The campaign of intellectual stop and search against black figures in elite institutions has continued with the targeting of Cambridge principal, Lord Simon Woolley. The Lord is the first black man appointed to head an Oxbridge college and judging by the current direction there is a growing contingent hopeful he will be the last.

In the conservative Spectator magazine an editorial exclaimed that the widely liked and respected Lord Woolley “is not fit to lead a Cambridge college”. Astonishingly, and without irony, it is written by a figure so widely discredited that his warning over Woolley is the moral equivalent of Jeffrey Epstein raising alarm over womens’ safety.

Andrew Gilligan is best known for admitting severe failings and errors in his reporting on the Iraq war in 2003 which led to his exit from the BBC. However, what is less well known is that Gilligan has a history of making targets out of black people in public life, again with allegations that turn out to be unsupported. Gilligan then later became a mayoral advisor to Boris Johnson, that well known exponent of public honesty.

At the heart of the stop and search is Lord Simon Woolley’s historic relationship with Lee Jasper, one of the most illustrious characters in black public life, instrumental in building much of black Britain’s prior political infrastructure. I have written expansively on Lee Jasper and the black political class in The Good, the Black & the Boujee: How Black Britain became Middle Class. Below is a brief edited extract from the book.

The attack on Lord Woolley is also part of a wider marginalisation of activists who have been part of historic black justice or mass mobilisation campaigns like Operation Black Vote. Andrew Gilligan was the reporter at the Evening Standard who led the intellectual stop and search of Lee Jasper and now Lord Simon Woolley.

In Black Britain’s history of activists, advisors and parliamentarians, Lee Jasper is a working-class disruptor and the unlikely architect of signature successes and failures. In his nearly half a century of activism the black political consensus has shifted with Jasper’s own status telling of how. The 2010s saw an exponential growth of black politicians taking their seats on parliament’s green benches. Yet despite this triumph of representation, the most disruptive black political actions bookended the decade: the 2011 Tottenham riot and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

Although different in nature, Britain was familiar with scenes of black demonstrators that reinforced their outsider status and these images obscured a new politics of race taking shape as the black political class underwent seismic change. This included: the decline of political blackness; the ascendance of black Conservatives; a new indifference of the major parties towards black civil disobedience; and the reconstitution of black political identity by neoliberal values as Britain moved to the right. Over thirty-eight black parliamentarians were elected between 2010 and 2025 but rather than balance a fiery backlash against progressive politics, many of the new minorities in parliament were adding fuel.

There is a new order since Lee Jasper formally joined the political class in the early 2000s. In 2008 Jasper was appointed a senior political advisor on equalities and policing to the then mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, a stalwart of the Labour left. Livingstone was a long ally of black political organising when leader of the now defunct Greater London Council between 1981 and 1986. Jasper’s senior City Hall position was short-lived after a Conservative smear campaign picked up by Evening Standard’s Andrew Gilligan accused Jasper of diverting public grants to his friends. The allegations were part of a Tory effort to oust the Labour mayor and scored a scalp when Jasper stepped down with an investigation pending. After his resignation the published findings exonerated him of any wrongdoing but the damage had been done. Jasper suffered great personal loss and Boris Johnson’s Conservative party took control of London in the election that year with the support of the Standard.

Jasper had made his name as a grassroots activist. After moving to London in the 1980s he joined the Mangrove Association, a hub of black radicalism in Notting Hill that had gained prominence through the Mangrove Nine trial. Jasper rose to chair the association and serve as secretary of Notting Hill Carnival. As his stature grew, Jasper advised the Inner London Education Authority and co-founded organisations like the 1990 Trust, the National Black Alliance and campaigns like Operation Black Vote, which trained minority politicians from across the political spectrum. Elected alumni of the scheme include the Conservatives’ Helen Grant, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi and Labour’s Clive Lewis, Tan Dhesi and Marsha De Cordova.

Despite Jasper’s nostalgia for direct action, modern surveillance has reduced the authorities’ fear of mass protest, and many of the organisations he built became easy targets for opponents due to their reliance on government funding. Both the 1990 Trust and the National Black Alliance are now defunct. Since resigning from the Mayor’s Office, Lee Jasper has never been employed in frontline politics. In contrast, Jasper’s protégé Lord Simon Woolley, with whom he founded Operation Black Vote, became a Lord and gained power at the helm of University of Cambridge College, Homerton. Lord Woolley had built broader allegiances and even joined Conservative prime minister Theresa May’s Racial Equality Audit.

One of Jasper’s greatest successes had been coordinating the campaign for Stephen Lawrence whose racist murder in Eltham was ignored by police officers who then placed Stephen’s parents, Doreen and Neville, under covert investigation. Jasper had negotiated the visit of Nelson Mandela to meet with the family and throw his titanic weight behind their campaign in 1993. It would take almost twenty years for anyone to be convicted but the campaign dragged the newly elected Labour government to launch the judge-led Macpherson Report. The outcome was arguably the most damning and consequential review on policing in British history.

The legal victory of the Lawrence family and their supporters is the biggest success of the broad black political class that belongs to its base of working-class activists who had the clarity of their convictions and applied direct political methods along- side parliamentary lobbying. Activists had also succeeded in creating a layer of accountability roles that granted access to public institutions although when black figures joined them in senior roles their tenure was often fiercely opposed or brief. Lee Jasper’s time in City Hall became a target of hostile media briefings over his relationships with key black stakeholders.

On his resignation Jasper lost his income and any party political ambitions were fatally ended. The irony is the allegations made against Jasper would also be made against Boris Johnson. Jennifer Arcuri, a young American businesswoman, would claim a sexual affair with Boris Johnson while being granted over £126,000 in contracts by his administration. In 2019 the Guardian reported how following the ‘intervention of Johnson, Arcuri was allowed on to the missions, according to an email seen by the paper.’ In 2020 the Independent Office for Police Conduct would state: ‘While there was no evidence that Mr Johnson influenced the payment of sponsorship monies or participation in trade missions, there was evidence to suggest that those officers making decisions about sponsorship monies and attendance on trade missions thought that there was a close relationship between Mr Johnson and Ms Arcuri, and this influenced their decision- making.’ Despite this there would be vastly different outcomes for Johnson and Jasper. The black radical from Greater Manchester was never employed again, while the white Etonian was made prime minister.

Read the rest in The Good, the Black & the Boujee: How Black Britain became Middle Class

For the past few weeks a particular plagiarist has occupied my mind… the adored writer Johann Hari. For those too young to recall his prominence in the early days of Twitter, Hari was the wunderkind heralded as Britain’s next big public intellectual in the last era people actually cared about current affairs magazines and newspapers. The Cambridge man with a double first whose reporting, first with the New Statesman and then the Independent, garnered a collection of coveted prizes including: the Orwell Prize, Journalist of the year at the Amnesty Awards and Young Journalist of the year at the British Journalism Awards. The year I joined Twitter as a student from the SOAS library, Johann Hari was named one of the most influential people in Britain by the Telegraph.

However, a disparate and DIY group of bloggers and journalists, including former Channel 4 News alumni Brian Whelan, began to pull at the threads of his reportage uncovering that not only had Hari taken the quotes of interviewees from elsewhere and blended them into his own, he had plagiarised the work of rivals and even fictionalised both quotes and events. After an editor at the New Statesman became suspicious, she soon found herself the target of the malicious and false allegations of homophobia and anti-semitism by an anonymous Wikipedia account. The man behind it was none other than Johann Hari himself.

When the scandal broke Johann Hari was disgraced and briefly exiled. Although diminished, the plagiarist has remained a literary darling. His books have become New York and Sunday Times bestsellers endorsed by Elton John, Naomi Klein, Oprah Winfrey and Stephen Fry. I know many well known black writers who have never been reviewed by The Guardian, yet Hari’s last book was not only widely covered but even named a Guardian Book of the Day. While Hari later apologised and the initial scandal took a great mental toll, he not only survived the plagiarism, but thrived.

We will never know what future Professor Jason Arday may have had if he had lived, but what I do recall from the aftermath of Hari’s plagiarism is that his mistakes did not lead to a debate on the intelligence of white men, or whether Hari’s failings proved that he had ‘stolen’ a job from qualified black writers or what his misdeeds said about DEI hires, after all Hari had traded on being working class and Scottish. Did Johann Hari’s failings prove that white men cannot achieve success on their own merit? Hari was a Cambridge man too, was his plagiarism proof of the institution’s white mediocrity? Who knows – none of these questions were ever asked. Hari’s failings, like those of all white people, were his own.

While there are parallels between Johann Hari and Jason Arday, it is worth noting the latter was investigated and cleared of plagiarism by his alma mater. There are so many crude comparisons that reveal how the misdemeanours of white men are never racialised in the way they are for black men, but in the case of Professor Jason Arday there are even more egregious complications.

Public grief and the press

For now, the outpouring of black grief has manifested in an untameable anger towards the British press, including several of its few black members. There are certainly questions of whether publications ignored protocols or lowered their threshold for stories about Professor Arday. The Daily Mail broke the cardinal rule of reporting by revealing Arday as their source after he had asked for it to be attributed to ‘someone close to Jason Arday’.

Yet, despite this, it is beyond satire that the anger against “the media” has been wildly, unfairly and most disproportionately targeted against black journalists, which has obscured a diverse cast of other actors. Firstly, Nathan Cofnas. We can at least be grateful for the academic’s candour as there is no ambiguity over his ambition. In Cofnas’s own words his intellectual stop and search of Jason Arday was never about the Professor himself. Cofnas, who has since amended some of his old writings, has said that on merit black people would not exist in elite spheres outside of entertainment and sport on account of a low intelligence. Arday was his opportunity to show the world why.

Although Cofnas’s views have been widely condemned, they are also widely shared even in liberal circles albeit without the commitment to biological determinism. In your own place of work, ask yourself in what regard are your black colleagues spoken of? What is said about them when they are promoted? There are only an estimated 200+ black professors working in Britain and yet a Restore politician supportive of Cofnas said ‘there are two million more Jason Ardays’ across our elite institutions who need to be removed.’ Who do you think they are talking about? There are those who say Cofnas broke the story as the private concerns of those described as moderate were ignored, but why are they assumed to be without a bias?

The backlash against the trans-Atlantic black professional class

Jason Arday happened to find himself in the wrong place at the right time for the academic bounty hunters in pursuit of black targets within elite institutions. The academic’s rise and fall is bound to the expansion of a black professional class. In the post BLM era, there has been a well organised and funded campaign against black representation playing out across multiple battlefronts. In the UK, a charitable effort to provide internship opportunities to under-represented black students is being aggressively challenged in court. Claudine Gay, the first black woman to become president of Harvard was also forced out over allegations of plagiarism. Britain’s affirmative action programmes have been modest compared to America’s yet a mendacious backlash has emerged on both sides of the Atlantic.

Whereas the major political parties in Britain have relinquished support programmes for black minorities, in the US the new right has challenged the ascendency of black Americans and are using the ballot box and the courts to end as many equality of opportunity initiatives for minorities as they can. Despite black women start-up founders receiving just 0.02 per cent of venture investment, the right-wing activist Edward Blum successfully took a business accelerator trying to fund black women to court on the grounds that it was unfair.

In America, the backlash is in keeping with its history, whereby every step forward by black Americans is followed by a challenge. The rise of free black Americans in Virginia led to new slavery codes, the abolition of slavery led to Jim Crow, wealthy black towns under Jim Crow led to lynch mobs, the election of President Obama was followed by the presidency of Trump, and now anti-woke campaigns have emerged after a wave of affirmative action. Black Americans are familiar with the cyclical pattern of racial progress but for young black British professionals this is their first rodeo and their instinct has been reactionary.

Opponents of black professionals in elite fields have now escalated their tactic of intellectual stop and search. From David Lammy to Diane Abbott, the ubiquity with which high profile black figures in public life have been gleefully described by peers and the press as unintelligent is staggering and this is long before Jason Arday had the audacity to be promoted ahead of men who never considered him Cambridge material in the first place.

Hustle and go: The rise of intellectual stop and search

The majority of stop and search operations never find incriminating evidence but Artificial Intelligence has been a game changer. When Cofnas discovered blemishes in Arday’s work he was triumphant in the way a patrol officer is finally happy to find a spliff on a suspect picked at random.

“The reason Arday is getting a lot of attention is he took the plagiarism which is fairly common in academia too far… he had such an exalted position that the mismatch between the quality and the prestige was so enormous that there was a hook for a story, that’s what was special about him. Not that he was a fraud or worthless scholar, it’s that there was a basis for a news story that would capture people’s attention” said Cofnas, during his victory lap. “There are so many cases of people who are just like Arday but there isn’t that kind of story potential.”

There are questions for the way institutions select and engage with black scholarship, but the university’s motivations have been flattened. Cambridge were in need of a rockstar when they hired Arday and taking Cofnas at his word, this only placed a target on Professor Arday’s back. I remember the fanfare the Cambridge hire announcement caused alongside the viral story of a brother from ‘the ends’ with a life stranger than fiction. I took the headlines seriously, but not literally. Later, as the anti ‘DEI’ parts of the press pursued, the boyish man was presented as a hustler who finessed his way into the upper echelons and the story was picked up by black audiences with a general lack of commitment but lots of curiosity.

If you are not old enough to remember Johann Hari then you should at least remember the story of Anna Delvey. The fake Russian heiress who enchanted New York’s wealthy socialites and banking institutions to commit grand larceny. Delvey’s deceit was cheered and she now has over 1.2 million followers on Instagram. In contrast the story of an autistic man who may have broken plagiarism guidelines was expedited into a national emergency and rhetorically conflated as a criminal matter. Won’t somebody ‘think of the students’, declared one columnist in the Times.

As the summer entered a drought, the Arday story was the only tap allowed to run, with various twists and turns, even causing bemusement amongst the black followers on gossip pages like the Shade Borough. Before there was Anna Delvey, there was the satirical internet character Joanne the scammer who reimagined scamming as a form of comic justice. In this manner, the allegations against Jason Arday represented both entertainment and reparatory justice. The greater fiction sold by those framing a job at Cambridge without a flawless academic record as a moral panic is that Oxbridge were somehow meritocratic institutions to begin with.

Meritocracy?

Privately educated students still remain severely over-represented at the universities, and even if you do not consider a private education as the academic equivalent of financial doping in a meritocratic race to the top, consider the case of one of the former Cambridge graduates to lead the charge against Arday. Lord Toby Young was allowed entry without even having the grades thanks to a call from his father, Baron Michael Young. There are others like him and they are rarely if ever black.

In the first year of Covid, privately educated kids were offered places without taking exams based on inflated predicted grades whilst across the country ‘disadvantaged pupils shown by Ofqual official statistics to be worst hit.’ Although there was a backlash, who asked for those students who benefited from such a bias to be thrown out or now in work to have their degrees downgraded? Furthermore consider the connected political characters Oxbridge institutions rehabilitate. Peter Mandelson was short listed to become chancellor of the University of Oxford after his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had been revealed. Students even queried how the politician passed the vetting to join the contest. Where is the meritocracy that was compromised?

As the Arday story moved at pace, I had waited for the rebuttal, ready to see his runners and riders do battle – yet few close allies emerged. When the first schoolfriend to appear went viral for calling Arday a ‘chatty patty’ in school it had seemed at that moment as if the case was closed as his opponents moved against him. It is in no one’s interest to deny that there are questions Professor Arday failed to answer and that he appeared to share misinformation with The Guardian, but in the wake of his death, the picture appears more complex.

The newspapers that once carried anonymous claims by ex-students of poor performance are now balanced with reams of supporting statements made on the record from other students and colleagues. It now appears Jason Arday was a prolific and widely cited scholar, much loved for his kindness. This context was missed, ignored or buried in earlier reporting.

A further irony is that the very publications who presented Arday’s fallibility as proof of fraud have since issued multiple corrections themselves. The Spectator’s editor Michael Gove barely shrugged when his publication wrongfully and, arguably libelously, named Nels Abbey as the chair of the panel at Liverpool’s John Moores University who cleared Arday of plagiarism. Even The Guardian, which undertook a more nuanced investigation than has been recognised, has since issued three corrections to their copy. It is almost as if research is hard and part of getting it right means at some point getting it wrong but some people’s mistakes are more costly than others. It is now well known there are other academics found guilty of plagiarism who remain in post.

What next for Schrodinger’s frauds?

Now the media finds themselves under siege from those who think you can advocate for kindness and demonstrate consideration for the wellbeing of others while also calling for the personal information of reporters to be shared and by berating them online. It seems the new media is the same as the old media after all. It is as if, no lesson has been learnt from the tragic story. Meanwhile, those who first pursued Arday are attempting to line up new targets.

When the vigil for Arday drew a crowd of over 10,000 to mourn, Cofnas referred to the gathering as a hate march. We have heard this before.

Elsewhere, Maarten Boudry, a supporter of Cofnas said “the unsettling truth is that universities are full of Jason Ardays. Most are simply a little more subtle in their deception and chicanery. A little less obviously rotten.” Arday’s alleged professional failings are presented as both the outcome of fraud and anti-white discrimination. Well, which is it? Is it that Arday tricked the institution – or that it did not matter because he got the job because he was black? This is the paradoxical suspicion black people in public life find themselves under as a kind of Schrodinger’s fraud.

It is this gaze of suspicion that has cast such a cloud over black professionals since Arday’s death. I have lived in a daze ever since but anticipate that there is much more to come. It is clear that, in life, Jason Arday suffered, but despite the messages to ‘rest in peace’ I know there will be none. A highly publicised inquest will likely push and pull at the public accounts Jason Arday made. Regardless of what embellishments or untruths may be uncovered, whether made by Arday himself or made against him, his greatest crime was always holding a position a white person believed they deserved by those who would rather a black man was dead than occupy a place in the elite. Many others are now asking if they are next to be searched.

I can say the best thing about completing a book is that I finally have more time to do something much more enjoyable…read. It is fair to say this overview is overdue.

I am currently finishing Eden McKenzie-Goddard’s Smallie and Hettie O’Brien’s The Asset Class. The latter was a proof I started last year but paused whilst emergency editing The Good, the Black and the Boujee. So far the books are very good and I look forward to finishing.

The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward

In similar fashion I was also given a proof of Yrsa Daley-Ward’s debut novel The Catch last summer. I was drawn in by the opening then lost my copy, recovered it and then the book was so badly beaten in my bag being an unread travel buddy that the cover detached and has been lost to the streets.

The good news is I finally managed to finish it at the start of the summer. Yrsa Daley-Ward is a very interesting writer and I would like to read all future work. Her ‘memoir’ The Terrible was also striking and gave clues of her style as a novelist. In The Catch, Yrsa amplified the voltage on her meta-magical realism with multiple unreliable narrators. The book was incredibly bizarre but never dull. A true triumph in how experimental work can also be highly readable. There was little danger I would not finish.

Flesh by David Szalay

I have also read the much celebrated Booker prize winning Flesh. Literary acclaim is a gift and a curse. You sell a bag of books but raise the critical eye of your reader. ‘So this is the best work of fiction you say?’ We’ll see about that.’ Flesh is a masculine text which raises questions when the majority of literary readers are women and men have abandoned the genre.

The interiority and dialogue are sparse. The visceral sensibility of its isolated male protagonist and the subtle critique of the role common people play in the lives of rich folk were measured. The book is one of the most moreish books I’ve read and I respected its understanding of the male condition without the need for the binary moral obfuscation ruining fiction as demonstrated by another 2026 read.

Can’t Get Enough by Kennedy Ryan & Kin by Tayari Jones

I tried to read Kennedy Ryan’s romance Can’t Get Enough and sadly I very much could. I did not finish. I’m convinced fiction has a responsibility to at least probe the sensibilities of its primary reader, and I fear mimicking it so closely as this book does, makes the writing more akin to content marketing than art and I had no interest in what was on offer. The protagonist’s dilemma: ‘should I date this hot black billionaire?’ is no dilemma at all.

Anyway thank goodness for Tayari Jones. If she wrote down her weekend to-do list then I would read it and even pay the extortionate price publishers are now charging for hardbacks. Kin was masterful. Tayari really knows how to tell a story. Her turn of phrase is splendid. Each sentence has such vivid imagery. I was stunned to learn that some in the literati find her work trite and stereotypical but I find the humanity she affords her characters and her dissection of intra-racial social class to be second to none.

Fire Inna Dancehall: A Legacy of Sound, Style and Struggle

For now my focus has returned to non-fiction. I recently blurbed journalist Derek Bardowell’s new book Fire Inna Dancehall. The book is a whistle stop tour of dancehall artists whilst making an ode to the genre that gives expression to Jamaica’s Afro-proletariat. The genre is heavily maligned by the island’s pious upper middle class and the book is a fun read when accompanying a playlist.

The book is garnished by tales from Derek’s days interviewing Dancehall acts as the former music editor of The Voice newspaper. The book moves at considerable pace and it is hard to know how it would sit with an audience unfamiliar with the stars that Derek profiles as rapidly as an emcee riding the Dutty Money riddim. If like me your formative years played out alongside ragga and dancehall then this book is a dose of nostalgia.

Escaping Babylon: An Intimate History of Black British Music

I was also taken down memory lane by Jesse Bernard’s Escaping Babylon. Several reviews mentioned their challenges with its experimental form but this does not come across in the audio book. It is very easy on the ear aside from the mispronunciations of artists’ names by the reader. Jesse and I are the same age and so the book traverses so many immediate cultural and personal points of reference it feels like it was written especially for me even down to Jesse citing my home town of Tottenham as his grounding. It captures a history of young inner city black life in a fraught early 2000s soundtracked by grime with a sociological consideration of black music. At times the book verged on instantly canonical. I have already recommended it to friends.

Escaping Babylon is presented as an intimate history and although the essays are personal, it was notably guarded. Perhaps this is the norm of masculine writing. We hear about Jesse kissing a girl in the club to Lethal Bizzle’s Pow but the music accompanying his romantic life is missing despite the effort to ensure any reader returns to the work of Lynden David Hall. Jesse does a brilliant job in retrieving forgotten memories of black British Neo-soul. Sexy Cinderella is now firmly on my playlist. However despite the bread crumbs on Jesse’s upbringing in upper middle class St Albans there is an unexplored intrigue. Much of the book is focused on black life in the hood and I was interested in the tension between where Jesse grew up and where the music he is drawn to is from.

Grime and sound system culture are proletariat and the music accompanied genuine inner city turmoil. An intimate writing of how Jesse placed his own class status growing up in wealthy St Albans whilst being drawn into black music born out of black working class strife and its adjacent cultures. I was interested in this dynamic. There were hints of black music providing rescue from a predominantly white St Albans but how so class? I wanted to know how his own - whether working class, emerging middle class or other wise informed his musical relationships. Having written The Good, the Black and the Boujee examining the class fragmentations within black Britain - this felt like an omission that could have been incredibly valuable. Can middle class black Britons claim working class black cultural products as their own? This is an interesting line of inquiry that was right up my street.

Grime Kids: The Inside Story of the Global Grime Takeover by DJ Target

There is significant documentation of black British music happening at present. The Music is Black is the inaugural exhibition at the V&A East. DJing at the launch was the pioneering grime figure DJ Target whose audiobook Grime Kids I also recently completed. If Jesse Bernard’s book was guarded in places then this account by a bonafide Grime insider amounted to a maximum security prison.

The audio book is an easy listen. Target has a great voice for storytelling but despite its promise, the book is no ‘inside story’. In early passages the book threatens to be revelatory on his come up with Wiley but the book is painted without colour. What is the texture of their interior lives? What were the primary emotions driving them? Who and where were the women in their lives? Target says he was not raised by his mother. If there was any pain from the maternal estrangement it is unremarked. At times Grime Kids is so sanitised that AI could have written it. The value of historical gossip is heavily underestimated and if any book asserts the need for historians and journalists driven by the incentives to capture the story - it was this.

Anyway if you want something good. I’ve got you - The Good, the Black & the Boujee: How Black Britain became middle class is out now, if you order today.

My next reads

The Recovery House

(Possibly) London Falling

Currently finishing

The Asset Class

Smallie

I was grateful to speak with the Bookseller about The Good, the Black & the Boujee: How black Britain became middle class.

You can read our exchange below.

The Good, The Black and the Boujee describes itself as a “critical reckoning” with the pursuit of Black excellence. What first prompted you to interrogate the idea of Black excellence and the realities of Black middle-class life in Britain?

I was trying to reconcile two contradictory events that defined the past 10 years: the Black Lives Matter protests and the proclaimed black renaissance that had celebrated a wave of so-called black excellence. Alongside the protest movement was also the most racially diverse government in history and a black political class openly in conflict with black grassroots campaigns. It has been an era of paradox. So has the past decade been a feast or famine of opportunity and progress for black Britons? I believed the answers lie in understanding social class which is often invisible in black experience.

The work is about what class reveals about black Britain and what black Britain reveals about class in the 21st century. My general argument is that a black middle class has emerged for the first time as a class group within a racial group, rather than as a racial minority within a class group – just as the entire middle class itself is collapsing due to the rise of super-wealthy elites. You may have a degree, earn an upper-middle income and have elite entitlements, but if you cannot buy a house where you were born and have less security than the last generation’s traditional working class, what does this mean?

There is also an insurgent right-wing politics of race opposed to black social mobility that is bubbling on both sides of the Atlantic. The rest of the book is a colourful ethnography of emergent sensibility, gender divisions, the fluidity of modern black life and a consideration of the new politics of race.

One of the most striking findings from your research is that almost half of educated Black professionals read fewer than five books a year. Why do you think that is, and what responsibility does the publishing industry have in addressing it?

[It’s a] scary stat for someone trying to sell their book. I think all people don’t read like they once did and social media has ruined our attention spans. What people would have once sought from books, they seek on podcasts – which is crazy, considering how low-quality podcasts are. That said, in publishing the over-production and under-editing of books does not help either. Sadly, books are in transition from mass media to a luxury item. The hardback of my book is nearly £25. Mad. Book inflation is scary. Although I will add, after five years of research and writing, readers are definitely getting something of value from The Good, the Black and the Boujee.

Who do you think is still missing from conversations about Black Britain in publishing and journalism?

This book is both social history, but also fundamentally a critique made in good spirit. I think we need a higher standard of literary criticism and a higher threshold to pain. As long as the critique is rigorous and made in good faith, I welcome any disagreement with this work by peers. I think we need a culture that has the expertise to really engage critically with our work – its accuracy, value and contribution. The journalism challenge is different: it is fundamentally about funding models because the talent and curiosity is there. In publishing more broadly we need better critical engagement with work so all of us can improve our pen game and thinking. If you do not like the book, please say and be clear as to why, but make sure your receipts are strong. The only thing worse than bad writing, is lazy reading.

Having spent years researching The Good, the Black and the Boujee, what gives you optimism about the future of Black Britain?

I think there is a concentration of cultural and social capital in Britain that is unparalleled in Europe. What a great base to build on.

Are there particular questions or areas of British life you are interested in investigating next?

This book stressed me out, so I am enjoying Arsenal’s summer as Premier League champions at the moment.

Order The Good, the Black & the Boujee here.

It was recently the 1 year anniversary of my appointment as the Home Affairs correspondent of the national news programme Channel 4 News. No, that does not mean I cover house prices. The beat shadows the remit of the Home Office and the visceral stories conservative tabloids are most likely to sensationalise: migration, terrorism and most commonly, crime.

Home news is notoriously grit and no glamour. Historically, a seat on the home desk has been less coveted than a place in the political lobby, a foreign bureau or Washington. In contrast to political reporters and foreign correspondents, crime reporters appear less likely to have studied at Oxbridge, attended private school or descend from an upper middle class background.

(To understand the complexities you can read my new book on what the black middle class reveals about Britain’s new social hierarchy)

Yet despite its place in the social hierarchy, the home affairs beat is one of the most relentless. Not only do you work more independently but home affairs stories have a higher risk of complaint, there is greater demand for stories and in contrast to our trans-Atlantic cousins, British culture is introverted and so prospective interviewees tend to be camera averse. Considering TV is driven by what you can see, home affairs stories were once known as “picture challenged.”

Outside of production concerns, as home correspondents can be at greater risk of the law, there is a higher bar on home affairs than in political reporting along with far more ground to cover too. Crime reporters navigate opaque stories with active legal proceedings and have criminal liability if reporting restrictions or contempt laws are breached.

Domestic news is the bread and butter of most general reporters but a home affairs correspondent is mandated to deliver original stories and think more strategically about long term coverage. The job involves social dexterity as we investigate the state agencies the public have greatest contact with but are also relied to cover their updates.

On the home beat there is a lot to balance: from the ethics of representation in crime stories to ensuring fair coverage of individuals and institutions. There has never been less trust in the instruments of the state but what differentiates a reporter from an activist is a dispassionate commitment to facts. Although, the lens of a reporter determines how they are arranged and I prefer to deviate from consensus. (For e.g I once took anonymous political briefings from MPs and turned them into a drill song.)

My voyage report in the role was an investigation into the police complaints system and the case of TV personality, Jackie Adedeji. The presenter had made a historic complaint about an officer she had met on duty who was subsequently placed under criminal investigation for using his position to solicit inappropriate and sexual relationships with members of the public whilst on duty. Jackie was the second woman to make a complaint against the officer and bravely waved her anonymity on Channel 4 News to speak publicly about her case.

Police Forces had seen a 67% rise in complaints of sexual misconduct against officers in England and Wales leading to a backlog of cases, a fall in confidence and questions over due process. In Jackie Adedeji’s case the investigating officer made inappropriate comments about her appearance that made her uncomfortable leading to an additional complaint and then it emerged that the new officer assigned to investigate him, had previously stood trial for rape. Unsurprisingly, this shook her faith in the process. However, after going public in our report and the pressure applied from our coverage, a police misconduct panel was launched and found in her favour.

This report was followed with a whistleblower led report with Superintendent Harvi Khatkar, the first female British Asian police officer to become vice president of the influential Police Superintendents’ Association and one of the most senior British Asian women to ever work in policing. In our report we broke what her allegations of cronyism and sexism inside a major policing body and how it overlooked women to elect a man under an active criminal investigation for assault. We subsequently revealed that the serving president, national secretary and assistant national secretary had all been subject to criminal charges or investigation.

Those line of stories shaped the year and it is with all of the above considered, outside of a relentless news cycle of crime stories, my ambitions for the last year were to focus on emerging trends, examine the state agencies in crisis, its impact on the most vulnerable members of the public and to revise popular narratives.

Below is a selection of original clippings from a busy year that excludes the on going major stories on: the UK police investigations (or lack thereof) into Epstein; concern over the deployment of foreign proxy on UK soil; and the policing of Palestine protest and impact of geopolitics on domestic agencies.

Revealed: TV personality makes police complaint about “traumatic” investigation into officer

Revealed: Senior female Asian police leader alleges retaliation, discrimination and “boys’ club culture” inside influential policing body

Kremlin linked paramilitary the Wagner group ordering London gangs to carry out political attacks

Serious violence is down but crime perception is worsening: How the far right fuelled crime misinformation

Tortured for refusing to go ‘cunch’: inside Britain’s drug lines

Shootings down, deaths up: How guns on Britain’s streets are becoming more lethal

Golders Green attacker left psychiatric hospital in recent days, Channel 4 News learns

Andrew: What could the misconduct investigation reveal about Epstein’s activities?

Met Commissioner: Polarised debate is making policing a political football

92-year-old care home resident pepper-sprayed and Tasered

The Met Gala is upon us. The elite masquerade observed by fashion connoisseurs and commoners alike. In 2026, the exhibition dress code for the ball is ‘Costume Art’, but on display are not just silks or sequins, but societal shifts within the trans-Atlantic elite.

This year, the Gala’s co-chairs are Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Beyoncé. Since 2016, such has been the dominance of black creatives that black women making up two out of the three co-chairs presiding over an establishment affair is unremarkable.

The rise of black elites and their role in aligning black identity to the interests of billionaires was an area of intrigue in my social history, The Good, the Black and the Boujee: How Black Britain became middle class. In March, Jay-Z defended the morality of billionaires and, on Monday, his billionaire wife will co-chair a Met Gala giving Jeff Bezos (its main sponsor) a special platform.

One of the most interesting emails in the Epstein files was between Jes Stanley, the CEO of J.P Morgan’s asset management arm and Jeffrey Epstein in which the banker tells Epstein: ‘… watch the TV adds on the Super Bowl. Its all about hip blacks in hip cars with white women. The group that should be in the streets, has been bought off. by Jay Z.”

The Met Gala is now a narrow window into the modus operandi of a black trans-Atlantic elite and their class assimilation. The writing below is an extract from The Good, the Black and the Boujee: How Black Britain became middle class where I consider the costs of a seat at the table for those in and out of the room.

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On May fifth 2025, a collection of the richest and most famous people on the planet were on parade at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for the year’s signature soiree. Only the most desirable A-listers are invited to the annual Met Gala to dine alongside the benefactors who paid $350,000 for a table. Each May, the curated celebrity guest list cut their cloth to a theme set by the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, Anna Wintour. The socialite had been the ceremony’s high priestess since 1995 but, thirty years on, the event had been forced to reflect a new power in the creative upper echelons.

In contrast to the ubiquitously white society affair launched in 1946 to eulogise couture fashion, the theme in 2025 was an ode to black style grounded in the brilliant history Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (2009) by Monica Miller. The evening’s red carpet was a grounded floral print sky that held a constellation of stars in gem sewn headwear, silk cravats and finely tailored suits. If the event was an opulent serenade to everything coveted as cool within the celebrity class, then black creatives were not merely in the background of the symphony, they were conducting the orchestra. The dandy theme had been the embodiment of their social group too.

Black dandyism has been the visible expression of class transformation across the black Atlantic. The signature suits black émigrés tailored to their stride has been a feature of historic black migration for an ambitious class. Grainy film captures the great migration of southern black Americans to industrial cities like New York in elaborate zoot suits and in Britain the public memory of post-war black migration begins with the Pathé footage of suited Caribbean men docking at Tilbury on the Empire Windrush in 1948. Those two events formed motifs for Met Gala garments worn by black and white attendees.

The 2025 gala marked the height of black culture’s reign and the court styled out in full regalia. Miller’s work documented how black dandyism had served as ‘both liberation and a mode of conformity . . . adopted to combat racism [that] all too frequently reinforced, rather than challenged bourgeois nations of respectability’.

The Met Gala’s racial integration and the pride of its black participants is in keeping with a black elite that thrives on the institutional validity of its white class peers more so than from working or even middle class black kin. Historically, this recognition has been fleeting and cyclical but at the 2025 Met Gala that elusive ghost had been captured. The gala did not just turn upside down the cultural hierarchies drawn by race but also nation. Black Americans have long been at the helm of black cool, but in 2025 the British were not just coming, they had arrived.

The legendary black mixed-heritage Formula 1 racing champion Lewis Hamilton from Stevenage in England was a co-host of the gala alongside Anna Wintour. The sportsman had attended wearing the clothes of the south London British Jamaican designer Grace Wales Bonner, the first woman of black Caribbean heritage to lead a major fashion house at Hermes. So too had the black mixed-heritage avant-garde singer FKA Twigs. The American it girl Kylie Jenner was one of several celebrities to wear the fashion brand Ferragamo under the creative leadership of Maximilian Davis, born in Manchester to parents of Jamaican and Trinidadian heritage. Also present at the gala were leading black British designers Charlie Casely- Hayford, Bianca Saunders, Nicholas Daley and renowned Savile Row tailor Ozwald Boateng, among others. The range of celebrities wearing their work was so vast that the magazine Cosmopolitan published the editorial ‘Why black British designers won this year’s Met Gala’. It was a victory with deep historical roots.

Miller traces the origins of dandyism to eighteenth-century black Britons who became fashionable status symbols within the aristocracy. Julius Soubise born in 1754 to an enslaved mother in St Kitts and gifted to the Duchess of Queensberry as a child was styled in haute clothing as was the era’s fashion. The Duchess cultured Soubise into her class tastes. The black Briton’s talents in fencing and horse riding transported him into Britain’s first recognised black socialite. In beginning her history with Soubise, Monica Miller effectively crowned the eccentric Soubise the first dandy of the black Atlantic and the blueprint for the gala’s attendees.

Clothing has long been the most visible expression of class, and although fashion may be for everybody, couture is unapologetically elitist. On the red carpet the twenty-first- century heirs of Soubise reveal how much has changed and remained the same for black faces in the upper echelons. Style has remained their marker of class differentiation, power and cultural assimilation but nearly three hundred years since Soubise, Sancho and Equiano manipulated European sartorial refinement to make space for them- selves, such has been their success that white fashionistas now cosplay the black interpretation of their own image. In this sense the Met Gala 2025 represented a triumph of black socialites.

In Britain there is now a clear and distinct black elite who unsettle the expectations of black experience and behind them is an even broader middle class who reveal the complexities of Britain’s contemporary social hierarchy. It was the tension between the presence of these groups and Britain’s enduring racial inequalities that led me to understand them. The success of black cultural figures in sport, fashion and film has meant black Britons cast a far larger impression on public life than our population. I had suspected that the invisible lives of this group revealed new truths about both race and class that were rarely declared.

To read what they are order The Good, the Black & the Boujee: How Black Britain became middle class

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Symeon Brown is the Home Affairs correspondent on Channel 4 News and a reporter on Unreported World. Symeon’s reporting has won or been shortlisted by the Orwell Prize, the British Journalism Awards, the Criminal Justice Association, the Medical Journalists’ Association, and the Sandford St Martin Awards. He has reported from

Symeon was the executive editor of Channel 4 News’ BAFTA nominated “Black to Front” special. He was previously seconded to Channel 4 as a commissioning executive in current affairs and specialist factual where he was part of the executive team that launched the youth current affairs strand ‘Untold’. Symeon is the author of Get Rich or Lie Trying: Ambition and Deceit in the New Influencer Economy. He supports Arsenal.

This week my publisher revealed the book cover for my social history and critique of Britain’s expanding black middle class. The work is the culmination of a decade researching, writing and thinking about contemporary black life through a lens an early reader described as ‘provocative’. I shall leave that for you to decide.

Pre order The Good, the Black and the Boujee: How Black Britain became middle class here.

What stood out on the announcement release, despite being of no surprise, is the way the word ‘black’ stands out on the publicity page in lowercase, appearing aloof and unnecessarily contrary.

It has become common in radical writing to capitalise ‘Black’ and the style has been adopted by establishment media organisations (this could be viewed as a red flag itself). The capitalisation of black is also the house style of my publisher that I deliberately chose to ignore.

While I am happily part of black organisations who do capitalise black, I found the gesture a distraction for a book rigorously reporting the 21st century’s politics of race and presenting new findings on black life.

Advocates of capitalisation may claim capitalisation asserts recognition of black agency and presence but it does this by introducing a racial primacy which is counter to historic liberation values. Although gestures are the most familiar form of political action I find capitalising black to be an odd means that undermines its desired ends.

In recent years I have seen media follow the rule of racial capitalisation by also doing so with the W in white and now the B in brown. Moving towards a world where race is given hierarchy on the page before anything else can be read on it creates an unintended detour with implications for the spirit of critical ethnographies.

Surely good writing can speak for itself without an intervention superseding the rules of grammar to make an unclear political gesture? When writing about working-class struggle at what point do I capitalise the ‘Working’ or the ‘Class’?

Within the radical black intellectual tradition there has always been differences in attitude. Stella Dadzie, Beverley Bryan and Suzanne Scafe chose to capitalise. Professors Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy chose not to. Most famously bell hooks was so keen to subvert the hierarchy asserted by capitalisation that she applied lowercasing to her own name to elevate her ideas rather than herself. The latter three thinkers expressed concern over a creeping racial essentialism of race inferred by capitalisation and I think I am persuaded by them.

The other issue is also the confusion capitalisation affords. Unlike in the US the capitalisation of ‘Black’ in Britain was once a statement of ‘political blackness’ - a banner for all non-white people and once somewhat white (Irish) in coalition against white supremacy but as I discovered in my research for The Good, the Black and the Boujee this political union is not undergoing separation as much as it is instructing divorce lawyers.

The majority of black professionals I surveyed for the book said they do not want to align politically with other racial minorities. You will have to read the book for more on that but considering this contested use of ‘Black’, just who is being included when black is capitalised and if this is a question, why are we using it?

The truth as I have come to see it is the publishers, newspapers and corporations who embraced the capitalisation of Black did so during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests. Considering the long list of demands, it appears the weakest gestures were easiest to embrace regardless of the value.

Capitalisation of black may as well be a T-shirt with the slogan “I went all the way to the largest anti-racist demonstrations in the 21st Century and all I got was this lousy T-shirt with Black in upper case.”

No thank you. I shall wait for the reparations instead, black is fine… for now.

You can read The Good, the Black and the Boujee: How Black Britain became middle class