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Anthony McIntyre ☠ When he died at the tender age of seventeen Alex McKee had around enough heartbeats left in his body to to be able to live another six decades, maybe more.

A budding scientist from Cork city, set to do his leaving cert in September, he had been part of a team that was the recipient of the Ombudsman for Children Award at the Stripe Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition 2026. The team also won first place in the category of Health and Wellbeing for its work 'Bumblebee', its aim described by the Irish Times as being to support non-verbal children and adults living with dementia.

He had bags of potential and a long productive future ahead of him, all of it robbed when he died from electrocution while taking a shower, the result seemingly of faulty wiring. He had been holidaying with his mother and sister at the time. His mother is a Greek national and each year the family would travel to Kimolos, one of the country's southern islands.

Many of us heading off for holidays, if we worry at all, might be nervous about the flight, or increase our vigilance in anticipation of pick pockets. Nobody expects to be electrocuted taking a shower. If those responsible for maintenance had been as diligent with their wiring as Alex was with his science, he might still be alive.

Cork TD, Colm Burke, said of the dead teen:

It's extremely sad to hear that someone so young has died so tragically . . . He was a really talented young person with his whole life and huge career ahead of him. Earlier this year, he put a huge effort into getting to that stage in the Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition and was awarded for his efforts. 

A fortnight back from a holiday abroad where I was accompanied by my own son, the news of the Greek tragedy concentrated the mind, making the loss of life all the more poignant. Family holidays are times for bonding and memory making. Along with my son and my daughter's boyfriend I would swim out to the buoys in the Mediterranean delineating the end of the lifeguard observed swimming stretch. We would joke that the best way to clear a beach of clerics is to shout 'buoy in the water', which would see them swimming out in their droves. That type of craic is what holidays are meant to be about. Happy memories are lodged and later revisited.

But there will be no happy memories for the family of Alex McKee, just grief and despair. Not any way to return from a family holiday.

Eternal Dreamless Sleep to a boy, the benefit of whose science will be felt by many into advanced years. 

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Greek Tragedy

Christopher Owens ðŸ”– Never underestimate a good blurb.


How else are you meant to be sold the plot of the book you’re holding, but also what filter to use when reading it.

Here’s the one that was used for the novel currently being reviewed:

Trav, thirteen, is trying to come to terms with the death of his father. Jay, Trav’s best friend, is tasked with going through a decade’s worth of writing that Trav wrote after finding his father dead. Stella, Trav’s mother, is trying to keep it together for her son while dealing with irreparable fallout in her adopted family. Together, they try to make sense of grief and its druggy comedown, and what happens when cursed destinies intersect. Powered by the prose — the rhythm and technique — of accent, sociolect, and place, this novel is working-class but not council-estate chic, grim but not grey, and blessed with a slangy Birmingham vernacular not readily found in modern fiction.

If you read that and immediately thought of Close to Home, you’re not the only one. However, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing as Birmingham has a very different history, culture and the citizens have a different perspective from us Belfast types so it has the potential to be quite different in its delivery.

While certain aspects are a little different, the basic premise (working class kid from broken home does lots of drugs at university while harbouring pretensions at being a writer) is still close enough to invite comparisons. Still, are the characters distinct enough to stand on their own?

Yes and no.

The protagonist is drawn reasonably enough to be both direct and to allow for a small amount of subtext to be filled in by the reader. As he is also the writer (speaking about himself in the third person), he’s careful to ensure that he doesn’t come across as too much of a bastard (indeed, in the prologue, he freely admits that he’ll be telling some porkies in the name of ‘his Truth’). The end result is a half blank canvas for the reader to project their own takes onto instead of a solid character whom we are compelled to follow through thick and thin.

This is a shame as there are moments that are so powerfully rendered that they hit the reader in the solar plexus. The main example is the death of Trev’s dad. As an opening, it’s stark, filled with little nostalgic details that accentuate the sadness and leaves a lingering effect throughout. Likewise, a scene detailing allegations of sexual abuse and the aftermath is packed with claustrophobia, disbelief and rage.

Overall, it’s a decent debut novel which is entertaining and poignant, tells its story in a manner that is direct and thoughtful (I finished it in a day) but doesn’t harness the power of the aforementioned scenes to create a compelling narrator and/or narrative. Maybe an extra 50 or so pages would have helped the story go in a different direction or fleshed out the characters a little more. Regardless, there are worse ways to spend your time.

In this case, the blurb didn’t lie to us so it did its job correctly.

Taylor Burns, 2026, Trav: A Novel, Zer0 Books. ISBN-13: 978-1803418537

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.

Trav 📚 A Novel

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Sixty One

 


Religious Derangement Syndrome @ 11

 

A Morning Thought @ 3233

Ian Major  ✒ When we encounter Christians who practice lying and/or dishonesty, adultery or any other sin, their hypocrisy marks them as dangerous people. No telling what they might do.

(NKJV)Matthew 23:27: Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. 28 Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

On 22 June 2026 The Right Honourable Sir Jeffrey Mark Donaldson, PC, MP was found guilty at Newry Crown Court of all 18 charges against two victims who were children at the time of the abuse: one count of rape, four of gross indecency, and thirteen of indecent assault.

Not a great surprise, you may think, as many politicians in Westminster have had similar exposures in time past. All power tends to corrupt in this evil world. But Jeffrey Donaldson made his political career on the premise of being an sound Evangelical, opposed to gay marriage and the expansion of abortion. He constantly wore a fish symbol on his lapel and spoke about his faith in churches and Premier Christianity magazine. In 2023 he told a GB News broadcast that his faith was at "the core of his being".

His 2004 biography, Not By Might - a Journey in Faith and Politics, written by Noel Davidson is a glowing presentation of a devout Christian standing for righteousness in our nation, and labouring for the welfare of his constituents.

The reality behind the front was a man not only guilty of serial sexual abuse of two children, committed beginning in his twenties, but a series of adulteries, gay encounters and heavy drinking. Some of these were known by fellow politicians, some of whom are Evangelicals.

The fall-out from the case doesn’t end with whatever sentence he faces in September. The two poor women have the memory of the offences to carry for the rest of their lives, even though they have been vindicated by the jury. The scandal has smeared the gospel, for his very public assertion of his faith is known to all, at least in Northern Ireland. Added to that may be the discovery that several Evangelicals knew of his godless conduct (except for his paedophilia) and allowed him to continue as both MP and Party Leader. They abhorred his behaviour, but were content to remain in the party he led. This may have grave consequences for the DUP if this crisis for the party is not clearly resolved, for most Evangelicals in NI vote for the DUP or the TUV. Voting for a party that embraced serial hypocrisy may not be an option for many believers.

Jeffrey Donaldson's standing as a true Christian is almost zero. Not because of his abuse of the children, for even that may be forgiven if there is true repentance. Donaldson however has shown no sign of true repentance, marked by his denial of guilt and making the women go through the ordeal of testifying in court and being cross-examined.

His serial adultery, gay encounters, lying, and drunkenness while talking Christian talk mark him as a hypocrite. That is a sin that is often hard to leave.

Any chaplain or evangelist visiting him would know they are not dealing with a common sinner, but one able to lie most convincingly. I hope they will call him to true repentance and wait to hear a full account of all his sins, and his crimes acknowledged fully in a letter to each woman. Then a similar letter to his church and party, apologizing for the pain he has caused them.

Then, maybe then, he can turn to Christ, confessing all to Him and asking His forgiveness. A changed life will be the only acceptable indication of a changed heart.

⏩Ian Major grew up a heathen Protestant, was converted at 17. He lives out his Evangelical faith as a Baptist. 

Jeffrey Donaldson's Standing As A True Christian Is Almost Zero

Caoimhin O’Muraile  ☭ On Tuesday 28th July 2026 a huge earthquake was reported to have taken place in Japan. 

Although the Asian country is prone to geological disasters including earthquakes such happenings should not be viewed in isolation. There is no evidence earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are on the increase, though severity on the Richter scale of earthquakes are on an upward trajectory. If we view such disasters within the overall climatic changes which are occurring in general and a very different picture emerges. 

The earthquake in Japan caused multiple deaths and huge evacuations around the Kumamoto region of Kyushu Island. This quake occurred at the same time France and Spain were experiencing huge wildfires rampaging across the terrain which are on the increase annually. Wildfires do not recognise national borders or capital cities. Madrid, the Spanish capital, has been under threat from these abnormal infernos on more than one occasion as have other Spanish cities and cities around the globe from their regional wildfires. Thousands of people, many of them holiday makers, have been evacuated and many homes will be lost forever while firefighters struggle to cope. 

Along with the earthquake in Japan, the wildfires in Spain and France, here in the Twenty-Six-Counties we have had a wildfire on Sliabh na mBan (Slieve Namon), Mountain of the Women or Maidens Mountain, in County Tipperary. Firefighters responded to renewed fire activity while reassuring the public the blaze remained under control. Despite these reassurances the south eastern flank of the mountain “eased down then resurfaced” with a vengeance. Many of the isolated areas were described as “isolated hotspots”. A spokesperson commented; “outbreaks of fire activity such as those experienced are to be expected following a wildfire event on this scale”. Greece also had wildfires about the same time and a mid-air helicopter crash killed the crews of both machines - these were helicopters trying to extinguish the fires. The problem here is “wildfire events on this scale” are happening with increased regularity and severity. Along with winter floods, and big freeze ups, increased earthquake severity, summer wildfires are becoming regular and to be expected. Global warming is the cause of these unprecedented changes in our climate and the results can be seen by all but the congenitally stupid every year and are getting worse.

Emerging climate science can reveal, which many of us have suspected for some time, that global warming is the engine of climate change. Such warmings have occurred on a much slower scale over several periods of millennia but more recent research can reveal “human driven atmospheric warming is physically altering the earth’s crust”, thus affecting the weight distribution on the earth’s surface. Earthquakes occur due to a release of “tectonic stress” and this “weight distribution” modifies the “seismic clock” altering earthquake regularity. First, we are told there has been no increase in earthquake regularity then, in the next breath, they imply the “seismic clock” is being modified, implying the rapidity and regularity of earthquakes are increasing. What are we to believe? It is accepted that the rate of climate change is “human driven” even the boffins who are trying to defend those humans responsible for these increases in global warming through their business activities and profiteering admit that the rapidity of these changes to be “human driven”. This human behaviour, by a minority of people, is overwhelmingly driven by the relentless “pursuit of profits and economic growth”. Space exploration directly alters “the chemistry, physics, and climate conditions” across all five of the planet’s atmospheric layers.

All around the globe so-called natural disasters are on the increase most notably, wildfires. Along with the terror unleashed by these fires in France and Spain, Greece has been ablaze as flames tore across the island. Can people remember some years ago in Australia businessman and climate change denier, Rupert Murdoch, telling us climate change is a “myth”? He said this while in the background film footage of Australia burning could be seen by all. The business fraternity in general appear to hold the opinion, or pretend to, that climate change is either exaggerated or non-existent, the work of left-wing activists trying to cause chaos. To these profit seeking bastards just look around you, it is you and the likes of you, who are greatly to blame for the possible premature destruction of planet Earth. The likes of Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and various space agencies around the globe are systematically contributing to the earth’s destruction! While we are constantly told of the need to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, a major contributor towards climate change, we are told nothing of the much worse space exploration contribution to such climatic changes.

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is in the process of commercialising space travel, hoping to make it, one day, as readily available as domestic aviation excursions. Should this happen and it probably will it almost certainly will mean more and more rockets taking off, each lift off the equivalent of twenty-eight Jumbo Jets taking off simultaneously. The amount of domestic aviation travel we have is already far too great for the sustainability of the planet but throw this volume on top and global disasters are sure to increase. 

On the heels of Musk is another space cowboy capitalist money grabbing bandit, Richard Branson. His primary space travel project is Virgin Galactic, a commercial company focused on suborbital space tourism. The company was formed in 2004 to take private passengers to the edge of space. Flights are expected to reach an altitude of around 54 to 55 miles, or 85-88 kilometres, giving passengers a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of the earth’s curvature. This altitude is the separation point between the Mesosphere, below 85km, and the Thermosphere, above 85 km, known as the Mesopause, where temperatures plunge as low as -90 to -100 degrees C. Damage is caused to the two main layers and the sub-layer Mesopause and to reach this point traveling through the all-important Troposphere and Stratosphere also causing irreversible damage to these important layers. 

The Troposphere is of great importance, though not the only layer where damage occurs and is concerning, because it directly affects the earth's weather patterns and temperatures. It is in all probability damage to this layer in particular, though not exclusively, which is causing the increase in adverse weather conditions epitomised in these wildfires across the planet. With Musk and Branson aiming to increase the amount of damage caused we can expect more and more fires and floods. As large chunks of ice the size of a small country like Wales falling off the ice caps at the poles it is only a matter of time before a country like Ireland is underwater. These seasonal floods we experience one day will not recede because the water will have nowhere to go as the oceans fill up and rise. Already the wildfires are proving too much for over taxed firefighters in various countries. And yet, despite all this, and overwhelming evidence the likes of Musk and Branson are allowed to continue damaging the planet at an unprecedented rate.

If space travel is commercialised as Musk and Branson make no secret of their intentions we can multiply the planets problems. It is bad enough with domestic aviation travel which if any sense and continuity of argument exist should be at least reduced. One breath the so-called politicians, who we are foolish enough to vote for, tell us of the danger’s aviation poses to the planet then they talk of building another runway at Heathrow Airport or Dublin Airport. More runways equals more aviation transport and the math here tell their own story. More aircraft equals more aviation fuel emissions and general usage which in some cases result in spillage into the ground. There may be hope with the domestic flight travel because research work is underway to electrify the transport mode, the airplane. Progress will depend on the level of investment into this electrification of flight is expended. Will the capitalist class consider it important enough or, to be precise, a high enough profit return to invest?

Elon Musk has recently been hailed as the world’s first trillionaire much of this wealth being amassed on damaging the planet with his space toys. His company, space X, is expected to reach $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030. This is a phenomenal amount of money made by nefarious means involving missions which destroy the planet in the process. Many of those who have unfortunately lost their homes in Spain, France, Greece and anywhere else where these wildfires have hit are probably the same people who applaud the genius of Elon Musk and the likes of. While they were watching on their television sets news of Musk’s financial achievements little would they have realised these same financial gains may cost them indirectly their homes and livelihoods. Surely the time has come to catch ourselves on collectively, listen to people like David Attenborough and the young Swedish activist, Gretta Thunberg, and stop listening to the lies spun by the likes of Trump, Branson, and Musk to name but three brigands.
 
Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Catch Yourselves On 🪶 For Once

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Sixty

 

A Morning Thought @ 3232

Jim Duffy ✍ The Presumptions Are Well Known.


1. Fine Gael will demand that any supports with electricity, etc Must be universal - meaning much of the money will go to millionaires (who admit to being embarrassed at getting it. Michael O'Leary called giving him those payments "disgusting"). 

Most of the money will go to people who don't need it and those that do will not get enough as so much is wasted on those that won't. Fianna Fáil, independents and the civil service will try to block such a dumb policy. Fine Gael will threaten to collapse the government unless all aid is "universal". So the dumb policy will continue - despite being condemned by every expert and everyone from the ESRI to the Fiscal Council. Fine Gael is fixated on the idea. 

When working for Fine Gael I tried arguing against the idiotic idea of "universality" in payments. It was impossible to convince Fine Gaelers of the idiocy of the policy. Even the Fiscal Council, which is hardly left wing, calls the policy idiotic. However for some reason it is an article of faith for Fine Gael.
 
2. Harris will demand that social welfare recipients not get payments adjusted for inflation so he can give the middle and upper middle class tiny tax cuts. Fianna Fáil will say "over our dead body" and threaten to collapse the government. Fianna Fáil, thankfully, will win that one.
 
3. Chambers will demand cuts to spending on Defence, calling them savings, despite the fact that Defence in Ireland has been so chronically underfunded that there is no room whatsoever for cuts. Asking it to cut spending is like suggesting to a skeleton that they lose weight. Hopefully, Fine Gael will stand their ground on that one and threaten to walk if Defence spending is not increased as committed to.
 
4. Chambers will demand a complete embargo on hiring staff in the health service - despite mental health services chronically understaffed to such an extent that an "urgent" appointment, that elsewhere is provided in days or weeks in Ireland takes six months or more. 

It is literally third world standard. That is not an exaggeration. It is quicker to get urgent appointments in much of Africa than it is in Ireland. In Britain there were calls on the health secretary to resign due to a delay of three Weeks. In that very week I was offered an "urgent" appointment eight Months away!
 
As a result there are people dying by suicide in every parish in Ireland as they cannot get appointments with psychologists. I have heard of a scary number of suicides in my home parish. I was in a group of people who used to meet weekly in a support group. Two of that group killed themselves entirely because of the lack of access to appointments. One young woman killed herself when for the fourth time her appointment was postponed and she was offered an appointment in the following year. She could not take it anymore. She killed herself. DPER simply saw that as having one less person to pay money to and one less person in the queue.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Budget 27 🪶 The Human Cost

The Guardian 📰Written by Patrick Wintour. Recommended by Tony Roche.

By dragging out talks, Tehran aims to damage the US president politically – but some fear a bruised and weakened Trump could lash back

Tehran has set out a protracted negotiating timetable designed to keep Donald Trump embroiled in the Iran conflict until the midterm elections, in the hope of inflicting the same ruinous blow on his presidency as Jimmy Carter suffered over the 1979-81 US embassy hostage crisis.

For many inside Iran, inflicting meaningful revenge on Trump is a legitimate and self-standing war aim, reflected in the mood of those attending the funeral of the supreme leader Ali Khamenei where demands for retribution were ubiquitous.

While Iranian officials since the 1979 Islamic revolution have never trusted the US, that animus is now also directed personally towards Trump. He not only tore up the painfully negotiated nuclear deal in 2018, but he sanctioned the assassination of the military leader Qassem Suleimani and twice involved Iran in negotiations on its nuclear programme only to launch wars against it. He shows no remorse for the killing of the country’s supreme leader, or for the attempt on the life of Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian.

Continue @ The Guardian.

Iran Plots To Deal Trump A Blow In Midterms By Keeping Him Entangled In War

Barry Gilheany ✍ It was a “gotcha” moment for opponents of “woke” culture and its institutional manifestation: DEI (or Diversity, Equality and Inclusion). 

And for those whose belief in meritocracy is often wilfully colour blind. On the other hand, it was a moment for serious reflection for genuine anti-racists. 

Last Wednesday, Jason Arday, the “youngest black professor at Cambridge University” resigned from his post as Professor of Sociology of Education after a welter of allegations concerning his academic credentials including plagiarism in the course of acquiring his PhD thesis at Liverpool John Moores University and his backstory in which he had supposedly learned to speak at age 11, and to read and write at age 18, having been diagnosed with global developmental delay and autistic spectrum disorder as a child. 

None of these disadvantages were to stand in the way of his appointment to that prestigious Cambridge post at 37. As well as the deconstruction of his academic credential, Jason Arday’s fantastical claims about his sporting achievements including that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days helping to raise £5m for charities over a twenty-year period and that he had played football for Crystal Palace as an under-18 (he actually turned out for Lewisham Borough in the Southern Counties East Division One – near the bottom of English non-league pyramid)[1]. As is inevitable on these occasions, this saga generated a quotidian of online and offline abuse towards the central character; “I told you so” triumphalism about the conservative media and academia and yet another culture war for respective combatants to engage in.

A hint of the looming storm ahead when Jason Arday delivered a talk entitled Wanted Dead or Alive: The Playbook at the British Sociological Association’s 75th anniversary conference earlier this year. It is unusual, to say the least, for such political polemics to be sounded at academic events such as these as they are usually occasions where academics discuss their work and possible breakthroughs. The youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history described the MO of the playbook to his audience of academic peers. 

In order to bring down some of the stellar names in US academia; conservative “activists” were trawling through the work of black academics; looking for any scraps of scholarly infractions to weaponise against them: inconsistencies, citation errors, passages in their works that appeared similar to work in existing papers. Errors duly identified would trigger pile-ons by right-wing media and political figures on universities to pressurise them to sever ties with the offending academic. High profile figures such as Claudine Gray, the first African American woman to become president of Harvard, fell victim to this blitzkrieg with her being forced to resign over plagiarism allegations. Other academics were forced to become passive spectators to the trashing of their work and some even committed suicide after being hounded out of their positions. But Arday warned that these tactics were being imported into the UK to deal similar fates to its high-profile black academics. He called for his peers to defend him from “the cancer that we need to eradicate from academia.”[2]

As if on cue, at the end of July 2026, the Telegraph reported that analysis had found that more than 100 passages in his PhD resembled another thesis by Paula Zwozdfiak-Myers, a student at Brunel University, published six years earlier. This followed two denouncements of Arday’s work by two academics with controversial views on race which for some anti-racists served as confirmation of the playbook narrative that Arday had expounded on at the British Sociological Association. The first was Nathan Cofnas, a self-styled “race realist” sacked by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024 after he suggested in a blogpost that, in a meritocracy, there would be “close to zero” black professors” at Harvard, who claimed in a Substack post that he had put Arday’s PhD through plagiarism detection software, which found that “many passages are lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source” (A disciplinary investigation into his blogpost about black academics concluded that Cofnas was not guilty of “discrimination or harassment” and that his views, “while seen by many as offensive, did not breach the law and did not contravene university regulations designed to uphold free speech.” He now works at Ghent University in Belgium).[3]

The second race-controversial critic of Arday was Dr David Harris, a professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, who had previously written to Cambridge with claims about Arday’s work. Harris had been stripped of his professor emeritus title after he wrote a post about critical race theory that was deemed “controversial” by colleagues, but it was reinstated this year. After Harris’s earlier queries about Arday’s work, two corrections were made to papers released in 2018 and 2020.[4]

The fact that his critics held so controversial views on race appeared to lead to a doubling down of support for Arday from those at the opposite end of the academic and political spectrum. Cambridge called the plagiarism claims a “vile smear campaign to undermine his credibility.” An open letter in support of Arday, signed by the Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, (never one to pass up an opportunity to burnish his “woke” credentials regardless of the possible electoral and reputational impacts on his party) and the prominent black studies academic Kehinde Andrews, argued there was “an orchestrated and grim effort to delegitimise a brilliant, young working-class academic for the sin of being successful while Black”.[5] An open letter from the Good Law Project, signed by prominent public figures, denounced the allegations as “entirely false”, a “smear campaign” to “undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.”[6]

But yet, despite John Moores University’s rebuttal of the plagiarism allegations concerning him, more troubling evidence emerged about Arday’s scholarly attributes and achievement including his claims to have held a string of prestigious visiting fellowships and professorships at other universities. The website for Jesus College, where Arday was a fellow, stated that he had been a visiting professor at the Ohio State University and the University of Glasgow which both institutions have denied. This biography also stated that Arday was still an “honorary professor at Durham University in the Department of Sociology” where he had previously worked. The university told the Daily Mail that he no longer held any role there. He has also claimed to have completed a master’s degree in psychodynamic practices at Birkbeck, University of London which, according to enquiries by the Guardian has no record of any student named Jason Arday having studied there. He has claimed to have published a book with Palgrave Macmillan but while this publisher have confirmed that they took a proposal from Arday, the book was never published.[7]

And the suspicions about his false representations of his work did not go away. Prominent academics of colour, including one who has worked in the area of race and education for decades, who have spoken to the Guardian on conditions of anonymity, have agreed that the claims of plagiarism were legitimate. John Preston, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Essex, asserts: “Having seen the evidence, it triangulates and there is, in my judgment, a case to answer here”.[8]

And so Cambridge’s DEI icon resigned and a full inquiry into the circumstances of Jason Arday’s appointment and his academic credentials has commenced. 

 But what has been and what will the likely fallout from the affair? For eminent black sociologist Paul Gilroy and other academics of colour, the manner of Arday’s appointment and the divisions around it, will have a chilling effect on blacks and other ethnic minorities in academe to come. For Gilroy, the 

unthinking culture warriors who have supported Jason Arday unconditionally share responsibility with his racist critics for making life harder for black academics and dragging UK higher education deeper into the mire . . . (emphasising that) . . . reckoning with [Arday] and his impact-chasing enablers should not be allowed to obscure the vicious, irrational cuts to humanities that are wrecking UK universities.[9]

For Jason Okundaye, the “inspiring story” media circus around Arday’s appointment and the framing of his story as the “youngest black ever” asterisked by a tale of hardship has left the field wide open to the right to frame criticism of DEI on its own terms rather than a genuinely progressive critique of institutional diversity practices – one capable of examining how for many organisations and corporations symbolic or tokenistic representation has been a substitute for deeper reform. For, in his view, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that Arday was treated as a mascot rather than a scholar, an expedient gesture for an institution frequently found wanting over its record on race in matriculation records such as in the Okundaye’s 2015 cohort in which there were only 15 black males out of 3,449 students; single-figure black academics (which is still the case); allegations of institutional racism. 

The lesson of the Jason Arday scandal is that the left must advocate for diversity not tokenism, the celebration of excellent BME and other minority scholarship without the iconography of exceptionalism or celebrity academic. It does not entail taking on trust the entreaties of someone who alleges a racist campaign of intimidation including a severed pig’s head, a masked man wielding a knife and bullets in the post on the reasoning that “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me” as Jason Arday responded to the Guardian after their queries found they were either non-existent or could not be verified.[10]

As is often the case with disability and neurodiversity, the story of the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history was framed as a triumph over adversity. However such heroic narratives prioritise the individual story of amazing success over the struggle for equality and justice by the community of group from which they have. Black, disabled, neurodiverse or any other minoritised excellence deso not have to be redemption stories to be coherent or empowering.

The Jason Arday affair can be seen as another deleterious example of imported US style, tick box, institutional feel-good DEI culture whose outworkings have disastrous consequences for societal harmony as well as the advancement of genuine equality for BME and other marginalised groups as the Henry Novak case showed in policing. To counteract the “DEI hires”, surrender of academia to “wokeness” and “bogus” disciplines like sociology jibes from the right means not just acknowledging plagiarism and fraud where it is found even among black academics but also attacking the falsity, tokenism and blackwashing of corporate wokeness. It means also resistance to the self-appointed guardians of woke orthodoxy in parts of the left – – the dictatorship of the woketariat as Anthony McIntyre has christened them.

References

[1] Lanre Bakare, 2026. Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head. New claims surround a star Cambridge professor. The Guardian. 3-August.pp.6-8

[2] Ibid, p.6

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

[5] Ibid, p.7

[6] Kenan Malik, 2026. The racism black academics face isn’t helped by leaping to Jason Ardat’s defence. The Observer Forum 9 August. p.25

[7] Lanre Bakare, 2026. Jobs, sport and charity. Long list of Arday’s claims now being scrutinised. The Guardian. 7 August. pp.12-13

[8] Bakare, 3 August op cit p.7

[9] Chris Osuh. 2026. Jason Arday. Scandal has a chilling effect on black lecturers. The Guardian. 8 August 2026 p.5

[10] Jason Okundaye, 2026. The right made DEI a weapon and the left just let it happen. The Guardian Opinion. 6 August. pp.1-2

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Jason Arday 🪶 Poster Boy For Or Victim Of “Woke”?

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