wrote , there’ll be “a recourse to and an exploration of the past.” Our true problems are difficult ones: economic stagnation; climate change; overpriced housing; inequalities of economic power; and a degraded public sphere that precludes rational politics. Rather than face these, politicians and the media are instead yearning for a (partly mythical) past.

This is because they simply don’t have the tools to deal with them.

Herein lies a difference between the modernising political projects of the past and the one we need now.

For Wilson, Thatcher and Blair “modernity” required that other people change: old boy dilettantes, trades unions, public sector workers or the left. Today, however, modernity requires that politicians themselves change.

It requires them to see that the lobbyists and vested interests they listen to are the “forces of conservatism” that are holding back economic growth. Reviving economic growth (if it is possible) requires, among other things, that we attack monopoly power, shrink the financial system, and simplify the tax system. But this would alienate corporate lobbyists.

It also requires them to recognise that the mass media is not only the enemy of decency and rationality but also a terrible guide to reality and public opinion, because it no longer aims at a mass market but is instead a few billionaires’ gimps writing for a handful of cranks. Kowtowing to the press is turning back time to when it mattered. What we need instead today is a reconstruction of the public sphere.

And it requires them to think less about mythical “policy levers” and instead about growing new ecosystems, be they forms of economic democracy, better functioning markets or consumer advocacy and advice groups that could act as countervailing power against powerful companies.

In short, politicians themselves must slough off the professional deformation which blights even the best of them: their excessive faith in top-down managerialism and regulation; their reluctance to challenge the constraints which regressive sections of capital tries to impose on them; or their neglect of the importance of emergent social phenomena. We need decentralisation not merely to local mayors, but to individuals - be it in the form of better-functioning markets, powerful consumer advocacy groups, or economic democracy.

Right now, the political-media class not only does not want to do this but barely even recognises than it is an issue. Like Cher, it would much rather turn back time - the difference being that at least Cher knew this cannot be done.

* A British invention.

** The only British PM to have played first class cricket.

The Tories and Reform had it easy when Keir Starmer was self-destructing – but a new PM with ideas exposes how vacant the opposition has become

Andy Burnham’s recollections of Britain in the 1970s must be pretty hazy. He was nine when the decade ended. Kemi Badenoch, born in 1980, can remember nothing. Lacking first-hand experience, the Conservative leader evokes the turmoil of a bygone era with cautionary zeal borrowed from an older generation. In a speech last week, she accused the new prime minister of pining for “endless strikes, rubbish not being collected, bodies not being buried, inflation at 25% and a chancellor going cap-in-hand to the IMF”.

This is more incantation than argument, a ritual fondling of beads on the Tory rosary. It is a symptom of a leader under stress, affirming her faith in Our Lady Margaret Thatcher and warding off socialist devils. Burnham has done nothing to support the claim that his government is a 70s tribute act, unless you count the appointment of a man named Healey as chancellor and the imposition of price controls on buses.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

In the 90s and early 00s, a recurring theme of New Labour was the party’s desire to become more like business. Both Blair and Brown lauded bosses as wealth creators and courageous leaders who had sufficient expertise to advise on welfare (David Freud) and the NHS (Derek Wanless), and Blair was forever demanding that government become “much more business-like”.

Things have changed. One feature of the Starmer government (and indeed its Tory predecessor) has been to act in ways that no sane business would. I’ll give nine examples.

- Good businesses know that it’s easier and better to keep existing customers than to try to win new ones. Labour, however, has done the opposite. Shabana Mahmood has told socially liberal party sympathizers to “fuck right off” whilst chasing Reform voters who never in fact moved to Labour.

- A good business learns from best practice around the world. UK governments have not done this, for example failing to learn from Japan (or pretty much anywhere else) on how to reduce the cost of infrastructure projects.

- No decent business would have appointed someone without experience to a senior position and without doing basic due diligence, as Starmer appointed Mandelson.

- Businesses don’t deliberately deprive themselves of revenue. But the government does, by keeping us out of the single market thereby causing the economy and tax revenues to be smaller than they’d otherwise be.

- Businesses know what their core competence is, and try to cultivate it. Labour has done the opposite, allowing even top universities (one of the few sectors in which the UK has world-class establishments) to decline, whilst trying to support a steel industry in a country with the highest energy costs in Europe.

- Businesses know that balance sheets have two sides. The government has been unaware of this. Rachel Reeves is reported to be considering using a regulated asset base model to finance the building of new towns, whereby a company provides infrastructure in exchange for charging a regulated price for its use such as a toll for roads or an electricity price for nuclear power stations. This makes sense only because it allows her to meet fiscal rules that consider only the liabilities side of the balance sheet and ignore assets such as the future revenues from toll roads. But this is unbusinesslike. Unless they are in financial distress (which the government is plainly not) businesses don’t have self-imposed rules which prevent profitable investments. And if it’s profitable for a private company to borrow to build a new town then it must be profitable for the government to do so too, simply because the government can borrow more cheaply than the private sector.

- A good business knows that you sometimes need to spend money in the short-term to make it in the longer-run. Successive governments have not done this, for example by closing Sure Start centres even though these save the Treasury money in the longer-run, and by not investing enough in net zero even though the benefits of doing so would exceed the near-term costs.

- In business, contracting out is a matter of detailed economics, not ideology or favours to cronies. Good businesses buy in services only if doing so is cheaper and if they have the ability to ensure the precise quality of what they’re getting. Indeed, as Ronald Coase pointed out (pdf) companies only exist at all because the costs of contracting out exceed those of doing the job in-house. Governments, however, have been more careless about this than any decent company would be. For example, the privatization of probation services and children’s homes led to a collapse in quality; Sam Freedman’s Failed State is good on this. And military procurement has for years been as much about corporate welfare as about building good defences. The House of Commons Defence Committee recently said the procurement system was “broken” and that “multiple, successive reviews have not yet fixed it”. And the NAO has found (pdf) that of 52 of the latest major procurement projects only two were delivered on time and within budget. Very few businesses could survive by being so sloppy (or worse) for so long.

- Businesses know that ownership matters. Takeovers, buy-outs, flotations, and sales of some units are quotidian events. The government by contrast keeps issues of ownership off the agenda, despite clear evidence that private ownership of the water industry is a failure.

Of course, I’m not saying that business is a paragon of how organizations should behave. It’s not. It is, as Marx pointed out, a sphere of exploitation, alienation, domination and unfreedom. And it often fails by its own lights. Nick Bloom and John Van Reenen have shown that there’s a “long tail of badly managed firms”, partly because of nepotism and perhaps because managerialism has supplanted actual good management.

But the government has not abandoned the business paradigm for these reasons. Quite the opposite. It’s kept many of the bad aspects of business and abandoned the good, acting in utterly unbusinesslike ways**. It’s given us not actual competence but rather competenciness - a simulacrum of the real thing. The centre-left’s pretence to being the hard-headed grown-ups in the room is merely a narcissistic fantasy. It no more gives us competent government than children playing at doctors and nurses provide qualified medical professionals.

So, why are politicians so unbusinesslike?

One reason could be that they have so little experience of business that they just haven’t a clue how it works. As Martin Robbins says:

Our political system is so out-of-touch with any semblance of what effective management looks like in the modern world that in their minds basically any dull man in a suit will do.

Politicians get their image of business not from the real world but from The Apprentice, wherein a bunch of talentless wannabees mistake ambition and gobshitery for any ability to run things.

But there’s something else. In the 1990s, Labour saw business as a paradigm of successful achievement, in contrast to the party itself which had been out of power and sometimes in chaos since 1979. Today, however, two decades of stagnation have left us with very few British businesses that are models of success*. Instead, the paradigm has changed. Politicians now aspire not to be like businessmen but like “influencers” trying to grab eyeballs. Badenoch is the exemplar of this in the digital age: like a cushion that bears the imprint of the last arse to have sat on it, she repeats the last tweet to have impressed itself upon her. Farage is the analogue equivalent, with his dominance of legacy media. Starmer’s tragedy was like Coriolanus’ - unable to either parlay his old skills into his new role, nor adapt to it.

Which poses a question about Burnham. To what extent is his rise the result of him seeming to be a better influencer, with nice eyes and an ability to speak human, and to what extent because of superior ideas and ability to govern? We can but hope.

* One exception to this is Games Workshop, but politicians don’t want to appeal to their client base.

** Don’t tell me that Labour needs to act like this because of public opinion. I might buy that if they were at 35-40% in the polls, but at 15-20% it is just drivel.

Delegates at an ‘anti-woke’ conference disparaged Ed Miliband’s net zero policies. But even they could not ignore the sweat on their foreheads

It was hardly a perfect film, but I keep thinking of Don’t Look Up. In its depiction of a world that stubbornly refuses to heed the warnings of an imminent planetary disaster, it was perhaps too on the nose. But these days, reality itself is too on the nose.

This week served up ample evidence, on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, like much of Europe, the all-consuming concern has been intense, intolerable heat, with temperature records shattered and swathes of the country under the highest state of alert. For the first time, red warnings were issued in the UK for three consecutive days. Schools have closed; nights have become sleepless, with the mercury rising to meet the technical definition of “tropical”. There are wildfires in Derbyshire. All this in a temperate country in June.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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A database of almost a million passports from around the world was leaked online.

Note what happened. A high-value credential—a passport—was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it’s the low-value system that got hacked, putting the high-value credential at risk.