If Meritocracy Is Sacred, Apply the Fucking Thing Consistently
Something is rotten in how Britain distributes humiliation. Jason Arday faced scrutiny not merely as an academic, but as evidence against people who resembled him.
I cannot get Jason Arday out of my head tonight.
And I am angry.
Not performatively angry. Not social-media angry. Not angry because I need to belong to some political tribe and Jason Arday has suddenly become useful ammunition for my side.
I mean genuinely, privately angry.
Because a man is dead.
A father is dead. A partner is dead. A son is dead. A brother is dead.
And before somebody immediately jumps into my replies with “but plagiarism”, yes, I know.
Investigate the plagiarism.
Investigate every bloody page.
Check every citation. Check every claim. Check the doctorate. Check the appointments. Check the fundraising. Check whether he ran 600 miles or six miles. Check Cambridge. Check Liverpool John Moores. Check Glasgow. Check everybody who signed off on anything.
That is journalism.
What happened around Jason Arday became something else.
And I want to talk particularly about GB News, because I have now gone looking.
I wanted to know whether my discomfort was emotional or whether there was something measurable underneath it.
There is.
I can verify at least nine dedicated GB News news and opinion pages about Jason Arday between 25 July and 14 August alone. Nine. In a matter of weeks. They followed the allegations, his resignation, his book events, his appointment, allegations from a former student and, eventually, his death. Their opinion pages did not merely examine plagiarism.
One presented the affair as evidence that “merit triumphs over race-based social engineering”. Another described Arday as Cambridge’s “DEI superstar academic”.
So I searched GB News for William O’Reilly.
Remember that name.
William O’Reilly.
A Cambridge historian.
A white Cambridge academic whose case involved something remarkably relevant to this conversation.
Cambridge investigated after an undergraduate complained that material from his essays had appeared, without proper credit, in a paper published under O’Reilly’s name. A university tribunal concluded that the inclusion of the material resulted from negligent acts rather than deliberate plagiarism. He remained in his job. Varsity later reported further allegations and described legal threats made as it investigated the affair.
Do you know how many dedicated GB News reports about that plagiarism case I could find?
Zero.
Not nine.
Zero.
Perhaps some forgotten television segment or poorly indexed page exists somewhere. I am not going to manufacture certainty that a search cannot establish. But in searches of GB News’s indexed output, I could verify nine dedicated Arday pieces and no equivalent dedicated O’Reilly plagiarism report.
And this is where my blood starts to boil.
Because I am a journalist.
I believe in scrutiny.
I have spent enough of my life asking unpleasant questions of powerful people to know what happens when “be kind” becomes an excuse for avoiding evidence.
Jason Arday was not entitled to immunity because he was Black.
He was not entitled to lower academic standards because he was autistic.
He was not entitled to have questionable claims accepted because his biography was inspirational.
If he plagiarised, establish it. If he fabricated achievements, establish it. But tell me something. Where was this fucking appetite when William O’Reilly’s student complained? Where were the rolling morality plays about meritocracy? Where were the feverish arguments about whether white professors belong at Cambridge?
Where were the columns asking whether whiteness had corrupted university standards?
Where were the breathless television discussions about whether white academics were being waved through because institutions were dominated by white people?
Of course there weren’t any.
Because William O’Reilly was allowed to be William O’Reilly.
Jason Arday was required to become Black people.
That is the difference that disturbs me.
When a white academic fails, we investigate the academic.
When Jason Arday was accused of failing, suddenly we were investigating diversity.
Suddenly DEI was on trial.
Suddenly Black advancement was on trial.
Suddenly his appointment became evidence that the whole project of trying to make Britain’s elite institutions slightly less overwhelmingly white was somehow fraudulent.
This was not subtle.
GB News literally published an opinion piece headlined around the proposition that the Arday affair demonstrated that “merit triumphs over race-based social engineering”.
Think about what that framing does.
One man’s alleged academic misconduct ceases to be one man’s alleged academic misconduct.
His Blackness becomes causally relevant. His appointment becomes a racial policy experiment. His mistakes become evidence against diversity. His biography becomes a political crime scene. And suddenly everyone gets permission to rummage through the man’s entire existence.
How far did he run?
How much money did he raise? What happened when he was eleven? What happened when he was eighteen? What did he tell this newspaper? What did he tell that university? What did an old student think of him? Was every anecdote exact? Was every triumph real? Was every sentence original? Was this man exactly as extraordinary as everybody had once been told he was?
There is a point where scrutiny becomes consumption. There is a point where accountability becomes entertainment. There is a point where journalism stops asking, “What happened?” and an audience begins chanting, “What else can we find?”
And I recognise that machinery. Every journalist should. Because it is intoxicating.
Once the public has decided somebody is a fraud, every new discrepancy becomes a hit of dopamine. Every new allegation validates the last. The subject stops being a human being and becomes a series.
Episode one. Episode two.
Another revelation. Another panel. Another columnist. Another humiliation. Another day. Another fucking headline. And somewhere inside all of that was a man.
Jason Arday said something shortly before his death that I find difficult to shake.
“We’re talking about academia here. I didn’t murder somebody.”
The police have not said that his death was suspicious. I will not speculate about how he died, and neither should anyone else.
His family has said that the campaign against him became too much. That is their assessment, made in grief. It deserves respect without being converted into a conclusion that none of us is presently entitled to make.
But we are entitled to look at ourselves.
And I think we bloody well should.
Because even before Jason Arday died, something about this felt disproportionate. The Guardian has noted that when William O’Reilly’s plagiarism affair emerged in 2023, press attention amounted to barely half a dozen articles.
Barely half a dozen across the press. Compare that with what happened to Jason Arday.
Then ask why.
Not because asking the question proves racism.
It doesn’t.
Statistics do not climb out of a spreadsheet and announce motive. But journalism begins precisely where disparities demand explanation.
Why did this Black professor become culturally fascinating?
Why was his misconduct potentially evidence about DEI when O’Reilly’s misconduct was not evidence about white professors?
Why did one case invite a discussion about an individual and another invite a discussion about an entire philosophy of racial equality?
Why does the adjective “Black” suddenly become indispensable when discussing the credibility of the accused?
That is what I mean when I say racialised coverage.
And GB News should answer for its editorial choices. Not because it investigated Jason Arday. It had every right to. Not because it criticised him. It had every right to. But because once you repeatedly connect the alleged failures of one Black academic to “race-based social engineering”, you are no longer merely reporting an academic-integrity controversy.
You are constructing an argument about race.
Own it. And then explain the control group. Show me your William O’Reilly coverage. Show me the programmes. Show me the headlines. Show me the opinion columns declaring that his case demonstrated the bankruptcy of a system dominated for centuries by white academics.
Show me where his race became a theory explaining his appointment.
You cannot demand that Jason Arday answer for DEI while allowing William O’Reilly to answer only for William O’Reilly.
That isn’t meritocracy. That is a double standard wearing meritocracy’s tie. And Cambridge does not escape this either.
In some ways Cambridge makes me angrier. Because Cambridge loved the symbolism when the symbolism was useful. Youngest Black professor. Thirty-seven years old. Autistic. A remarkable journey. Look at Cambridge. Look how modern Cambridge has become. Look who can walk through these ancient doors now.
Universities know exactly what they are doing when they market human beings like that.
They take someone’s race, disability, history and struggle and convert those things into institutional capital. Then the difficult questions arrive. And suddenly the symbol belongs to himself again.
No.
You don’t get to do that.
If Cambridge appointed Jason Arday after rigorous examination of his scholarship, it should demonstrate that.
If Cambridge failed to examine him properly because administrators fell in love with an extraordinary diversity narrative, that is not an argument against Black professors.
It is an indictment of Cambridge. Because tokenism is not equality.
Putting a Black man on a pedestal because he makes the institution look virtuous, while failing to give him the same rigorous assessment, institutional support and protection you would give anyone else, is not progress.
It is another way of using him. And this is what makes me desperately sad about the whole bloody thing. Everybody found a use for Jason Arday. Cambridge could use him as evidence of progress. The anti-DEI right could use him as evidence that progress was fraudulent. Newspapers could use him as a spectacular fall-from-grace story. Commentators could use him to argue about race. Academics could use him to argue about standards. People who had never read a page of sociology suddenly acquired extraordinarily passionate opinions about academic citation.
Everyone got something. And now Jason Arday is dead.
His family gets the silence afterwards. That fucking haunts me. Because there is something profoundly indecent about watching a human being disappear beneath everybody else’s argument about what he represents.
Maybe Jason Arday made serious mistakes. Maybe some allegations against him would ultimately have been proven. Maybe Cambridge failed spectacularly. Those questions do not disappear because he died. But neither does proportionality. Neither does humanity. Neither does the obligation to ask whether we would have behaved the same way if his name had been William and his face had been white.
I cannot prove what was inside the mind of every editor, producer or columnist who pursued Jason Arday.
I am not going to call every journalist who reported this story a racist. That would be intellectually cheap and journalistically dishonest.
But I can look at the pattern.
I can look at nine pieces I can verify from one broadcaster about Arday, against no dedicated GB News plagiarism report I could verify about O’Reilly.
I can look at an opinion headline turning Arday into evidence against “race-based social engineering”.
I can look at a Black professor’s alleged failures being transformed into an ideological case against diversity.
And I can say this.
Something is rotten in the way we distribute humiliation.
If your principles really are about academic integrity, your fury should not know the colour of the professor.
If plagiarism is intolerable, make it intolerable when William does it.
If Cambridge’s standards matter, make them matter when the accused man is white.
If meritocracy is sacred, apply the fucking thing consistently.
Do not tell Black people that they will be judged as individuals and then, at the first scandal, put their entire race in the dock.
Jason Arday did not have to be perfect to deserve that basic fairness.
He did not have to be a hero, did not have to be Cambridge’s diversity miracle, he did not have to carry every Black academic on his shoulders. He was allowed to be complicated. He was allowed to have flaws. He was allowed to face serious questions. And he was entitled to face those questions as Jason Arday.
Not as Exhibit A in the case against Black achievement.
Tonight I keep returning to one thought. Maybe the most dehumanising thing we did to Jason Arday was not criticising him. It was refusing to let him be only one man. Cambridge made him a symbol when it suited Cambridge. The culture warriors made him a symbol when it suited them. The media discovered that the symbol generated traffic.
And now, after all those arguments about what Jason Arday supposedly proved, there is one terrible fact that proves absolutely nothing about DEI, meritocracy, race or academic standards.
A 41-year-old man is dead.
And perhaps, before everybody rushes to make him useful one last fucking time, we might finally allow Jason Arday to belong to himself.
