The scandal surrounding Cambridge University professor Jason Arday, the plagiarism (now beyond doubt), a fake CV and a Walter Mitty like complex about his achievements has provided ample ammunition to Britain’s Right, and further afield. It should also have provided a good opportunity for the Left to raise issues around race, class, education and the rancid self-serving set up that is academia. Unfortunately, the only ones that seem to be trying to make any headway on the issues are the Right.
Arday was the poster boy for Cambridge’s diversity credentials. He ticked all the boxes and probably added a few more of his own for good measure. We now know that very little of what he claimed about his life, his CV and non-academic activities is true. He does have a PhD which was awarded by John Moore’s University in Liverpool. But it has now been marred by the fact that it contains what have been described as significant examples of plagiarism. It is unlikely that he was non-verbal till age 11 and learned to read and write at the age of 18, given that he had sat GCSE’s before that age. Someone who knew him has claimed on Tik Tok that he wasn’t non-verbal.[1] The details are important, but more important is the reaction from various quarters. The Right are obviously having a field day, with most of the right-wing press giving over extensive coverage to the issue and surprisingly sticking to the facts on many occasions. Having smelt blood they see no need for fake news.
Ostensibly, the issue is about an academic who faked it till he made it, but in reality it has gone beyond that and become a discussion on DEI initiatives, university admissions and race. Though it should be said there are no DEI initiatives like those that exist in the US, though some on the right speak as if there were. He obviously did not deserve to get as far as he did and this is now being used to say no BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) students as they are termed deserved to get as far as they did and that Arday is the tip of the iceberg.
Arday was the poster boy for Cambridge’s diversity credentials. He ticked all the boxes and probably added a few more of his own for good measure. We now know that very little of what he claimed about his life, his CV and non-academic activities is true. He does have a PhD which was awarded by John Moore’s University in Liverpool. But it has now been marred by the fact that it contains what have been described as significant examples of plagiarism. It is unlikely that he was non-verbal till age 11 and learned to read and write at the age of 18, given that he had sat GCSE’s before that age. Someone who knew him has claimed on Tik Tok that he wasn’t non-verbal.[1] The details are important, but more important is the reaction from various quarters. The Right are obviously having a field day, with most of the right-wing press giving over extensive coverage to the issue and surprisingly sticking to the facts on many occasions. Having smelt blood they see no need for fake news.
Ostensibly, the issue is about an academic who faked it till he made it, but in reality it has gone beyond that and become a discussion on DEI initiatives, university admissions and race. Though it should be said there are no DEI initiatives like those that exist in the US, though some on the right speak as if there were. He obviously did not deserve to get as far as he did and this is now being used to say no BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) students as they are termed deserved to get as far as they did and that Arday is the tip of the iceberg.
His fakery was uncovered by an aggrieved racist who prefers the term “race realist” i.e. someone talking about race but with a tangential relationship to reality. Nathan Cofnas was a researcher at Cambridge, dismissed from the university for stating that in a real meritocracy blacks would disappear from most fields except sports and entertainment. This should be an easy debate to win, but the Left messed it up a long time ago and has been found wanting. They have bought into liberal identity politics and wokeism to such a degree that most of them frequently have great difficulty in distinguishing their own politics from those of Biden, Clinton, Obama and even Keir Starmer on a whole host of identity issues, including race and the odd war here and there.
They couldn’t even bring themselves to say that “this guy is a charlatan but….” Instead they have come out defending him on all levels, even excusing his fake CV and the plagiarism. The SWP stated that we are expected to embellish our CVs and that:
They couldn’t even bring themselves to say that “this guy is a charlatan but….” Instead they have come out defending him on all levels, even excusing his fake CV and the plagiarism. The SWP stated that we are expected to embellish our CVs and that:
Here Arday’s failing was not that he lied, but that he didn’t lie convincingly enough.
Universities as institutions choose to cover up any hint of scandal, rather than live up to standards they claim as sacrosanct.
That is part of a wider pattern generated by the collapse of state funding and the intense competition between institutions for students and investment.[2]
Nor quite. He did lie convincingly enough to get the professorship and was lauded by all and at the time of writing Simon and Schuster, one of the top publishing houses in the world, is due to publish his fantasy tale as an autobiography in the coming weeks. It took a racist degenerate to expose the lie.
And funding issues are an issue in education but not in this case. In 2018, Cambridge and Oxford had assets of £21 billion. In 2026 it was revealed that Cambridge had a £4 billion investment fund which is partly invested in the arms industry, though the university/company has refused to elaborate on exactly how much is invested in it.[3] A token black professor is virtue signalling when murdering millions of black and brown people around the world is apparently ok. Promote a black person from London, but murder some from Sierra Leone. Cambridge sits atop a pile of rotting corpses, not only historically but currently.
There is another path to be taken on this issue. One is to accept his charlatanry as they come in all shapes and sizes, fight against racist notions that BAME don’t deserve or are not capable of being at university and also challenging the notions of identity politics, DEI and replace it with class. The black Marxist US academic Adolph Reed has been to fore on this, placing class centre stage even with black and brown people. Before looking at what he says about race and class it is worth looking at the racial and class make up of Cambridge, which might surprise some. BAME make up around 16.2% of the English and Welsh population with the largest group being Asians, followed by blacks at 4%.[4] Cambridge university admits a great percentage of BAME to its programmes even when we exclude international students from the statistics. According to its Equality and Diversity Information Report 2022-2023:
When it comes to all staff, the percentage of BAME is closer to their actual percentage of the population and stands at 16%. In relation to just academic staff 13.4% are BAME, though blacks are extremely underrepresented at only 0.6% as compared to Asians at 8.1%, 3.4% mixed and 1.3% as other.[7] There is no breakdown on students within the BAME cohort, though I am going to take a guess and say blacks are underrepresented. It is part of the problem and is itself racist that all minorities are just lumped together as some great homogenous mass when there are clear differences in the experiences and lives within each community.
Though some 13% of the staff chose not to disclose their ethnicity, Cambridge’s diversity report is remarkably detailed. They can tell you how many whites, blacks, Asians, women, disabled and unsurprisingly trans-genders study or are employed by the university and can even break it down to some nationalities, Irish, Pakistani, Chinese, Bangladeshi, Indian, African, Caribbean etc. What it cannot tell you is how many working-class people study or work there. It cannot tell you how many BAME from working-class backgrounds study or work there either. Class does not figure. On the one hand, they don’t care about white working-class and on the other in their condescension they don’t recognise that there is any such thing as BAME working class. Being working-class is something you shall not speak of. It is like a disease. The Irish comedian Justine Megan wrote in a recent article that when she went to Ireland’s equivalent of Cambridge, Trinity College, she was asked what school she had gone to in order to socially pigeon hole her and she quipped that she was “diagnosed as working-class”.[8] Many of us have had that experience where they realise you are working class, one of their hoi polloi as they would put it and you realise their reaction would be milder if you told them you had Ebola.
We should be clear Oxford and Cambridge and other universities of their like (the Russell Group) and their feeder schools of Eton, Harrow etc. are not meritocracies, they are about class and money. Boris Johnson, Cameron, Blair etc are all about money, nothing else. Even Trump went to an Ivy League university and if you think that was about anything other than money, you have been asleep for some time. This is not about meritocracy as it has never existed in academia and most academics are opposed to changing that. Academia has always been about money and the Zeitgeist. A period in the 1960s and 1970s when working-class people went to university and came to the fore was just a hiatus, that no longer exists. The number of working-class academics is on the decline and has been for quite some time.
Adolph Reed has argued for the centrality of class. It is not surprising that the SWP and other cowards shy away from dealing with the difficult issues. Even someone of the stature of Adolph Reed has been cancelled because of his views on race and class. If a black Marxist academic can’t freely opine on the issue, who can? Those with nothing left to lose perhaps, and given the class nature of the SWP and most “Left” groups in Britain they have a lot to lose until they go back to mammy and daddy for their handout. In 2020, the Democratic Socialists of America, that vague liberal wishy washy group that so many on the Left invest time in, cancelled him over his views on race. He an academic, a product of the racist South where he was an organiser was cancelled by middle class wannabes who have never known real struggle and sacrifice and less still intellectual clarity.[9] Though Reed was not without his supporters, notably Cornel West, the black activist, academic, theologian and author of a ground breaking book Race Matters, first published in 1993.
And that is also what has happened in Britain and elsewhere. Their identity politics led to people like Obama being hailed as the Left whilst drones rained down on Pakistani and Afghan weddings, whilst police murdered blacks at will. It was seen at that time as arch identarian Ta-Nahesi Coates termed it in his eulogy to the Obama regime “Eight years in power”. This is all gate keeping and is not about opposing racism but making sure blacks and other minorities don’t turn their guns, literal or metaphorical, on their real enemies: the ruling class, not other working-class people. Such a situation would see the Oxbridge dons and a significant section of the leadership of the British Left shot at dawn, unfortunately only in the metaphorical sense, though I live in hope.
Reed doesn’t buy into the gate keeping and has opposed race reductionism time and again. Even in the face of mounting police violence in the US he stated that:
Indeed, he might have added that a black Yale graduate might be the one who murders other blacks as part of their service to the state and capitalism. When Freddy Gray was killed by the police in Baltimore, some of the police officers were themselves black, but tellingly the Mayor of Baltimore Stephanie C. Rawlings was black, the Police Commissioner, Dr. Anthony Batts was also black as was the prosecutor Marilyn Mosby. All of them attended prestigious universities such as Oberlin, Harvard and Boston College. None of that helped save Gray or anyone before or after him. Three of the police officers were tried and acquitted and the other three had the charges dropped, despite the city settling for $6.4 million. Even now, blacks represent 61% of the population of Baltimore, 41% of the police force but account for 88% of police killings.[12] Identity politics cannot and in fact has no intention of solving any of this. Too many jobs at stake in the Identity Industry.
It is an Oppression Olympics to keep the working-class fighting amongst themselves for crumbs to prevent them asking the big question posed by Bertolt Brecht. Fine that is the breadcrumb but where is the whole loaf? The upper-class have the whole loaf and the identity politics people want their patronage, they don’t want working class people of any colour to have the whole loaf. It is a reactionary game. The scandal at Cambridge should have afforded the Left an opportunity to question this nonsense, instead they came out swinging on behalf of the capitalists. Sections of the British Left in the 1980s used to chant on marches, Workers Black, Workers White, Workers of the World Unite! Now there real slogan is more akin to Workers Black, Workers White, Against Each Other Fight! Fight for crumbs of course, not the real prize. That is what identity politics is.
The education system is under attack from the Right who want it to be even more of a system at the service of industry than it currently is. They want to run down the humanities, people being taught to think is not good, though honestly some of the courses and postmodernist rubbish available from universities is not about thinking but confusing people and going off on tangents and they want to exclude the working-class as much as possible. Instead of arguing for pushing the Cambridge dons and their ilk off the edge of the cliff they have come out defending a charlatan as to do otherwise would undermine the identity politics they have latched themselves and their lucrative careers to for quite some time.
The right are wrong about hiring and admission practices, though not entirely. Academia is not a meritocracy, it is run by a self-serving club of narcissists, whether you progress or not within it depends partly on luck. Race and class are clearly factors and also whether you swim against the current or not is crucial. What would have happened had anyone at Cambridge dared say the Emperor Has No Clothes? They could have had a disciplinary proceeding opened up against them, lost their job, social and professional ostracisation etc. There are issues you can’t touch within academia. There is the case of James Caspian who was first approved for and then blocked from studying detransitioners at Bath Spa University.[13] The University made no bones about its reasons. They didn’t want to offend.
“The posting of unpleasant material on blogs or social media may be detrimental to the reputation of the university.”[14]
There is also the case of Alice Sullivan who carried out a review for the British government and recommended that sex and gender be recorded as two different categories. For her trouble her talk at Bristol University was disrupted.[15] David Gordon, a professor of Social Justice at Bristol had invited her. He replied to the Russell Group LGBTQ+ Staff Network defending his invite and saying it was in the interests of staff to hear her out. He was suspended.[16] Then there is David Miller sacked in 2021 after years of harassment because of his pro-Palestinian views under the usual fake accusation of antisemitism. He sued Bristol University. They fought him tooth and nail for years, but he recently won his case.[17] Join the dots and figure out what would have happened at Cambridge. Universities are not centres of learning, free inquiry and discussion, they are reactionary corporate entities that control what is said with a McCarthyite Zeal. It is damning of academia and the British Left that it was a racist reprobate who brought this issue up and not them and further damning that once exposed they circled the wagons and dug their heels in.
The whole episode encapsulates at once what is wrong with the educational system and universities in particular and also what is wrong with what passes itself off as the Left: middle-class wannabes with no criteria and little experience of struggle. The fad will be defeated and one day everyone will say they had always been against this. It is time to take note that it is not the case, lest they try for multiple runs at it.
[1] See
There is another path to be taken on this issue. One is to accept his charlatanry as they come in all shapes and sizes, fight against racist notions that BAME don’t deserve or are not capable of being at university and also challenging the notions of identity politics, DEI and replace it with class. The black Marxist US academic Adolph Reed has been to fore on this, placing class centre stage even with black and brown people. Before looking at what he says about race and class it is worth looking at the racial and class make up of Cambridge, which might surprise some. BAME make up around 16.2% of the English and Welsh population with the largest group being Asians, followed by blacks at 4%.[4] Cambridge university admits a great percentage of BAME to its programmes even when we exclude international students from the statistics. According to its Equality and Diversity Information Report 2022-2023:
Of students domiciled in the UK, 30.4% of UG students, 27.9% of PGT and 20.7% of PGR were BAME.
This compares against a Russell Group[5] average of 20.4% UK BAME, 9.1% of all PGT students and 10.1% of all research PGR students in 2021-22.[6]
When it comes to all staff, the percentage of BAME is closer to their actual percentage of the population and stands at 16%. In relation to just academic staff 13.4% are BAME, though blacks are extremely underrepresented at only 0.6% as compared to Asians at 8.1%, 3.4% mixed and 1.3% as other.[7] There is no breakdown on students within the BAME cohort, though I am going to take a guess and say blacks are underrepresented. It is part of the problem and is itself racist that all minorities are just lumped together as some great homogenous mass when there are clear differences in the experiences and lives within each community.
Though some 13% of the staff chose not to disclose their ethnicity, Cambridge’s diversity report is remarkably detailed. They can tell you how many whites, blacks, Asians, women, disabled and unsurprisingly trans-genders study or are employed by the university and can even break it down to some nationalities, Irish, Pakistani, Chinese, Bangladeshi, Indian, African, Caribbean etc. What it cannot tell you is how many working-class people study or work there. It cannot tell you how many BAME from working-class backgrounds study or work there either. Class does not figure. On the one hand, they don’t care about white working-class and on the other in their condescension they don’t recognise that there is any such thing as BAME working class. Being working-class is something you shall not speak of. It is like a disease. The Irish comedian Justine Megan wrote in a recent article that when she went to Ireland’s equivalent of Cambridge, Trinity College, she was asked what school she had gone to in order to socially pigeon hole her and she quipped that she was “diagnosed as working-class”.[8] Many of us have had that experience where they realise you are working class, one of their hoi polloi as they would put it and you realise their reaction would be milder if you told them you had Ebola.
We should be clear Oxford and Cambridge and other universities of their like (the Russell Group) and their feeder schools of Eton, Harrow etc. are not meritocracies, they are about class and money. Boris Johnson, Cameron, Blair etc are all about money, nothing else. Even Trump went to an Ivy League university and if you think that was about anything other than money, you have been asleep for some time. This is not about meritocracy as it has never existed in academia and most academics are opposed to changing that. Academia has always been about money and the Zeitgeist. A period in the 1960s and 1970s when working-class people went to university and came to the fore was just a hiatus, that no longer exists. The number of working-class academics is on the decline and has been for quite some time.
Adolph Reed has argued for the centrality of class. It is not surprising that the SWP and other cowards shy away from dealing with the difficult issues. Even someone of the stature of Adolph Reed has been cancelled because of his views on race and class. If a black Marxist academic can’t freely opine on the issue, who can? Those with nothing left to lose perhaps, and given the class nature of the SWP and most “Left” groups in Britain they have a lot to lose until they go back to mammy and daddy for their handout. In 2020, the Democratic Socialists of America, that vague liberal wishy washy group that so many on the Left invest time in, cancelled him over his views on race. He an academic, a product of the racist South where he was an organiser was cancelled by middle class wannabes who have never known real struggle and sacrifice and less still intellectual clarity.[9] Though Reed was not without his supporters, notably Cornel West, the black activist, academic, theologian and author of a ground breaking book Race Matters, first published in 1993.
God have mercy, Adolph is the greatest democratic theorist of his generation,” said Cornel West, a Harvard professor of philosophy and a Socialist. “He has taken some very unpopular stands on identity politics, but he has a track record of a half-century. If you give up discussion, your movement moves toward narrowness.[10]
And that is also what has happened in Britain and elsewhere. Their identity politics led to people like Obama being hailed as the Left whilst drones rained down on Pakistani and Afghan weddings, whilst police murdered blacks at will. It was seen at that time as arch identarian Ta-Nahesi Coates termed it in his eulogy to the Obama regime “Eight years in power”. This is all gate keeping and is not about opposing racism but making sure blacks and other minorities don’t turn their guns, literal or metaphorical, on their real enemies: the ruling class, not other working-class people. Such a situation would see the Oxbridge dons and a significant section of the leadership of the British Left shot at dawn, unfortunately only in the metaphorical sense, though I live in hope.
Reed doesn’t buy into the gate keeping and has opposed race reductionism time and again. Even in the face of mounting police violence in the US he stated that:
…a black Yale graduate who works on Wall Street is no doubt several times more likely to be jacked up by the police on the platform of Metro North than his white counterpart, out of mistaken identity. And that mistaken identity is what we might call racism. But it’s a shorthand. He’s still less likely to be jacked up by the police than the broke white guy in northeast Philadelphia or west Baltimore.[11]
Indeed, he might have added that a black Yale graduate might be the one who murders other blacks as part of their service to the state and capitalism. When Freddy Gray was killed by the police in Baltimore, some of the police officers were themselves black, but tellingly the Mayor of Baltimore Stephanie C. Rawlings was black, the Police Commissioner, Dr. Anthony Batts was also black as was the prosecutor Marilyn Mosby. All of them attended prestigious universities such as Oberlin, Harvard and Boston College. None of that helped save Gray or anyone before or after him. Three of the police officers were tried and acquitted and the other three had the charges dropped, despite the city settling for $6.4 million. Even now, blacks represent 61% of the population of Baltimore, 41% of the police force but account for 88% of police killings.[12] Identity politics cannot and in fact has no intention of solving any of this. Too many jobs at stake in the Identity Industry.
It is an Oppression Olympics to keep the working-class fighting amongst themselves for crumbs to prevent them asking the big question posed by Bertolt Brecht. Fine that is the breadcrumb but where is the whole loaf? The upper-class have the whole loaf and the identity politics people want their patronage, they don’t want working class people of any colour to have the whole loaf. It is a reactionary game. The scandal at Cambridge should have afforded the Left an opportunity to question this nonsense, instead they came out swinging on behalf of the capitalists. Sections of the British Left in the 1980s used to chant on marches, Workers Black, Workers White, Workers of the World Unite! Now there real slogan is more akin to Workers Black, Workers White, Against Each Other Fight! Fight for crumbs of course, not the real prize. That is what identity politics is.
The education system is under attack from the Right who want it to be even more of a system at the service of industry than it currently is. They want to run down the humanities, people being taught to think is not good, though honestly some of the courses and postmodernist rubbish available from universities is not about thinking but confusing people and going off on tangents and they want to exclude the working-class as much as possible. Instead of arguing for pushing the Cambridge dons and their ilk off the edge of the cliff they have come out defending a charlatan as to do otherwise would undermine the identity politics they have latched themselves and their lucrative careers to for quite some time.
The right are wrong about hiring and admission practices, though not entirely. Academia is not a meritocracy, it is run by a self-serving club of narcissists, whether you progress or not within it depends partly on luck. Race and class are clearly factors and also whether you swim against the current or not is crucial. What would have happened had anyone at Cambridge dared say the Emperor Has No Clothes? They could have had a disciplinary proceeding opened up against them, lost their job, social and professional ostracisation etc. There are issues you can’t touch within academia. There is the case of James Caspian who was first approved for and then blocked from studying detransitioners at Bath Spa University.[13] The University made no bones about its reasons. They didn’t want to offend.
According to Caspian, the university said: “Engaging in a potentially politically incorrect piece of research carries a risk to the university. Attacks on social media may not be confined to the researcher, but may involve the university.
“The posting of unpleasant material on blogs or social media may be detrimental to the reputation of the university.”[14]
There is also the case of Alice Sullivan who carried out a review for the British government and recommended that sex and gender be recorded as two different categories. For her trouble her talk at Bristol University was disrupted.[15] David Gordon, a professor of Social Justice at Bristol had invited her. He replied to the Russell Group LGBTQ+ Staff Network defending his invite and saying it was in the interests of staff to hear her out. He was suspended.[16] Then there is David Miller sacked in 2021 after years of harassment because of his pro-Palestinian views under the usual fake accusation of antisemitism. He sued Bristol University. They fought him tooth and nail for years, but he recently won his case.[17] Join the dots and figure out what would have happened at Cambridge. Universities are not centres of learning, free inquiry and discussion, they are reactionary corporate entities that control what is said with a McCarthyite Zeal. It is damning of academia and the British Left that it was a racist reprobate who brought this issue up and not them and further damning that once exposed they circled the wagons and dug their heels in.
The whole episode encapsulates at once what is wrong with the educational system and universities in particular and also what is wrong with what passes itself off as the Left: middle-class wannabes with no criteria and little experience of struggle. The fad will be defeated and one day everyone will say they had always been against this. It is time to take note that it is not the case, lest they try for multiple runs at it.
[1] See
[2] SWP (07/08/2026) The racist witch-hunt of Jason Arday. Yuri Prasad.
[3] The Guardian (31/01/2026) Cambridge university accused of ‘obfuscation’ over armes investment. Geraldine McKelvie and Felix Armstrong.
[4] See.
[5] Russell Group is a group of 24 universities in Britain with its headquarters at Cambridge somewhat like the US Ivy League.
[6] Cambridge University (2024) Equality and Diversity Information Report 2022-2023. P.45
[7] Ibíd., p.11
[8] Irish Times (08/08/2026)Justine Megan: ‘It wasn’t until I went to Trinity that I was diagnosed as working-class.
[9] HAC (08/16/2020) The Canceling of Adolph Reed. Roger Berkowitz.
[10] NYT (14/08/2020) A Black Marxist Scholar Wanted to Talk About Race. It Ignited a Fury. Michael Powell.
[11] WSWS (20/12/2019) An interview with political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. on the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Tom Mackaman.
[12] See
[13] The Guardian (25/09/2017) University ‘turned down politically incorrect transgender research’. Sally Weale.
[14] Ibíd.
[15] BBC (22/12/2025) University threatened with legal action after protest at academic’s talk. Branwen Jeffreys.
[16] The Telegraph (17/01/2026) Academic suspended after defending gender-critical speaker. Tim Sigsworth.
[17] See his own statement.
⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.
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