Did a white man kill Jason Arday? If not one white man, perhaps many white men? Perhaps blaming white men doesn’t go far enough, perhaps systemic racism killed Jason Arday? Not just systemic racism within the minority of journalists who actually, belatedly investigated beyond the official Arday-Cambridge narrative. Did systemic racism across the whole of the news media, the whole of academia, indeed the whole of Britain kill Jason Arday?

Well, some in the news media, and academia, without any self-awareness of irony, are indeed blaming Jason Arday’s death on systemic racism.

And they’re blaming systemic racism as personified by one white man in particular, Nathan Cofnas, even though Cofnas is only one of the academics who raised questions about Arday’s academic integrity, years ago – when the supposedly systemically racist media and academia ignored, cancelled, fired, and pilloried him.

Now that the evidence for Jason Arday’s incredible claims, and Cambridge’s complicity, is mainstream, one would think that academics and journalists could admit their blind eyes of the past, and accept that the narrative that most of them were spinning or swallowing a few years ago has been proven false today.

Alas no.

The same narrative is back with a vengeance.

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With enough vengeance to undermine the employment and even the personal safety of Cofnas, of anybody who might be accused of collusion with him, and of multi-cultural society as a whole.

Because for some, the colluders extend to everyone in academia and the media, and even all Britons.

Just this weekend, Reuters published a story, ostensibly titled “US academic who accused Jason Arday of plagiarism allowed to resume some work.”

Reuters did not begin its summary of its story with Cofnas, even though the title suggests that the story is about Cofnas.

Instead, look at which bottom lines Reuters chooses to put up front.

“Arday was found dead aged 41 in London this month.”

No mention that Arday’s death is an apparent suicide. Police said his death is not suspicious. His memoir had just come out, in which he describes earlier suicidalism, before he joined Cambridge. The week before his death, he had resigned from Cambridge University, after a month of cascading revelations of Arday’s incredible claims to learning difficulties, racist victimization, selfless charity, judicial magnanimity, sporting prowess, and academic achievement. In the week of his resignation, he told friends he felt he “couldn’t go on,” that the scrutiny was too much.

So surely a responsible journalist would add the clause “in an apparent suicide” after referencing his death. But not Reuters. The entire story lacks any allusion to an apparent suicide.

Why? Is Reuters suggesting that Arday could have been murdered?!

Well let’s continue with Reuters’ own summary of its own story.

The second line of the summary is:

“He had been hailed as Cambridge’s youngest Black professor.”

That framing is leading. And it’s leading in the wrong direction. Instead of admitting that he had been recently outed as under-qualified and falsely-qualified to be a chaired professor at Cambridge, of any age, of any color, Reuters sets up his identity as a qualification. And as a qualification relevant to his death.

Why? Is Reuters suggesting that Arday broke a racist, ageist ceiling at Cambridge, only to be killed or hounded to death for it?

Reuters could have admitted that the narrative had suddenly shifted from what Arday and Cambridge had wanted it to be in 2023, when he was hired, i.e., it shifted from Cambridge’s youngest black professor to Cambridge’s least credible chaired professor.

Reuters could have admitted that once mainstream journalists probed his other incredible claims, then the negative coverage would be the best explanation for an apparent suicide.

Instead of admitting the negative coverage up front, Reuters hailed Arday as Cambridge’s youngest Black professor – reviving Cambridge’s own hailing for the prior three years.

Reuters appears to revive such spin in order to revive a dated narrative of Arday the victim.

But who is the victimizer?

Well, looking in the third line of the summary:

“Cofnas faces disciplinary inquiry by Ghent University.”

Now we have our villain! Victim already established. Now enter the villain. A ceiling-breaking black man is found dead. White man faces disciplinary inquiry.

I am starting to see a familiar narrative here.

Still, Reuters’ jumping from Arday’s spin to Cofnas’ employment woes is a jarring leap for the reader. Cofnas is no longer at Cambridge. The disciplinary inquiry is by Ghent University, a little university in little Belgium.

So the jump from Arday’s death to Cofnas’s disciplinary issue is at least a geographical jump if not an attributional leap.

By the time the reader hits the word Ghent, the audience is feeling a niggle, even if subconsciously, about why Reuters started with Arday’s death in London, only to jump from London to Ghent.

Reuters will finesse that dissonance with its fourth line of summary.

“Ghent says it had contact with U.S. ambassador over Cofnas case.”

There, Reuters just included the most important country in the world. So not just about a little university in little Belgium. America is involved too. And implicitly that is bad.

Scroll down, and you will find no explanation or speculation about why the US Ambassador and Ghent were in contact.

Never mind, the suggestion is enough.

While scrolling down, you won’t find any hint of the context and backstory I’ve given you, until the brief fifth paragraph.

“The plagiarism allegations against Arday drew huge media coverage, leading to questions about other elements of Arday’s life, including statements he made about his career, personal life[,] and medical conditions.”

That’s a start.

Yet Reuters does not allow any hint that exposure of Arday’s incredible claims might have caused Arday to take his own life. Instead Reuters ends the story by circling back to the implication that racism killed Arday.

“Arday’s death triggered intense debate about racism in the academic world and the media in Britain. Before his death, Arday repeatedly said the public attacks upon him were taking a toll on him and his family.”

Reuters does not cite or link to any intense debate. Reuters just moves on from racism to Arday’s death. Link suggested.

Reuters isn’t alone in framing Arday as the deadly victim of racism.

Just the day before, Vogue magazine published a screed by another intersectional victim of Cambridge’s racism, who complains of “the anti-Black mob both in Cambridge and in the British media that hounded Dr. Jason Arday to his death at the age of 41, despite his having been cleared of accusations of plagiarism.”

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Having talked about Farah Ahmed, the Cambridge professor who pushed for Islamic education to supplant western education, and who, on behalf of a now banned terrorist group (Hizb ut Tahrir), pushed for the exploitation of education to “develop weaponry for Jihad” and to help Islam to “dominate,” it’s time to talk about the community she founded.

That is: The Islamic Educator Learning Community.

The IELC website is hosted by the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, or Camtree — of which Farah Ahmed is an “affiliate.”

Now I am all for a teacher research exchange that improves education. And I am all for the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange actually exchanging rigorous teacher research with the Islamic Educator Learning Community.

The questions are:

Is the Islamic Educator Learning Community good for educators?
Is it advancing better education?
Is it good for the educated?
Is the Islamic Educator Learning Community good for society as a whole?

Alas no.

The IELC produces incestuous, circular, slippery, unproven, anti-scientific, anti-Western, social Marxist gobbledygook.

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It’s time to talk about Cambridge’s Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC). Having talked about Farah Ahmed, the Cambridge professor who pushed for Islamic education to supplant western education, and who, on behalf of a now banned terrorist group (Hizb ut Tahrir), pushed for the exploitation of education to “develop weaponry for Jihad” and to help Islam to “dominate,” it’s time to talk about the community she founded.

The Islamic Educator Learning Community website is hosted by the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, or Camtree — of which Farah Ahmed is an “affiliate.”

Now I am all for a teacher research exchange that improves education. And I am all for the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange actually exchanging rigorous teacher research with the Islamic Educator Learning Community.

The questions are: Is the Islamic Educator Learning Community good for educators? Is it advancing better education? Is it good for the educated? Is the Islamic Educator Learning Community good for society as a whole?

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Well, first off let’s take it at face value.

Its landing page says that the “IELC is a holistic learning community of Islamic educators (anyone working in or teaching Muslim learners aged from 3-18 years).” (Note the grammatical error in the parentheses. Not a good start.)

Holistic learning sounds good, right? It sounds actually contrary to the narrowly Sunni-Islamic-centric education that Farah Ahmed has promoted for more than 20 years!

I have just a little worry that the statement refers to Islamic educators instead of just Muslim educators, but let’s give it a chance. Islamic is a suggestive adjective, but it isn’t just a euphemism for Islamist. It is usually used to suggest a pious or even scholarly engagement with the faith of Islam, and I am certainly in favor of all things scholarly.

The landing page continues: “We have created an online platform designed to facilitate exchange between Islamic scholarship, educational research[,] and Islamic educational settings.”

The most inclusive and worthy part of this statement is the middle item: “educational research.” I am certainly in favor of cross-fertilizing rigorous educational research into education of whatever faith or no faith.

So then, let’s look at the sort of “educational research” that the Islamic Educator Learning Community promote on its “online platform designed to facilitate exchange between Islamic scholarship, educational research[,] and Islamic educational settings.”

Well there was only one paper actually on the IELC’s page for “Publications and Projects.” The page can’t be found, except where externally archived, which is strange. It is sadly reminiscent of when Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education scrubbed its own page of its own employees, after they came under scrutiny earlier this month.

Okay, let’s not jump to conclusions! The paper itself is publicly available. It was published as open-source. It has not been withdrawn by the journal that published it – the London Review of Education.

The author is Usama Javed Mirza, whose affiliation is listed as Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education, where he was at the time employed as a researcher. Yep! The very same department that peddled Jason Arday’s incredible claims.

Indeed, Mirza submitted the paper pretty much in the same month that Arday started work in that department as a chaired Professor of the Sociology of Education. It is also the very same department that still employs Farah Ahmed as an Assistant Research Professor of Education.

Mirza’s paper is titled

“Islamic scientific critical consciousness as a theoretical framework for Muslim science educators.”

Okay, already I have concerns. I count three oxymorons in the first eight words:

“Islamic scientific” is the first oxymoron. Farah Ahmed herself has made clear that science is a threat to Islam (at least the narrow Sunni-Islamic faith that she espouses), except where it helps to “develop weaponry for Jihad.” And Mirza’s paper quickly turns out to promulgate similar alarm about the threat to Islam from science – unless educated and reinterpreted in a selective way that conforms with Islam as he interprets it.

The second oxymoron in the title is a dialectic collision of science and anti-science: “scientific critical consciousness.” Critical consciousness is a term of art in woke discourse. It is rarely defined. Where it is defined, it is defined usually only circularly (as in: critical consciousness means being mindful to be critical) or metaphorically (critical consciousness is a critical lens). It is only critical in the sense that it criticizes everything that doesn’t conform with the latest development of unadmitted social Marxism. And what doesn’t conform includes real science. What does conform is Marxist fake science. Remember that Karl Marx offered his subjective, internally-contradictory, a-historical nonsense as “scientific”!

The paper’s title doubles down on the woke circular, metaphorical double-speak, with a third oxymoron: “theoretical framework.” Can any woke moron explain how something can be both theoretical and a framework?

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Yesterday I reported on the ridiculous excuses made by the Faculty of Education at Cambridge University for Professor Farah Ahmed’s push for Islamic education to supplant Western education, and for her advocacy for education that helps Muslims to develop “weaponry for Jihad” and to “dominate.”

The Faculty responded with a false suggestion that she is not responsible for those views, and a more accurate claim that the views were written in 2002, and that in 2010 she repudiated the now banned terrorist group for which she wrote these views.

Except that Farah Ahmed has repeatedly reiterated some of the same views.

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From 2002 to 2013, according to her own CV, she was headteacher of two “Islam-centric schools” that she had founded (incidentally, with fellow members of Hizb ut Tahrir — the now banned terrorist group).

During that time, she sole-authored a paper describing Islamic education as “a defence against the dominant secular culture,” and urging selective engagement with modern teaching.

In 2016, Farah Ahmed lodged an article urging education through “a non-western i.e. Islamic, way of being in and knowing the world,” which “differs fundamentally from the secular and ‘technological’ educational systems.”

“The need for critique and questioning that characterizes Western higher education has paralyzed a true search for knowledge and self-awareness.”

In 2018, Cambridge passed her doctoral thesis, even though it reads more like Islamic theology than educational theory. Here are some indicative quotes:

• “Islamic learning will not compromise on the supremacy of Quranic revelation and Prophetic tradition as sources of unassailable knowledge.”

• “FBV [Fundamental British Values, a statutory requirement in schooling] as defined by government have less to do with Britishness, than to do with a muscular secular-liberalism closing down debate in the public square.”

• British education is pushing a state-defined British identity in replacement of “religious and multiple cultural heritages.”

In 2021, she lodged an article rejecting the idea that secular education can be religiously neutral. At least this article allows for dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims.

In 2023, Farah Ahmed administered a conference at Cambridge University, officially

• to help educators to escape the “secular, neoliberal system of education,”

• to “unlearn conventional teacher education[,] and move toward Islamically grounded teacher development,” and

• “to re-center our focus on preparing the Muslim learner for the akhira” (that is: everlasting paradise after death).

In 2024, Farah Ahmed co-authored an article with the stereotypically ungrammatical woke proposition that Western education is “inherently emergent from the transition from colonial empires to nation-states built on Eurocentric ideas.”

The same article complains that Islamic schools are “deeply fettered by these conceptual and practical infrastructures.”

Her proposed solution is to “deconstruct,” “rethink,” “renew,” and “reconstruct” educational objectives, curricula, and assessments within a Qur’anic “framework.”

In 2025, she co-authored a pamphlet entitled “How Islamic is My School? A Toolkit to Evaluate and Create a Development Plan.”

This contains a long list of nine complaints, echoing her polemic of 2002.

1. “Young Muslims need a deep understanding of how an Islamic worldview differs from a secular one. Without this they are unprepared for ideological challenges to their iman [faith] and may abandon their dīn [piety].”

2. “Our core aim as educators needs to be to raise the next generation to have an Islamic ‘aqliyyah [mentality\ rooted in Islam, so they are able to think through an Islamic lens and evaluate new ideas from an Islamic perspective.“

3. “A truly Islamic approach to education will integrate spiritual, intellectual, and personal growth, and offer a curriculum that builds an Islamic worldview across all subjects.”

4. Our objective should be “providing an education from an Islamic worldview that truly nurtures young Muslims so that they think through an Islamic worldview.”

5. “Our understanding of knowledge is that it is multiplex and relational…[It] differs from the positivist secular approach. For Muslims, Allah is the possessor of objective knowledge.”

6. “Ethics and morality are rooted in the Qur’an as the literal word of Allah sent to guide humankind in living a moral life.”

7. “The Islamic concept of education as the flourishing of human fitrah [state of nature] and growth towards Allah contrasts sharply with a concept of education as gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications.”

8. “In the former, however, it is questionable whether high-stakes standardised summative assessment has any purpose in education, particularly in the education of young children.”

9. “Our curricula should be building an Islamic worldview, personalised character, and selfhood.”

Along the way, the pamphlet suggests eight questions you should ask of your school:

1. “To what extent does our school prepare young Muslims to navigate life in a secular/western setting while maintaining a steadfast Islamic worldview through submission to Allah?”

2. “Is our educational philosophy derived from an Islamic worldview?”

3. “In what ways does the Islamic worldview differ from a secular one?

4. “What are the implications that arise from this difference in terms of education?”

5. “Do our conceptualisations of knowledge and learning emanate from Qur’an, Sunnah [the Prophet’s example,] and an Islamic worldview?”

6. “In what ways do we stand for justice and call towards truth?

7. “How far do we see our work as decolonising education in Islamic contexts?”

8. “In what ways can we support learners to understand that being Muslim has to ultimately be their choice?”

As of today, Farah Ahmed’s personal website headlines her as “Educator § Academic § Activist: Translating classical Islamic educational thought into contemporary classroom practice.”

God help us.

The homepage then says she is available for “consulting engagements.”

I can imagine the eagerness with which woke school principals are rushing to consult Farah Ahmed on “translating classical Islamic educational thought into contemporary classroom practice.” I can’t imagine them asking: How does this differ from what she had advocated in 2002 for a now banned Islamist group?

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Max talks with Bruce Oliver Newsome, Ph.D., a recovering academic, about his journey from a Marxist undergraduate to a counter-extremist graduate, through arguments at Cambridge about truth, statistics, interpretation, objectivity, non-partisanship, neutrality, social justice, and intersectionality.

Max and Bruce expose the hypocrisies of who may have "their own truth," which groups may be interpreted as victims of bigotry, who is privileged or persecuted.

Max and Bruce trace the influence of academic intersectionality from sociology to politics -- and the perverse outcomes for practical, everyday, electoral politics, where, for instance, Green transgenders campaign with Islamists who wish to persecute homosexuals.

Max and Bruce discuss also what all of us can do to counter the collapse of academia, the dilemmas between academic freedom and pointing out the b'll'cks, meritocracy and credentialism, accessibility and pretension, utility versus abstraction.

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THE LATE JASON ARDAY’S LATEST AND GREATEST EMPLOYER, the Faculty of Education, of Cambridge University, is the same department that, for more than a decade, has educated and employed Farah Ahmed, whose research, writing, and academic leadership push for a narrowly-Sunni-Islamic education to supplant Western education.

This seems a hypocritical and ungrateful position, given that she is a professor of education, at a western university!

But there’s more. Her views have changed little since she expressed them in support of a now banned terrorist group (Hizb ut-Tahrir). In 2002, she contributed to a book developed by that group, in opposition to Western education — except to allow for an education that would help to develop weapons for Jihad and Islamic domination!

In 2009, The Spectator brought the book to the attention of the then Secretary of Education, Ed Balls, and named Farah Ahmed as the author of the most offending chapter.

In 2010, Fared Ahmed said she no longer supports “all” the views of Hizb ut Tahrir, and is no longer involved with the group.

Cambridge has employed her continuously since 2018, according to her CV, and counted her as a doctoral student for years before that.

Okay, you could agree with Cambridge that her involvement with Hizb ut Tahrir is in the past, the group wasn’t proscribed at the time, she is free to write what she wants, views change, etc.

Except that Cambridge is making excuses that are contradicted by the evidence.

Farah Ahmed is still pushing much of what she pushed when she openly supported a now banned group. In further stacks on this subject, I will be revealing what Ahmed has promulgated since 2002. For now, let’s be clear about her record in 2002.

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Earlier this month, August 2026, The Spectator re-reported on Farah Ahmed’s writing, given that she shared a department with the incredible Jason Arday.

When approached by The Spectator, Farah Ahmed did not reply when asked if she still agreed with the views in the book she had co-authored in 2002.

The offending book (also described as a pamphlet or booklet) was published by Hizb ut-Tahrir with a date of 2003 (but was written and produced in 2002). It was republished in 2017, still with her name on it, although not necessarily with her knowledge.

It is titled: Education and Identity: The Dilemma of Muslims in the West. Its dilemma is that Western Muslims supposedly should navigate away from subjects of Western education such as democracy, inclusivity, integration, and secularism, , while still exploiting that education to help Islam to triumph over all resistant views.

The book lists Farah Ahmad (same person, different spelling) as a co-author.

She is listed as co-author of a chapter too, titled “The Western Education System and the British National Curriculum.” It really is that sweeping. It makes clear that Western Education in general and British education in particular are incompatible with Islam.

The chapter concludes that “the Islamic education system can only be implemented comprehensively, and in the manner obligated by Islam, by the presence of the Khilafah system,” i.e., an Islamist caliphate.

The chapter complains that “western education” is a “threat” to Muslims, by teaching that democracy and integration are right, and that polygamy and child marriage are wrong.

The authors might as well have written Boko Haram – the name of a Nigerian Islamist terrorist group, meaning “Western Education is Forbidden.”

Democracy, the chapter continues, is a “corrupt tradition,” because if “decision makers decide to make bombing Iraq or homosexuality legal, as they currently have, there is nothing anyone can do about it.”

I don’t think the writers understand democracy. They certainly don’t like it.

They criticize the British national curriculum for telling children that “democracy… is the only way that laws should be created.” They want recognition of laws created by sharia courts and clerics (not everybody’s clerics, only their preferred clerics). They don’t mention that British governments (national and local) and courts (family courts especially) already tolerate sharia law.

Instead, the chapter complains that “religious tolerance is primarily pushed in religious education,” with the result that “Islam is taught as a religion like any other, putting its value on the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and the like.”

The chapter characterizes Britain’s national curriculum as “systematic indoctrination,” intended to “build ‘model British citizens’ who will seek to actively take part in the implementation of the secular capitalist system in British society,” which is contrary “to the needs of Muslim students[,] as the aqeedah [belief system] of the Muslim is in complete contradiction to this.”

English literature is particularly problematic for the chapter’s writers. It “is one of the most damaging subjects” a school can teach, because (at primary school) it includes fairy tales that “reflect secular and immoral beliefs, which contradict the viewpoint of Islam,” and (at secondary school) it includes Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which “advocates disobeying parents and pre-marital relations.”

The chapter’s ultimate alternative is Islamic education, except that it makes intermediate allowance for a Western education that produces “weaponry” for Jihad, which will then help Islam to “dominate.”

Yep really!

The chapter includes the following Jihadi allowance for Western education:

“The motivation to study engineering would be to aid the development of machinery for Jihad[,] and Allah’s reward for this is immeasurable.”

The chapter continues:

“The motivation for studying computer technology would be to elevate the Islamic society over all other societies in the world, to show it as a shining example and to produce advanced weaponry for Jihad in order that the deen [Islam] may dominate over all other deens as commanded by the Creator.”

When The Spectator re-reported on the offending book, the Faculty of Education issued a statement (11 August):

“The faculty is committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law. All members of our community are encouraged to exercise their rights to freedom of speech, including to challenge ideas or theories they disagree with through scholarship and robust debate.”

But that doesn’t mean it should have hired Farah Ahmed, does it?

I agree with the freedom to say ridiculous things, but giving her a platform at a Varsity school goes beyond than just supporting her freedom of speech. It’s an endorsement of her views, and a commitment to expose students to such views, and to support the promulgation of such views.

And besides, Cambridge is hypocritical to state its intention to protect Farah Ahmed behind the sanctity of freedom of speech — a freedom is does not extend to its own faculty, students, and visitors who don’t uphold its dogma of the day.

Anyway, how confident can the Faculty of Education be in Arday, Ahmed, and their colleagues/comrades, after it canceled its own webpage about its faculty and staff?

On 25 August, the department told Jewish News that Farah Ahmed had contributed to the book only as a historical researcher, that its contents “are not her words,” and that she had split from Hizb ut-Tahrir , before Hizb ut-Tahrir was banned in Britain (in 2024).

The statement is stacked with six apparent errors or misdirections:

“These comments were made in an article {actually: a book] to which Dr Ahmed contributed as a historical researcher [actually a named co-author] more than 20 years ago. She has said that they are not her words and do not reflect her views {no: she said she no longer agrees with “all” the group’s views]. Dr Ahmed also reiterated that she ended her association with Hizb ut-Tahrir more than 15 years ago [in fact, she stated she had not recently participated], long before the group was proscribed [but not before it expressed the extremism that belatedly got it banned]. Her appointment at Cambridge followed a standard recruitment process and complied fully with the University’s legal obligations as an employer [like the process that ended in Arday’s hiring? because that one is under investigation, by the University].”

The department is making factually erroneous and ethically disingenuous excuses – it looks like it is dodging, distracting, hiding, splitting hairs, spinning, and covering up.

Note that the department’s statement does not condemn terrorism, or the group, or Farah Ahmed’s prior support for that group.

And note too that Cambridge University itself, and the university’s colleges where Farah Ahmed is institutionalized, have not commented.

Let’s be clear about what the Faculty of Education tried to do in its statement.

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Sociology, a once flourishing field, has become a highly politicized discipline which sacrifices scientific rigor and commitment to finding objective truth for ideology, partisan advocacy and advancing a social justice agenda. Politically contested assumptions are presented as consensus or as settled facts. Scholarly standards are replaced with political/ideological ones. Indeed, much of contemporary sociology is indistinguishable from political activist movements such as Black Lives Matter and MoveOn.

This ideological bias, sociologist Jukka Savolainen points out, has distorted the research agenda, marginalized dissenting scholars, and contributed to its crisis of credibility. Sociologist Kevin McCaffree notes that if you look at the data on much of sociologists’ current research on capitalism, sexism and racism you’ll see that they are misrepresenting the evidence, concealing the evidence or distorting it outright. Indeed, sociology has become a “damaged brand”, unloved and distrusted by broad sections of American society, including those best positioned to influence social policy.

Undoubtedly, the concepts investigated by sociology - the structure of the family, class structure, race and ethnicity, migration - are important and worthy of careful study. Sociology was and should be an important and relevant field. It is likely that a move to a more honest and probing truthful sociology - one that seriously considers alternate hypotheses and engages with contradictory findings from other disciplines - would be beneficial to society. However, the discipline has become so rotten - with really ideological, incompetent or unethical people deeply embedded within it - that any correction from its current trajectory seems unlikely.

Mendacity Embraced and Everything is Furiously Spun From the Start in the Direction Desired

After decades of teaching and research, the prominent sociologist Alexander Riley reached the following mordant conclusion about the state of his discipline:

“Today, sociology treats complex and contested questions with the most simplified framework imaginable. All questions about human life are now equations of victims and victimizers and the mechanisms by which the powerful oppress the powerless. No alternative explanatory models for the empirical outcomes we see in the world are entertained or even acknowledged as legitimate. All evidence that cannot be adequately twisted to fit the storyline is ignored. Outright mendacity about empirical matters is embraced, details of cases are occluded, and everything is furiously spun from the start in the direction desired.”

Sociology’s faculty, professional associations, graduate programs and to a large degree journals are all complicit. Dissident sociologists keep their heads down. The question has come up in various circles whether sociology can be saved or reformed. Many believe that the solution is to have other disciplines address the scientific questions that used to be in the wheelhouse for sociology and criminology. This is already happening. Some sociology is getting done by people not trained in sociology. They are loyal to the content, not to its professional manifestation.

Social Justice Without Economic Class.

Sociology has long attracted egalitarians and people interested in making the social world better and more fair to those who have suffered from discrimination. They regard themselves as natural experts on questions of the general good and social justice. With its high level of moralization and fuzzy boundaries, sociology, compared to other social sciences, has been unusually open to Marxism and other marginal traditions.

Historically sociology aligned with the ‘Old Left’ which focused on improving life for low income and marginalized people of all backgrounds. Focused on moving economic rather than social and cultural policy, they studied economic inequality without assuming the moral obligation of society to arrange itself so that all groups are equal on socially valued outcomes.

Over time sociology’s focus on inequality began to crowd out other research topics. Today, 80 percent of articles published in the flagship sociology journals touch on inequality. However, their dominant concern is no longer socioeconomic inequality. Rather it is achieving outcome equality for groups primarily defined by their race, gender, and sexuality. When sociology departments, advocate “dismantling structures and ideologies that uphold, normalize, naturalize, and legitimate/justify all forms of inequality”, this is in the context of promoting equal outcomes across these groups, not advocating traditional class-based redistribution. Egalitarian economics and liberal progressive universalism have been replaced by tribalism and competitive victimhood.

Critical Theory and Intersectionality Underlie Woke Sociology

The origin, definition and core tenets of the social justice wokism underlying sociology are contested and what it denotes is not always clear. Political scientist Eric Kaufman provides a general definition of woke as ‘the sacralization of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual identity groups’. While the term ‘wokeness’ may be receding in popular discourse, woke practices remain firmly entrenched in higher education where the culture and bureaucracy are deeply ingrained.

A philosophy and worldview decades in the making, wokeism is a cultural paradigm espousing the inherent moral superiority of the underdog and doubting the moral legitimacy of Western societies. In its strongest form wokeism holds that woke people believe that our current society is extremely racist, sexist, discriminatory and homophobic.

Sociologists Start with a Conclusion and Find Evidence That Supports It

Scholarly standards in sociology are clearly corrupted. Sociologists are frequently criticized for starting with their conclusion and, working backwards, finding evidence that they think backs it up. Central causal questions are settled before the research begins. According to sociologist John Iceland, this results from ‘explanatory superficiality’. This happens when an academic discipline limits available perspectives to explain a given phenomenon in order to produce analyses that align with the preferred poltiical narrative.

Basic ideological parameters e.g. pervasive structural racism, are assumed from the outset and remain unquestioned. The oppressive nature of society is given. Systemic bias and the oppression of marginalized people are taken for granted - all analyses proceed from there. To illustrate, Professor Redstone points out that within sociology, any inequality among groups is de facto the result of disrimination. Even suggesting research into alternative explanations is viewed as racist, morally wrong and victim blaming. Methods are rigged to arrive at these ideologically preferred conclusions. Statistical malfeasance, evidence cherry-picking and intellectual dishonesty are common. Ideological interpretations pass as theory.

The Research Feels Empirically Grounded Because Research Keeps Confirming It

After years of careful examination, sociologist Ilana Redstone concluded that the discipline has lost the capacity to hold multiple explanations simultaneously and adjudicate between them with evidence and without moralization. Further, she astutely observes, that the the research feels empirically grounded because other research keeps confirming it - research produced by instruments and methods organized to confirm it.

(In the less politicized and contentious subfields of sociology, such as social demography, researchers start with the progressive belief in government-led social intervention for the disadvantaged).

A majority of sociologists believe that sociology “should analyze and transcend oppression”. In pursuit of this, they employ a progressive epistemology which judges the veracity of scientific findings as to how well they fit their prevailing narratives. Sociology has normalized a systemic asymmetry in evidential standards - permissive toward ideologically congenial claims and stringent toward inconvenient ones.

In contrast to the norms of science (separating the ‘is’ from the ‘ought’, understanding causal mechanisms before making value judgments, etc.) put forward by Weber and Merton, and practiced by many sociologists in the past, the standard of evidence in today’s sociology varies according to what you are arguing.

This is readily apparent to critical sociologists like Professor Eppard who documents how sociologists frequently make big claims that have a weak to nonexistent evidentiary basis. These include claims about systemic racism, implicit bias, police shootings, microagressions, sexism, sex differences, transgender issues, single parenthood, etc.

Sociologists Nitpick to Death any Findings That go Against the Prevailing Political Commitment.

Eminent sociologist Mark Mizruchi points out how:

“Seemingly smart people seem to lose all critical perspective when findings accord with their worldview and/or political perspective. When a sociologist has the guts to report findings that question the accepted wisdom, however, he or she is typically excoriated, regardless of the quality of the work. In these cases, many of the same people who uncritically accepted more “palatable” findings on the same topic suddenly become fierce and incisive critics.”

Sociology professor Joshua Murray observes that his colleagues’ nitpick to death any findings that go against the prevailing political commitment. (Source: personal correspondence).

The respected sociology professor, Jukka Savolainen reached a similar conclusion, noting that “politically disfavored findings face social sanctions and procedural hurdles that go well beyond normal scientific scrutiny”. He offers as an example the muted response to sociologist Eric Stewart who was found to have engaged in systemic data fabrication. He attributes the lack of outrage to the ideological fit of Stewart’s work with its focus on systemic racism.

It is especially difficult to publish results that are considered harmful to marginalized groups (e.g. studies that do not find evidence of bias/unfair treatment but instead find differences in risks/behaviors). Professor Gosine, in this website, draws on his unusual life experience and academic journey to heterodoxy, to explain how alternative explanations - particularly cultural explanations - are pushed aside in sociology.

For further discussion please see www.ihatesociology.com. This comprehensive indictment and repository includes: faculty profiles (called simultaneously hilarious and revolving), testimonials from students, faculty and the public, case studies (including the infamous ‘progressive stacking’ teaching method), and more.

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The New Nuisance (Bruce Oliver Newsome Ph.D.) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Britain’s descent into selective unfreedom of speech continues. Yet again, a British judge criminalizes politically unfashionable speech in a blatantly two-tier way. Once again a criminal court develops case law beyond the avowed intent of statutory law. Yet again, the victim’s remaining hope for justice is an appeal — at colossal expense to him, his private supporters, and the public purse.

Stephen Gray served for nearly three decades in Cleveland Police. Now retired, the 65-year-old and his wife foster children in Darlington, County Durham, north-east England. He has never been referred to the national program to counter extremism (“Prevent”). Yet on 30 April 2026, a Magistrates’ Court in Newton Aycliffe convicted him of a “grossly offensive” communication.

The communication is a repost on Facebook.

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Gray was prosecuted for sharing two satirical memes. The court chose to protect the freedom of one and convict him for the other, introducing a new subjective crime of light-heartedness. The latter meme is too light-hearted to be protected like the former, says the judge. See if you can find the differentiation that the judge found.

The finding is difficult to parse, because, this being Britain, the jurisprudence has not been published, months after the judgment. Our source is the Free Speech Union, which helped to defend Gray, and is helping his appeal.

The first meme satirizes calls for donations to help asylum-seekers. It is titled “time for mass deportation” and “Children in Need.” Its main content depicts an apparent adult, and describes him as a 12-year-old called Mohammed. It asks for donations to move Mohammed from a three-star to a five-star hotel where he would benefit from a better halal menu, free Wi-Fi, and proximity to a girls’ school.

District Judge Steven Hood acquitted Gray over that meme, accepting that it addressed political issues debated in Parliament: privileging illegal immigrants over citizens; and the grooming of mostly white girls by mostly Muslim men.

The second meme showed a rasher of bacon beside a man in a turban. Its caption reads:

“Fun facts about Bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9 year old!”

The intent behind this meme is likely (remember: Gray cannot speak to the intent of the meme’s author) to satirize the Prophet Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha, and his followers’ attitudes towards child marriage.

Gray testified that he shared the meme to raise the question of whether Mohammed’s example had contributed to the continued acceptance of child marriage in some Muslim societies.

The meme is not my sort of satire. But for me it is as satirical, as political, as policy relevant as the first meme.

Judge Hood rejected Gray’s explanation. The judge decided that the post could not make a serious point when it was framed in a light-hearted manner.

Let that sink in.

In other words, the judge denied the post’s freedom as political expression precisely because it was a joke. Free political expression ends where it is funny, or irreverent, or sarcastic, or satirical.

What a ridiculous standard!

Hood’s judgement has a chilling effect on anyone who ever satirizes anything and steps foot in Britain, including yours truly.

The judgement betrays the inherent subjectivity of adjudicating the acceptability of speech — the law gives space for activist judges to abuse legislative intent in order to advance some agendas and demographics at the expense of others.

The standard itself is open to abuse. Any British court can now use Hood’s precedent in case law as an excuse to convict people it doesn’t like. A court just needs to say that one communication is light-hearted, while another is serious, in order to convict the first communicator and to protect the other.

The added agony is that Britain has a tremendous legacy of political satire, and has protected it for centuries.

Jonathan Swift did not propose literally eating Irish babies. Evelyn Waugh did not literally condone the accidental shooting of boys with a starting pistol at a private school. Monty Python wasn’t advocating for government agents to extract organs from organ donors when the organs are needed rather than when organ donors are already dead. Private Eye did not mean to suggest that Theresa May is a literal robot.

Criminalizing a laugh is no laughing matter.

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This will read like an April’s Fool story, or a classic comedy out of Ealing Studios, but it’s true! Residents of Piddington, a village in Oxfordshire, are pursuing a referendum on secession from the UK, after the national government revealed plans to rehouse “asylum seekers” in a nearby depot owned but no longer used by the Ministry of Defence.

Even the village’s name reminds me of “Passport to Pimlico,” released by Ealing in 1949.

To be clear, Piddington, unlike Ealing’s Pimlico, has not yet declared independence, or even voted to secede. But the parish council has held a vote to call a referendum on secession. The majority was 96 percent.

The leader of the parish council says that he decided a vote is the most effective approach, having seen local protests fail wherever national government has unilaterally imposed asylum-centers.

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For instance, in Summer 2025 the council and residents of Epping Forest (near London, in Essex) protested the national government’s untrailed and secretive decision to turn a local hotel into an asylum-center.

Public protests in Epping peaked after one of the hotel’s foreign residents assaulted local girls. But local police and courts cooperated to order protesters to stay away, while police vans bussed in non-local counter-protesters from the railway station.

The local council had already ruled that the hotel’s change of use violates local regulations. But national government lawyers persuaded an appeals court that the rights of asylum-seekers trump the rights of local residents, and the laws of local government.

So protests, local government, and local law don’t matter to national government and courts, and most national media — at least they don’t matter as much as illegal immigrants.

Wherever locals protest asylum center or foreign crime, national government, national media, and local police and courts collude to smear local protesters as non-local fascist agitators.

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Most obviously, in Summer 2024, after the stabbings of girls at a dance class in Southport, national government smeared protesters as non-local fascist misinformers, while the same government spread misinformation to suggest that the perp was a Welsh choirboy with no prior criminal record. In fact, he was a child immigrant, known to police for a record of violence, and known to counter-terrorism agents for plotting Jihadi terrorism. The same government fast-tracked for prosecution a political opponent, Lucy Connolly, for an angry tweet about the crime, while turning a blind eye to misinformation and incitement from the political left.

Two years later, this summer, national government was more interested in smearing local protesters against an illegal-immigrant who stabbed a man repeatedly in the head on a street in Northern Ireland than in admitting local concerns about public safety. The perp in this case was not the first illegal immigrant claiming to be from Sudan who stabbed a Briton in the head.

Given such precedents, Piddington isn’t bothering with street protests, legal protests, or representations to government. Instead, Piddington’s particular protest is a protest vote — a vote on secession.

Piddington is playing clever politics and drawing profound comparisons.

In Britain, a local authority cannot secede without Parliamentary approval. By the way, this is another proof of Britain’s constitutional inflexibility towards local dissent, which bodes ill for what some commentators worry is an inevitable civil war.

Parish councillors make clear that they know Piddington cannot secede unilaterally. They admit that their referendum is a protest, to draw attention to a real issue, to draw Britain’s government into a dialogue it has so far avoided, and to gain support from even further afield.

The leader of the parish council (Tim McNally) categorizes Piddington’s vote with the American choice to secede from Britain in 1776. Indeed, he deliberately scheduled the vote to approve a referendum on 4 July 2026 — the 250th anniversary of American independence day (which my alter ego already declares “offensive to progressives everywhere”).

McNally even talks about petitioning the US to join the union as the 51st state!

Not only did the vote approve a referendum, it approved the drafting of a constitution and consultation with relevant legal scholars (I volunteer).

Which reminds all Britons of their desperate need for a single constitutional text like the US constitution.

Yes, Britain has a constitution, but not a single constitutional text. Clearly, Britain’s oft-touted “unwritten constitution” isn’t sufficient, is it?

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Unless you agree with casual two-tier policing, two-tier justice, two-tier schooling, two-tier freedom of assembly, censorship, persecution of Christians and Jews while privileging Islamists, abuse of safeguarding to punish dissent, and demonization of fathers, boys, whites, wavers of English flags, and…oh I don’t have the space or the blood pressure.

I would love to see the US government issue a statement on Piddington’s right to choose its own constitution.

The US government has already publicly condemned the British government’s erosion of human rights, and partiality in protecting rights and freedoms.

Some in US government have aired the potential for US asylum for British Jews and political dissidents.

I agree with the parallel that McNally is making. Piddingtonians, like colonial Americans, are subject to rule without representation, and erosion of local government whenever national government thinks it knows better what is best for locals.

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The UK government did not consult or notify Piddington’s 350 residents, so yes they should be mad.

The “asylum seekers” will number 1,250, so will outnumber the residents more than 3 times. All will be foreign young men, with a historic propensity to violent crime. They will be unvetted, unrestricted in their movements, and not preoccupied with work or any organized worthy activities — except their own amusement.

On that alarming thought, Border Security Minister Anna Turley unwittingly descended into self-parody.

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Today (11 August 2026), Jason Arday’s autobiography is scheduled for publication. A bit premature: he is still only 37 years old. On the other hand, I bet he and the publisher now wish they had been more premature, and published it a couple months ago, before the cascading revelations of his incredible claims. It is titled Great and Unfortunate Things, with unintentional irony.

Will it be released? I doubt it! Last week, Arday resigned from Cambridge, and said he wouldn’t attend promotions of the book this week.

But advance copies have already been distributed, to journalists, some of whom are prepared to reveal claims even more incredible than the claims debunked already this summer.

Extraordinary learning difficulties. Medical miracles. World-class endurance feats. Millions raised for charity. Prestigious academic appointments. Bizarre racist persecution.

Chances are the autobiography will be pulped, and apologists will pretend that his claims are misinformation spread by right-wing conspiracists (what, even the politically-aligned and previously sympathetic The Guardian?)

So before the apologism and smears, let’s record Arday’s top 35 most incredible claims! Stay tuned, because more will come out.

1. At the age of 3 years, Arday was diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay, he told American interviewers.
   He was diagnosed with deafness, dyslexia, and epilepsy too, according to advance copies of his autobiography. (Perhaps that’s why he needed a co-author?)

   Cambridge repeated these claims when announcing Arday’s appointment as Professor of Sociology of Education in 2023 — which seems incongruous. A university normally publicizes the appointee’s adult academic qualifications. But why dwell on his academic qualifications, when they’re so bad? More on that below…

   No medical or psychological authority has corroborated his neurodivergent claims.

2. Arday was unable to speak until he was 11, and unable to read or write until he was 18.
   Cambridge, the BBC, and numerous media profiles repeated these claims, and they are reportedly repeated in Arday’s autobiography.

   No witness has come forward, no diagnoses have been made public.

   Yep, you already see a pattern here.

3. Arday said that as a child his development was tracked by the television documentary Seven Up.

   The Seven Up project began in 1964, more than 20 years before Arday was born. The children selected at the time were aged 7 years. Only 14 were selected. The BBC says he was uninvolved.

   Arday later said that he had meant an unrelated community project with the same name.

4. Arday complains that when he was in secondary school, teachers (Racists!) struck his knuckles (Systemic racism!) with a pen (A hideously white pen?) after he failed to complete his work (Stereotyping black boys!).

   Corporal punishment in British state schools was abolished in 1987, when Arday was two years old. If a teacher struck him, the teacher would have acted unlawfully, and should have been prosecuted.

5. Shortly before turning 16 years old, Arday was struck by a car, his heart stopped for two minutes, he spent several months in a medically induced coma, doctors recommended withdrawing life support, but Arday remained conscious throughout (with locked-in syndrome).

   He awakened “miraculously.” But his ordeal wasn’t over. He spent about a year relearning how to walk and talk.

   This narrative is in the proposal for his autobiography. The proposal that he wrote in 2024. The narrative is not in the forthcoming/unpublished autobiography written from 2025 to 2026.

   Instead, the advance copies describe him at school, completing his examinations, when he was aged 15 to 16.

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6. In his upcoming/unpublished autobiography, Arday claims he was attacked/mugged in his late teens, and developed epilepsy as a result.
   Yet he begged for leniency for all four attackers when they were sentenced.

   Two appeared as students in his lectures years later. One asked him to write references, to which he agreed. They other asked him to be a godfather, to which also he agreed.

   Ghandhi, Arday: they rhyme in all the right ways.

   Who are these righted wronguns? Why aren’t they coming forward to thank their magnanimous benefactor publicly?

   Surely four more contracts for autobiographies are deserved?
   Strange that Arday’s marvelous impact on two delinquents was not matched by his impact on real students, who describe him as a “terrible” and absentee teacher, and were accused of racism and were down-graded when they complained about his teaching .

7. The teenage Arday won so much money in local snooker competitions that his mother suspected that the money might have come from drug dealing. (Wow, even his mother is systemically racist.)

   CueTracker, a snooker-results database, reportedly counts Arday in one amateur competition with no prize money. Perhaps he won alot of money in competitions that did not enter its database. Shouldn’t Arday’s mother corroborate his recollection of her reaction at least?

8. Arday spent “a handful of years” playing for Crystal Palace at under-18 level, he told a podcast in 2021.

   Crystal Palace says that it does not retain records from the relevant period. Arday hasn’t provided any evidence.

9. Arday subsequently played semi-professional football for 12 years, he said in the same podcast.

   Local journalism from 2018 suggests that that Arday was a goalkeeper (the journalism refers to his unfitness due to an injury) for Lewisham Borough in the Southern Counties East Division One, which is near the bottom of the non-league pyramid. It is not “semi-professional.”

10. Arday could have turned professional at both football and snooker!
    In a 2023 interview, Arday reportedly said:

    “It turns out I did quite well, having been a youth player at a professional football club and on the verge of turning professional at snooker.”

    But as you’ve seen already: no evidence for anything but his amateur involvement in football and snooker (see above).

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11. Arday ran 600 miles in six days.

    Running 600 miles in six days would would approach the recognized world record. The current men’s six-day world-best performance is 650.9 miles (1,047.5 km), set by Ivan Zaborski in 2025.

    When questioned by The Guardian, Arday said the 600 miles had taken 12 days, including rest days. Still, averaging 50 miles per day for 12 days would be a rare achievement, for which he has no evidence other than his mouth.

12. Separately, Arday ran 300 miles in three days.

    In 2011, he set up a page on JustGiving prospecting the challenge, for charity. The page suggests that he raised £380 from 21 supporters: that’s 1.27 quid per mile.

    In 2024, he told the Greenbelt Festival he had completed the challenge…on a treadmill.

    There is no other evidence than his mouth for this claim either.

13. Arday ran 30 marathons in 35 days.

    In 2010, Arday announced this plan on JustGiving.
    Eight months later, a local-newspaper reported that he completed his plan on schedule, and raised more than £6,000 for Shelter and the Shooting Star Children’s Hospice (that’s about 200 quid per marathon).
    But Arday has not specified any of the marathons, or provided a results record or a GPS record.
    Simon & Schuster reportedly removed the claim from publicity for his still unpublished autobiography.

14. During the 21st consecutive marathon, Arday suffered an epileptic seizure and fractured his fibula, and his leg swelled to twice its normal size, but nevertheless he completed another nine marathons in less than two weeks.

    Arday said he finished with the aid of painkillers and ice baths.
    Doctors consulted by The Guardian said that running nine marathons with a fractured fibula would be possible but extraordinarily painful.
    No medical documentation has been made public.

15. Arday personally raised for charity £5 million, or, in some accounts, £5.5 million.

    Yet his JustGiving page shows a total of four figures.
    Arday subsequently said the millions had been raised through “many fundraising collectives,” which later became a syndicate of 100 persons, whom he declined to identify, claiming nondisclosure agreements.
    Strange when fund-raising goes secret — so secret it involves nondisclosure agreements.

    The New Nuisance (Bruce Oliver Newsome Ph.D.) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

16. Arday funded his own travel to South America and West Africa to install water points on behalf of WaterAid.
    Arday’s unpublished autobiography reportedly claims that he installed a well in Brazil, but he does not associate that one with WaterAid.

    WaterAid’s published policy makes clear that it does not send volunteers abroad and does not encourage or facilitate self-funded volunteers overseas.

17. Arday claimed to have completed a master’s in psychodynamic practices (yes, that’s a real degree, but isn’t its title suspicious enough?) at Birkbeck College, University of London.

    However, Birkbeck told The Guardian that it had not found records for any student named Jason Arday.

18. Arday claimed that he leveraged the masters degree from Birkbeck to become a fully qualified counselor. He told a podcast that this qualification gave him a “rich understanding of mental health.”
    But he hasn’t provided any evidence for any counseling.

19. Arday claims (in the autobiography) that near the deadline for his doctoral thesis in 2015, he developed blurred vision , and was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor. After the tumor was removed (By whom?! Where?! When?!) he suffered a stroke and memory loss. He relearned his PhD content shortly before his viva.
    Of course, he passed! Hurrah. Because passing a doctorate wouldn’t be heroic enough without a benign brain tumor.
    The brain tumor returned, says the autobiography. Which implies he is living with it, and still functioning as a high-flying academic…Oh wait…

20. Scrutiny of his academic work was part of an organized racial “playbook” deployed against prominent Black academics.

    True, some critics of Arday are opponents of affirmative action or DEI.
    However, academics of color also told The Guardian that concerns about his work are legitimate.

    Further, if scrutiny was just racist, why was the Times Higher Education supplement (as anti-racist as they come) the periodical to prepare an investigatory report, and why were the editors of THE persuaded by Arday’s high-priced defamation lawyers to shelve a report that one of their own journalists had already written?

21. The claims of plagiarism are misrepresentations of trivial omissions of citations and coincidentally similar texts.

    At least two academics published comparisons of more than 100 similar passages in his thesis, dated 2015, and a thesis finished in 2009 at a separate institution. For years, these similarities did not get general attention, until The Daily Telegraph confirmed the same similarities and published them in August 2026, more than 11 years after Arday’s thesis was accepted by Liverpool John Moores University.

22. The claims of methodological misconduct are misrepresentations of clerical or honest errors.

    But The Times found in his doctoral dissertation/thesis impossible demographic totals (110 percent!), reused or misattributed quotations from interviewees, inconsistent samples, funding declarations for funds he never received, and lack of proper approvals through applicable ethics boards.

    The Guardian was told by independent academics that the errors constitute legitimate concerns about academic-integrity, rather than excusable mistakes.

    His errors did not end with his doctorate. Two papers he released in 2018 and 2020 have been corrected.

    Presumably these writings are what the Chair of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge had in mind when she told him “your research is the best in the world.”

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I am delighted that I have been offered a chaired professorship of sociology at the University of Cambridge!

All I had to say in interview was:

1. “Critical Race Theory is my lens,”

2. “I hate white people,” and

3. “I am neurodivergent.”

When I submitted a thesis plagiarized from other theses and AI, the Chair of Education said my “research is the best in the world”!

Boy, do I feel silly about all those years trying to get tenure in political science with rigorous research of practical and policy relevance!

St. Mary’s University has already awarded me an honorary doctorate! (pictured)

That’s not one of the hundreds of universities where I held visiting professorships in the 8 years between my doctorate and joining Cambridge.

Now I am stepping up to Cambridge, the university that is at the very top of all British institutions of higher education (for rates of error in results and/or conclusions in withdrawn papers tracked by Retraction Watch).

Going forward (stop looking backward!), I can look forward to 80 grand per year from the university, about the same from the BBC to make my own documentary about myself (no pesky interviewers!), and UKP 1.4 million from Simon & Schuster for my autobiography (even though I am not even middle aged!).

But I am not doing this for the money or the fame. What I earn pales next to the more-than UKP 5 million I raised for charity — last week alone.

The fact that my JustGiving page shows a total of four figures proves how quickly I spent the other 5 million.

Wait, I didn’t spend 5 million quid on myself! No! I spent it on the Victorian orphans, waifs, and strays I read about in Charles Dickens’ harrowing series of sociological studies of contemporary capitalist Britain. Now, thanks to me, Tiny Tim will live until Christmas 1844.

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I will donate my future earnings to charity — after I have paid the most expensive defamation lawyers in Britain.

They are awesome! They’re the ones who intimidated the editors of the Times Higher Education supplement from publishing an article that one of their own journalists had already written about me.

And my lawyers sent cease-and-desist letters to academics questioning my merit.

Nothing proves academic collegiality like intimidating academics who care about transparency.

Best part is: Cambridge doesn’t expect me to publish or teach ever!

I just need to appear regularly on mainstream media talking about myself.

That leaves me plenty of time to undertake another run of 600 miles in six days — despite a broken leg.

I’ll be running across the Atlantic Ocean to South America, where I will spend the rest of the summer developing drinking water for thousands of people (non-white people, of course).

Then I will running unopposed for local councillor — for the Labour Party of course! I’m not a racist fascist threat to democracy.

I know: I have big shoes to fill. Professor Jason Arday’s shoes. They’re huge. As he says, he has the biggest feet in the world. And you know what that implies!

In his honor, my appointment is to be known as The Chair Formerly Known as Professor Jason Arday’s Chair of Sociology of Education, Imagination, and Narrative Construction.

Having admired the incumbent for the whole of his brief meteoric career (before it turned into a meteorite), I realize that original scholarship, verifiable achievements, and humility have been holding me back.

So I copied him.

Copying is not the same as plagiarism. Anyway, plagiarism is just a white construct. Taking-without-attribution is a culture as valid as any other.

(Except when white people do it: then it’s colonialism.)

The results were immediate. Apparently, imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery: it is now a viable academic career strategy.

I would like to thank everyone whose products, experiences, job titles, and awards I have copied to get here.

But don’t get me wrong, don’t assume that everything I offer is just copied.

No, I am also a creative genius.

I have developed original methodologies, for instance.

1. Research datasets of such completeness that participant demographics sum to 110 percent!

2. Interview quotes that pre-exist the interviews.

3. Findings from data I can’t produce.

4. Funding acknowledgements for grants I never received.

It’s not just methodologies. It’s style as well as substance.

I have developed original variations of English grammar and spelling too. Even the title of my doctoral thesis is grammatically incorrect! Take that, ye conservative standards of common understanding!

And anyway, I was illiterate until after my 18th birthday — under the crushing weight of the racist British educational system.

So if you think about it, my spelling mistakes and incomprehensible grammar should be admired. In fact, they should be qualifications. And Cambridge agrees that they are.

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Policy Exchange’s new report on British policing shows that the principle of “equality before the law” has indeed declined in Britain. The report confirms the two-tier justice that, incredibly, is still being dismissed as a right-wing myth or a few bad apples.

The report makes clear:

What we have found is a situation which cannot be dismissed merely as a series of isolated cases or individual police officers acting with misplaced good intentions. Rather, what we have uncovered is policy-making by Chief Constables which appears to contravene policing’s core requirement to act “without fear or favour.”

Most obviously, Britons are being treated differently by their race.

Racist two-tier policing and justice have been institutionalizing in Britain for more than 30 years.

The murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, and the mix of police incompetence and cover-up that followed, provoked immediate, righteous adjustments.

But adjustment soon turned into over-compensation.

In 1999, Sir William Macpherson concluded his inquiry by rightfully recommending that police and other public bodies should collect observations about racism.

However, two recommendations made British policing over-compensate into anti-white racism.

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First is Macpherson’s labeling of all police (and other public services) as “institutionally racist.”

This label was under-defined and under-proven. Yet it provoked public servants into excessive demonstrative anti-racism.

Positive discrimination of non-whites in recruitment and promotion became routine — and legal. For instance, West Yorkshire restricted or delayed applications from white candidates, while accepting applications year-round from people from “under-represented” backgrounds — citing “positive action” provisions of the Equality Act 2010.

Serving police officers complain that they expect their career to end with any accusation of white racism.

Officers end up privileging the least white party in a dispute.

Second is Macpherson’s recommendation for police to record all incidents where racism is alleged, irrespective of objective evidence.

Thence, Britain’s police QUANGOs recommended the recording of Non-Crime Hate Incidents. All police forces complied.

Some examples of supposedly racist NCHIs on record include a neighbor smoking in a racist manner, chalk drawings on pavement perceived as targeting immigrants, and English flags on lampposts.

But police didn’t stop at recording NCHIs, quietly and unobtrusively, for statistical purposes.

No, police went further, by sending officers to the homes of subjectively accused racists, to warn them against their speech, “to check your thinking,” to strong-arm them into costly anti-racist reprogramming courses (run by the police themselves, conveniently).

The policing of Tweets not streets has become a police habit, despite the nominal decline of NCHIs.

In December last year, the College of Policing recommended to Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood (By the way, why the hell are unelected, unaccountable QUANGO recommending policy to a democratic minister?!) that NCHIs should not be recorded – 12-years after the same organization had recommended they should be recorded.

The College of Policing left a loophole for recording NCHIs. It recommended that officers should adopt a “common sense” approach, recording only the worst cases, for the purposes of intelligence. And under that category they continue to be recorded.

In February this year, London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley urged Londoners to report all hate incidents even when they don’t meet the legal threshold for a crime. That’s the same Commissioner who had announced in October that his force would no longer investigate NCHIs. And where did Sir Mark make this appeal? At a meeting of the British Muslim Trust, a government-funded organization established to monitor only anti-Muslim hate.

But Macpherson’s report is not the only excuse for over-compensatory senior police officers to indulge their authoritarianism and anti-white racism.

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Saudi Arabia is organizing a naval coalition to protect shipping from Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab strait — which begs some questions: What on earth is the EU’s naval coalition in the Red Sea doing? And what on earth is Britain doing with its months-long plan to organize a naval coalition to secure the Strait of Hormuz?

The Saudis are taking on regional maritime security for themselves, with some big regional partners, none of them Western.

The issues that the Saudis are confronting are more serious than the mainstream media cares to report.

The Houthis control Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, and much of its Red Sea coastline. The Houthis announced on 20 July a blockade against Saudi ships, nominally in retaliation for Saudi Arabia’s blockade on Yemen, although the announcement coincides with warnings from Iran, which funds the Houthis, that it would generalize across the region its retaliations against US strikes.

Houthi forces said on 25 July they had struck “sensitive” oil transport sites inside Saudi Arabia, which link to an export hub on the Red Sea.

Now Saudi Arabia is reportedly preparing to attack the Houthis overland, through Yemen. One cannot really expect Western states, burnt by their interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, to put boots on the ground there.

But one might expect them to contribute their impressive naval forces to the security of the surrounding seas.

The Saudi Ministry of Defense said on Thursday that 14 states. including big regional beasts Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt, had issued a joint statement supporting a multinational maritime defence coalition. (The full list of partners is: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Sudan, Djibouti, and Somalia.)

Saudi Arabia has asked the US and European countries to join the coalition.

The EU already leads a naval protection mission, Aspides, in the Red Sea, but the EU has issued no statement on the Saudi proposal.

Meanwhile, Britain leads a nominal coalition ready to re-open the Strait of Hormuz — but only after the war ends — which is a bit of a Catch 22.

For decades, Britain took a leading role within NATO for the security of the waters from Greenland to North-West Europe, and contributed secondarily to freedom of navigation around the Middle East. For 50 years, a British minesweeper was kept on rotation in the Middle East. Just before the US and Israel restarted their punitive strikes on Iran in the Spring of this year, Britain’s government recalled its regional minesweeper for maintenance, without preparing any replacement.

At the end of the second week of war (14 March), Donald Trump called on allies, Britain most of all, to help to re-open the Strait militarily. On Sunday, he and Starmer spoke by telephone. Everybody agreed that the Strait should be reopened, but not how. On Monday, Trump complained to journalists of Starmer’s attitude. On that same Monday (the start of the third week, i.e., 16 March), Starmer called a press conference to reject the US call to re-open the Strait militarily, in favor of a vague diplomatic-humanitarian “collective plan.”

Yet, two days later, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, and Canada indicated they would help to re-open the Strait militarily after all, although not until the war stops.

Within days, more than 30 countries joined that commitment. The British government undertook to host the planning meetings.

The trouble is, the British government committed to defensive operations, and restricts its naval operations to the Mediterranean. Britain’s defensive operations within the Middle East itself are restricted to air operations in allied countries.

The Saudi invitation, the Houthi threat, the Iranian escalations — all give Britain pretexts to change its posture, and venture into the Red Sea, if not the Indian Ocean, to protect international flows.

Re-opening the bottlenecks interdicted by Iran and its proxies is most urgent for Britain, given Britain’s over-exposure to the global price of energy (given its net-zero extremism).

The British government has not yet admitted any Saudi invitation.

The (recently retitled) UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) issued a statement condemning Houthi threats (including the blockade), called on the Houthis to cease escalatory actions, and expressed support for Saudi Arabia and regional partners —but makes no mention of any potential coalition to actually, you know, counter the Houthis — even though re-opening the bottlenecks interdicted by Iran and its proxies is most urgent for Britain

Britain and Saudi Arabia already cooperate (since 2025) in the development of Yemen’s coastguard capabilities against piracy and smuggling, which are dominated by the Houthis.

Britain has also materially supported the Saudi intervention in Yemen since 2015, with arms, training, and intelligence.

Britain’s support for the intervention might surprise many readers.

The UK government has settled in recent years on a pretense that intervention is always bad. We don’t want to repeat prior mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Interventionism sounds too much like imperialism, and foreigners should be allowed to make their own decisions, particularly because they’re much better people than us anyway.

Yet British non-interventionism is hypocritical. The British government doesn’t like when the US or Israel intervenes, but loves when majority-Sunni countries do it.

There are votes in that sort of thing, at least for a Labour Party which has settled on anti-Semitism and Islamocentrism as electoral necessities, but is being challenged to out-bigot the bigots by the Green and Liberal Democrat Parties, and defectors from the Labour Party (most of the so-called independents in Parliament), and even fouler ethno-Islamist parties at the local level, such as Aspire in Tower Hamlets.

EU member states are dominated by the same electoral incentives and dogma.

It doesn’t help that Britain’s navy is so denuded by underfunding that it cannot even defend British waters from Russian incursions.

Thus, you can predict that Britain and the EU (remember they’re not the same thing since Brexit) will continue to thread a needle between nominally supporting Saudi Arabia, without contributing anything materially sufficient to actually restore international flows, lest they are interpreted as supporting a US-Israeli Islamophobic, imperialist war.

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Andy Burnham has good ideas for devolution, but like his good ideas for education and training, Burnham avoids the other good ideas necessary to achieve the good outcomes he promises.

Today, The Times reports that Burnham will reveal on Friday reforms of England’s tax system, including the distribution to regional mayors of a share of national income ta…

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Andy Burnham’s 10-day-old administration has released some policy nuggets that are too easy to dismiss along with its vagaries, contradictions, and woeful unpreparedness.

Don’t get me wrong, Burnham’s administration is doomed to fail — by its bigotry, inexperience, and lack of talent (and, to be fair, the awful legacy that prior administrations have willed to it). Labour will be voted out in 2029 with a vengeance not seen since 1979 or perhaps 1931.

But as a matter of fact, the government’s announcements contain some good ideas with the bad.

Anyone who cares for the long-suffering people of Britain (and thence the long-suffering peoples of the West in general, most of them ruled by progressives whose only sources of ideas are each other), should hope that Britain’s government can succeed — and that other progressives will learn from it.

And if Britain is to succeed, the British government must escalate its good ideas and ditch its bad ideas.

Alas, the Labour Party’s own left-wing, which includes Burnham and most of his woefully under-qualified ministers, is unlikely to permit such constructive filtering. Progressive it might be, constructive it is not. It harks back to the socialist glory days of the 1970s.

Still, let me get to the good ideas. For now, the good ideas concentrate in education, and thence welfare and benefits, and thence devolution. Don’t get me wrong: bad ideas are mixed among them, but let’s filter, in the hope that a future administration will get the focus right.

The good ideas start with an acknowledgement of the problem of the NEETs. (Keir Starmer’s administration too had acknowledged the problem…but then didn’t do anything.) The number of young people (aged 16 to 24 years) not in education, employment or training (NEET) is more than 1 million, according to a release from the Office for National Statistics in May. The government expects it to reach 1.25 million in five years – i.e., one in six young people will be classified as Neets. This seems like an under-estimate.

On Tuesday, the government announced that secondary schools (in England only, for now) will be allowed to teach vocational subjects and skills, such as manufacturing and AI.

This education will be linked to apprenticeships, of which Britain has a long tradition, but which were decimated by Tony Blair’s electorally self-serving ambition to get half of Britons higher education (where they are indoctrinated in progressive politics, at the expense of skills).

On Tuesday, Burnham said: “We’ve had a system built for too long around the university route and it sends a message to some young people that they’re some kind of second-class citizens, and it’s just not right. They need an education system that works for them as well, that offers a path to all young people, that’s balanced between academic and technical.”

I quite agree. Yes, I agree with Burnham on something!

Don’t go misquoting me out of context. I still think Burnham doesn’t have the brains or integrity for the job, and he will be even more calamitous for Britain than was Keir Starmer.

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Remember: I am filtering the good from the bad. That’s what a good policy scientist does. I would say the same to the British government as I am writing here, if it were to ask. Rebalancing education towards the technical is good.

Bear in mind that this rebalance doesn’t need brains or integrity from an old-school socialist such as Mancy Andy. (Actually he’s from Liverpool: I know that. But every policy he offers is framed as if he has already proven it in Manchester.) Andy has a socialist tradition and voter base in favor of technical over academic education. Blair was more progressive than socialist. It’s usually a meaningless distinction, but in education it’s profound.

Helping Burnham to realize the bleeding obvious is that his administration’s new plan is building on previous administratons’ plans. In 2020, a Conservative government introduced T-levels as technical courses alternative to A-Levels in England — courses such as construction, agriculture, and health. Starmer announced earlier in 2026 that V-levels would be an additional vocational option for students from 2027. These options are for students in their final two years of high school, which many students skip. Burnham’s plan expands similar options to students two years younger, i.e., aged about 14 years, who are mandated to stay in school.

Yet allowing schools to teach more useful skills is not the same as ensuring they do it.

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From “looking backwards is harmful” to King Charles III’s woke reconquest plans, this video delivers savage British humor at its finest.

If you’re easily triggered by mockery of woke culture, American stereotypes, sanctuary cities, Redcoats, and frosted cereal breakfasts… you’ve been warned.

Highlights include:

- Why 250 years is “too soon”
- The three-fifths compromise roast
- Prince Harry’s future Kingdom of California
- Why Chicago and San Francisco will welcome the British back
- Rednecks vs. muzzle control
- And much more…

Happy 250th… or should we say, atone for your independence?

Yookay Border Force: putting YOU in the Yookay.

Subscribe for more political satire, commentary, and travel advisories that no government was brave—or foolish—enough to issue.

#America250 #PoliticalSatire #UKBorderForce #FourthOfJuly #BritishHumor #AmericanIndependence #KingCharles #UKPolitics #USPolitics #Satire

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Full transcript and comments page for paid subscribers only:

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Britons are struggling to characterize their new Cabinet, following the arrival of a new Prime Minister on Monday. It’s not as northern or female as Andy Burnham signaled. Most members have certainly changed. Most are not loyalists to Keir Starmer, even less so to Tony Blair. Like Burnham, many hark back to a mythical golden age of socialism in the 1970s. Like him, most are alarmingly deficient in popular mandate, external qualifications, and even political trust for their new responsibilities.

Let’s start with Burnham himself. A man born in Liverpool who pretended to be Mancunian in order to win the Mayoralty of Manchester. He claims to represent the north, but has not lived north or east of Manchester. At best he represents a narrow part of the West-Central England, just north of the Midlands.

Burnham has always looked south, while he talked up the north. Burnham was most newsworthy for agitating for changes in national government, despite sharing a party with Starmer.

As Starmer continued to trip himself up with both feet, Burnham was one of the Labourites who prevailed on ministers to brief against their PM. After Starmer blocked Burnham’s candidacy for an accidental by-election in February, Burnham prevailed on a local MP to resign from Mackerfield, to force a by-election in June, which Burnham won easily, in order to return to Parliament, which would allow him to challenge Starmer for the leadership (less than two years into Starmer’s 5-year term). Starmer initially vowed to fight on, but announced his intent to quit this month. No MP stepped up to challenge Burnham’s presumptive run.

Thus, Burnham has no popular mandate to be PM, even within the party, except in the form of pledges by more Parliamentary partisans in support than against. Opposition parties rightly called for a general election to confirm his premiership, but the constitution does not oblige him.

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Burnham’s supporters pretend that his easy rise proves the strength of his candidacy. In reality, it proves the weakness of his party. It could not find a new leader within its own MPs, despite a whopping majority. It triggered an expensive by-election and a more expensive mayoralty election in order to free up a mayoral candidate. Meanwhile, Burnham unwittingly poured scorn on that same Parliamentary party by criticising normal politics and the London elite. (Since then he has aired the idea of moving the Cabinet from London to Manchester. His current plan is to spend at least one day per work week there. That’s neither efficient nor effective.)

In the many weeks that Burnham enjoyed as rising PM, he remained vague about his Cabinet and his policies.

On Monday, he spent hours appointing just the highest roles in the Cabinet. The other appointments look set to continue for days.

Of the first day’s picks, I must start with the only selectee who can be coded as qualified and mandated (although not loyal).

John Healey becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second most powerful position in government. He had quit as Defence Secretary six weeks ago, over Starmer’s procrastination on filling a hole in defense spending. Healey said that Britain should spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030, which means he will need to find a couple dozen billions of pounds per year. Previously he advocated issuing “war bonds,” but who would buy them, when the government is running record debt? He will need to cut other departments or raise taxes (probably both). On Monday, Healey said “fiscal control” would be his “first duty.” You could see the markets’ confidence decline immediately.

Healey’s resignation suggests a certain loyalty to Burnham, but otherwise they barely know each other. More usefully, he was a minister in the Treasury under Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Yes, Healey is actually qualified by experience! This is remarkable given that his predecessor, Rachel Reeves, falsified her CV, couldn’t add, and quickly became the most U-turn-prone and hated Chancellor ever, as well as the most tearful.

Healey remains constrained by record government debt and his party’s suicidal unwillingness to cut spending. Remember that Starmer increased spending on welfare and benefits, after backbenchers rejected his proposal to cut them. (That was within Starmer’s first year of premiership.)

Burnham is an out-and-proud socialist who had already signalled that his government would spend and tax more. By Tuesday, his administration revealed plans to cut VAT (a sales tax) on electricity, to be funded by cutting the Starmer administration’s planned digital ID. But the minister responsible for that plan, Darren Jones, revealed, after being fired by Burnham, that digital ID was never funded. So Burnham is either ignorant or dishonest. This…doesn’t….bode…well.

In any case, scrapping VAT on electricity doesn’t make much difference to a household electricity bill in which most of the pricing goes to fund green initatives, debt, stealth taxes, and administration.

Burnham already looks unprepared and unreliable.

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Stalin once posited, “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?” Soviet and current Russian leadership stood by this conviction through periods of revolution, war, peace, détente, political collapse, regime change, failed reform, and resets.

The adage holds firm today as the central pith…

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Parental alienation is real, the patriarchy is not.

Yet most Western jurisdictions deny parental alienation, and use family law to fight the patriarchy.

But since the patriarchy doesn’t exist, they persecute decent fathers who just want to access their children.

Believe women, assume the worst about men, is the posture.

Women and children are victims, men are abusers, is the narrative.

(Unless the known abuser is a Pakistani immigrant, then he gets primary custody until he murders the poor girl, in the case of poor Sara Sharif.)

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Britain’s Ministry of Justice refuses to ask its own courts and agencies to estimate false accusations, but admits that almost all the men who answered a survey about family court say they were victims of false accusations. Data from Scottish courts suggest that 70 per cent of accusations are false.

The Child Maintenance Service admits that more than half of applicants for money from the other parent claim to be the victim or the parent of a victim of abuse. The CMS encourages the accusation by waiving the application fee! Here’s another incentive for false accusations: legal aid is automatic for an accuser of abuse.

In court, what-she-says is the evidentiary standard. He isn’t even allowed to speak in some British family courts.

Some courts write up findings and judgments with no basis in proceedings.

No reporters, transcribers, or recordings are allowed. None of the parties is allowed to talk publicly about their case.

Court benches are accountable to nothing but their own consciences.

Statutes grant excessive discretion to courts. Case law is open to manipulation.

Appeals courts usually refuse to interfere in family courts’ discretion.

Just getting to court is ruinously expensive for most fathers, while most of them remain on the hook for most of the costs of the family too, whether or not they can access their children.

Amazingly, British fathers have no statutory rights except as carers.

Even this right, to be a carer, is set up to be secondary. The law specifies the child’s interest in the ‘primary carer’. The primary carer is almost always the mother on the grounds that mothers typically spend more time at home. Maternity leave illustrates the unbalance. Statute provides more time for maternity leave than paternity leave, which makes some practical sense, until it is used years later to justify the relegation of the father’s access.

The inferiority of the secondary carer extends beyond access to the child to access to information about and influence on the child’s education and care. Secondary carers have no rights to information on their child except the child’s medical treatment and schooling. They have no rights no challenge the primary carer’s choices.

This imbalance hardly encourages parents to consult or to co-operate. Mother’s privilege is clear, but father’s access is not. Co-operation depends on her goodwill. She has all the power. Is it any wonder that mothers typically refuse mediation or an out-of-court arrangement?

Ironically, the professionals that are most engaged against the patriarchy are overwhelmingly female: social workers, teachers, local family service providers, educational psychologists, nurses, agents of the Child Maintenance Service and the Children and Family Court Advisory & Support Service, and magistrates.

Second irony: these professionals are most influential in alienating children from fathers AND in denying parental alienation exists.

Parental alienation is real, scientifically, if not legally.

The academic definition of parental alienation involves intentional displays to the child of unjustified negativity aimed at the other parent, to damage the child’s relationship with the other parent. A survey of more than 1,000 estranged parents found that at least 59 per cent have experienced ‘parental alienation’.

An organisation called MatchMothers is campaigning for the legal recognition of this concept, because mothers too can be victims. By contrast, the Survivor Family Network (misrepresenting itself as an All-Party Parliamentary Group, until quietly deleting its internet page), recommends a ban on what it calls ‘parental alienation theory’. This group simply assumes that male abuse is the root cause of relationship breakdown. It has no evidence other than a survey of fewer than 200 of its correspondents, all female.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) refuses to recognise parental alienation. Its agencies, QUANGOs, and courts follow suit.

Thence you get the bizarre hypocrisy where the same agents who deny parental alienation are actively using parental alienation to exclude fathers.

CAFCASS officers are not obliged to talk with fathers. They are obliged to talk to the child’s school, but not to inform both parents. Their confirmation bias is infamous. For instance, one officer went to a daycare location to ask a three-year-old child which parent he preferred. On the third attempt, she got the answer she wanted: mummy. On that basis CAFCASS recommended against the father’s unsupervised contact.

That’s before we get to the outright abuse of evidence. In one breathtaking case, a CAFCASS officer reported that a school had described the father as ‘uninvolved’. The father asked to see the school’s report. The officer refused. The school refused. He filed a Freedom of Information Request, which revealed that the school had reported the opposite. Confronted with the discrepancy, the officer agreed to recuse herself. However, she had been tipped off about the father’s statement, submitted days earlier. She entered a ‘retaliation’ and petitioned for the children to be taken into care, given that the father had said to a teacher, in a parents’ meeting, that he couldn’t wait to get his hands on them at the Easter holiday, meaning he couldn’t wait to see them. The mother encouraged a safeguarding concern; the school passed it to the officer; the officer passed it to the Local Education Authority. To its credit, the court rejected the petition, but it did not hold the officer to account. Nor did CAFCASS. CAFCASS tells me that the officer did nothing wrong.

WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?

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The US effectively re-started its war on Iran on Wednesday.

Shortly after 4 p.m. EDT, CENTCOM, which commands U.S. forces in the Middle East, released the following statement: “At the direction of the Commander in Chief, U.S. Central Command forces have started conducting additional strikes against Iran to further degrade their ability to threaten freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Trump had already publicized that these strikes were coming. During the NATO summit earlier on Wednesday, he said: “I’ll give them a little warning: We’re going to hit them hard tonight, but we’ll see how it all works out.”

Trump says the strikes are “in retribution for yesterday’s bombing of ships by Iran”, and that “if it happens again, it will get much worse.”

Iran’s foreign minister said: “We do not answer vulgarity with vulgarity, but with action: fearlessly and with great valor.”

Trump said that the US-Iran memorandum of understanding to end the conflict of is “over.” That dates from mid-June.

Clearly the ceasefire is over, which has been on and off again since early April. (For the record, I always said it would fail.)

The mutually acknowledged ceasefire dates back to April. The US unilateral ceasefires date back to March. US and Israeli strikes date back to 28 February this year. Note I wrote “this year.” The US and Israel struck Iran in Summer 2025. They have struck Iran before. I am stopping my periodization in Summer 2025 just to exclude other reasons for striking Iran. The strikes since 2025 have been nominally justified as punishment for Iran’s continued illegal development of weapons-grade uranium.

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The proximate provocation for US strikes on Wednesday is the same old Iranian behavior. During a ceasefire that obliges Iran to allow free passage of maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Iran keeps striking ships whose owners have not paid into its protection racket.

On Tuesday, three ships were attacked in the Strait by Iran. CENTCOM struck the launch sites on the same day. On Tuesday Tehran vowed a “crushing response.” On Wednesday Iran said it responded with retaliatory attacks on US military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait in the early hours of Wednesday

Also on Tuesday, the US government revoked the waiver on oil sanctions, which was part of the MOU of mid-June.

On Wednesday, the president said he was considering reimposing the naval blockade, which was lifted in mid-June.

What’s different this time?

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