The Case against Jason Arday

By Simon Elmer:

 

Jason Arday wasn’t a fantasist or serial liar, as he’s been depicted in the media. He wasn’t a poster boy for the woke-Left or an unfairly hounded victim of the far-Right. Jason Arday was a criminal, and he chose suicide rather than face the consequences of his crimes. 

In the UK, fraud is formally prosecuted under the Fraud Act 2006. This defines fraud as false representation, which means lying or misleading someone intentionally; as failure to disclose information you have a legal duty to share; or as abuse of a position of trust. A person is guilty of fraud if he knowingly commits the above offences in order to make a gain for himself or another, or to cause loss to another or expose them to the risk of loss. The gain or loss may be money or other property, including intellectual property. A person guilty of fraud is liable, on conviction, to imprisonment for up to 10 years, or to a fine, or to both. Criminal prosecutions for fraud are handled by the Crown Prosecution Service. Civil actions are pursued by victims to recover lost money. 

Jason Arday was guilty of committing all three categories of fraud; but whom did he defraud, and of what? 

The first group of people defrauded by Jason Arday are the British taxpayers who funded the various grants he was awarded to gain his degrees at Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral level. None of his degrees should have been awarded, and he never should have received the funding to undertake them. So the British taxpayer has been defrauded of money that should have gone to a genuine student or students producing work of benefit to our society, not Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) propaganda about decolonising the very academic institutions he was defrauding. 

To be sure, Jason Arday himself wasn’t responsible alone for this fraud, and the various academics who oversaw his theses and the boards that awarded him the degrees are also guilty of fraud, and should be investigated and, if found guilty of complicity to defraud the British taxpayer, compelled to refund the cost of the funding. 

The second group of people defrauded by Jason Arday are the academics who were not awarded the positions in academia he was granted. Following the awarding of his fraudulent academic credentials, Arday was appointed to a bewildering succession of positions, including, in 2018, a senior lectureship at the University of Roehampton before he had published a single academic paper; an associate professorship, two years later, at the University of Durham; a professorship, in 2020, at the University of Glasgow; and, finally, a year later, in 2023, a professorship at the University of Cambridge. 

In a mere five years, therefore, Jason Arday went from an unpublished student to a Professor earning in excess of £100,000/per year at one of the highest ranked universities in the world. These positions, and the financial rewards and career benefits they brought Arday, should all have gone to academics with real degrees, who had conducted real research and written real books that made significant and — given the seniority and prestige of these posts — important contributions to the field of sociology ranking with the best sociologists in the world. 

The third group of people defrauded by Jason Arday were the scholars whose dissertations, articles and books he plagiarised in his own, fraudulent academic work. It is sometimes hard for non-academics to understand the seriousness of plagiarism, particularly in an academic context. It means, first of all, that the plagiarist is a liar and unworthy of trust, and should never be allowed anywhere near an educational or pedagogical context in which they have authority over children, as Jason Arday was. But in more legal terms, plagiarism is theft. 

Academics have one form of capital, and it isn’t money. It is their intellectual property. Research, for an academic, is grabbed in the evenings they don’t spend with their wives or friends and the weekends of a professional life otherwise taken up by teaching, marking, and the growing administrative burden of the modern academic in Britain. Actually publishing an article or book typically requires the awarding of a grant sufficient to pay for their sabbatical from such work. When Jason Arday stole their work, he not only stole their ideas, he also stole that grant, he stole those weekends, he stole those evenings. And by publishing their work as his own, he also stole the publishing opportunities and consequent career advancements denied to the plagiarised academics in favour of his fraudulent research. 

Again, Jason Arday himself wasn’t only responsible for this fraud, and the editors and other people responsible for overseeing the integrity of academic and other scholarship are complicit in his defrauding of these plagiarised scholars. 

The fourth group of people defrauded by Jason Arday were the scholars who were not awarded the publishing contracts for books that were passed over for the rubbish that Arday published. These included such risible titles as Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy, an example of the sort of overt racism given academic credence by woke that was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018; Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain: Uncorking the Champagne Supernova, which is the sort of thing a hack like Owen Jones might write but is not consistent with a Professor of Sociology at Durham University, that was published by Routledge in 2020; We See Things They’ll Never See: Love, Hope and Neurodiversity, a sort of self-help book through pop songs published by Princeton University Press in 2025; and his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, which was published this year by Simon & Schuster, and which, again, is not the academic work expected and required of such a senior academic in such a prestigious institution. 

Again, Arday was not alone in defrauding genuine academics out of the book deals they were passed over for this tripe, and it’s indicative of the commercialisation of academia in the UK that academic positions are now awarded not on the academic worth of the candidate’s research but on the book sales of fluff like this that is paid for and promoted by publishers more interested in a woke readership than in academic rigour. 

To be awarded a professorship in sociology at the University of Cambridge an academic would once have to be producing studies of the calibre of works by Pierre Bourdieu, Jürgen Habermas or Richard Sennett, not the sort of self-help books for woke customers you find in an airport bookshop. However, under the infiltration and now colonisation of the UK’s education and culture industries by the ideology of woke, that’s fundamentally changed. Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge and Princeton University Press are all academic publishers, and publication of books by them therefore counts towards the respective university’s Research Excellence Framework rating, even if what they publish is the kind of rubbish Jason Arday wrote. Since universities have been subject, for some time now, to such numerical ratings, they employ academics like Arday who have publishing contracts with academic publishers to push up their ratings. And the academic publishers chose authors who write popular books, rather than academically rigorous ones, that will sell well. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of cretinisation by commercialisation for which the students, other academics and the general public pays.

The fifth group of people defrauded by Jason Arday, and those with by far the most cause for grievance against him, are his students. In the time he occupied these elevated academic positions, Arday would have taught, or occupied the position of teaching, thousands of students. They or their parents will have paid thousands of pounds each, up front or in the student debts they have taken on, to be taught by someone unqualified to do so. Not only have they been defrauded out of their money, they have also been defrauded out of the education they paid for. For the rest of their lives, there will be a question, not least in their own head, of the value of the degree they were awarded studying under this fraud. If they themselves go on to be academics, their every job interview will have the shadow of his fraud hanging over them. 

Reports have now come out that numerous students did, indeed, complain about the lack of teaching they received from Jason Arday, and they were greeted with the same response that investigative journalists received when they researched the actual qualifications and academic and other claimed achievements of this fraud — that is, they were accused of racism. I sincerely hope that every student taught by Jason Arday pursues claims for the return of their fees and compensation for the loss of the education against every university at which he taught them; and I hope that these are sufficiently ruinous to bring these institutions down as a warning to other UK universities of the costs of being complicit in this fraud. 

Once again, charges should be brought against not only the universities whose purpose is to foster and oversee academic excellence and not the enforcement of EDI policies of racial discrimination against White people, but also against the specific academics who created Jason Arday. That includes the thesis supervisors and examiners who passed his racist drivel, the heads of departments and schools who hired him, the board members of the EDI committees who promoted him, and all the other sycophants who celebrated his fraud. 

And, finally, the sixth group of people defrauded by Jason Arday is the British people. Arday sat on numerous charities, boards, committees and other EDI institutions not only funded by the British taxpayer but devoted to the erasure of British culture, the rewriting of British history, the denigration of the British people and, ultimately, to the demographic replacement of the British people in our homeland. To this end, Arday was awarded numerous honorary doctorates, fellowships and academic awards and given a correspondingly wide public platform to spread his message of hate and racial discrimination against White people. 

Given the infiltration and indoctrination of every UK institution — of which the department of sociology at Jesus College, Cambridge University, is only one example among thousands, and which includes our schools, councils, cultural and sporting institutions, media, police forces, law courts and parliament — it is highly unlikely that Jason Arday would have faced the prosecution and punishment he deserved. The UK’s law courts have repeatedly made it clear that, if you’re Black, you can rape a White woman or stab a White man and received desultory and minimal sentences far lower than the White people who protest the rape or killing, and Jason Arday would have been treated no differently. It was the reporter who tried to investigate his fraud that was the object of a police investigation rather than Arday, and he would, at worst, have been sufficiently publicly disgraced that he couldn’t hold an academic post for a year or two before being awarded an even more lucrative and prestigious post at some US university devoted to the advancement of ‘scholars of colour’. 

I am not happy that Jason Arday took his own life. I wanted to him to face the full force of the law under UK legislation, and for him and those who aided and abetted his fraud to pay the costs in fines, prison sentences and institutional bankruptcy. I would also hope that his example would force a review of and purging from British public life of EDI criteria, which have never been written into any UK legislation but which have been unilaterally enforced on the British people by every institution, business and employer in the UK. 

Arday is only one of tens of thousands of EDI hires who occupy senior positions in the public life of Britain who are also frauds, and who are committing the crime of fraud against the British people they have artificially and fraudulently been given authority over according to EDI criteria. In George Abaraonye, the former President of Oxford University Union who celebrated the murder of the White Christian political commentator, Charlie Kirk, Oxford University has its very own Jason Arday. In David Lammy, who claims to have a law degree from Harvard University and who, as our former Secretary of State for Justice, removed jury trials in the UK, the Government has its own Jason Arday. There are many, many more frauds in positions of authority. That’s why Arday’s case is so significant, because it’s a microcosm of the UK and its colonisation by the ideology of woke.

As I said, I very much doubt that any due process, legal or otherwise, would have been implemented in what the UK has become today; but now, with Arday’s suicide, any attempt to do so will be met from the woke-Left as a ‘desecration of his name’, etc. Indeed, as the Left habitually does with Black criminals — Chris Kaba being the most egregious example in the UK — he is already being transformed from a criminal into a martyr, with Stand Up to Racism organising a vigil in Trafalgar Square this week.

Jason Arday’s final crime, therefore, was committed against White people, in Britain and across Europe and the West, who will continue to be subjected, after his death, to the unrelenting attacks on our race, our culture, our history, our identity, our values and our continued existence to which the fraudulent life of this Black criminal was dedicated.

 

Simon Elmer is a former academic and lecturer with a B.A., M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of London. He taught at universities in the UK and USA for ten years and has published a dozen books. His most recent book is The Great Replacement and the Islamisation of Britain.