Holibobs

See you no earlier than Saturday evening.

Propriety and Constitution

“Race realism” ought to be as unacceptable as sex nonrealism, and vice versa. But having appointed Nathan Cofnas in the full knowledge of his published views, and therefore inescapably because of them, Cambridge never sacked him. Rather, at the end of his Fellowship, it merely declined to invite him to keep up an informal, unpaid relationship. As long as someone had been paying, then it had had no objection to his view that while it would not be hybridisation for a German Shepherd to breed with a Pekingese, it would be for a German shepherd to breed with a Beijinger. Yet he was still so bitter that he set out to avenge himself, and in so doing to launch a “revolution” to remove black people from academia. Seconds after the death of Jason Arday, by means that many of those bewailing it would make lawful to assist, Cofnas gave an interview saying so. This alien held a United Kingdom visa, and probably still does. Keep all of that in mind as you read Professor David Runciman:

Oceans of virtual ink have been spilled about the case of Jason Arday because it was the right story at the right time to grab the maximum attention. It happened in high summer, when apart from the interminable heat there wasn’t much else going on. It unfolded in stages, which kept people interested: first the accusations of plagiarism, then the piece-by-piece unravelling of Arday’s life story in the run-up to the publication of his now absurd-seeming memoir.

Above all, though, this was Cambridge. Had Arday been exposed while still a professor at Glasgow University it would have caused a fuss, but nothing on this scale. The contrast between the augustness of the institution and the very contemporary dynamics of Arday’s downfall is what gives the tale its piquancy.

Race, class, snobbery, wokery – somehow they’re all thrown into sharper relief when the setting is that cloistered little world of ancient colleges and elite reputations, some of them now in tatters.

But what is really going on here is that the story of an apparent fantasist is being played out through the fantasies people have about Cambridge. That place doesn’t really exist any more. When news outlets want a generic picture of the university to illustrate their tales of collapsing standards, they usually pick King’s College Chapel or the Senate House – suitably imposing edifices to juxtapose with the squalid goings-on being exposed.

But those buildings are no more representative of the university these days than Arday was. A more accurate image would show one of the gleaming new campuses a little way out from the centre of town where the money and power increasingly reside: either the West Cambridge site, on which the new science and tech departments are housed, or the Biomedical Campus to the south of the city, where the university’s hospitals and research centres exist alongside the headquarters of AstraZeneca and, soon, a £400m R&D centre for GlaxoSmithKline, which is relocating from Stevenage.

Then there are the science parks incubating would-be world-beating start-ups clustered to the north of town. These places have shiny new railway stations – Cambridge North and, more recently, Cambridge South, which opened in June. They have lavishly funded new buildings, including the £58m Whittle Laboratory, which opened in July. This is where the action is.

Arday was professor of the sociology of education and a fellow of Jesus College. Those grand titles sound like they tick all the important boxes for status and significance. But that’s another illusion. People who work in Cambridge sometimes joke there are now three universities: science and tech to the north and west, biomedicine to the south and the old parts left in the middle.

This is “heritage” Cambridge, the bit tourists come to see. It contains most of the colleges and most of the social science and humanities departments. It’s not exactly a Potemkin university since a lot of very hard work still goes on behind the facade. But it can feel like it is primarily for show while the real business is being conducted somewhere else.

One prompt for the outrage about Arday’s appointment to a professorship is that the university seemed to treat it – and him – as window dressing, a way of parading its progressive credentials before the world. Self-evidently something went badly wrong in how this happened. But no one should conclude that it’s only at the woke edges that this sort of preoccupation with appearances is at play. After all, King’s College Chapel is now window dressing too.

I worked at Cambridge for nearly 30 years, ending up as a professor and head of the politics department. The university is organised into different schools, and politics is in the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences, alongside other subjects including sociology and education. We would meet regularly to talk about the pressures we were under and the need to defend our disciplines. Occasionally, though, we would be joined by senior figures from other parts of the university – science, medicine, engineering – when wider issues were at stake, usually involving money.

I can still recall how baffled these people sometimes seemed not simply by our preoccupations but even by what it was we actually did. They were polite but unavoidably patronising. We were heritage Cambridge, useful for how the world saw us, but hard to take seriously on our own terms. When CP Snow wrote about the “Two Cultures” – initially in the New Statesman – at the end of the 1950s his complaint was that the arts and humanities people were so sure of their own importance that they hadn’t bothered to acquaint themselves with even the rudiments of scientific knowledge. He had no doubts about who was patronising whom. That is not the problem now. Academics in the social sciences and humanities can feel so unsure of their importance that they end up doing whatever they can to attract attention.

Even if it is sometimes short of cash, Cambridge is not short of wealth – partly thanks to the endowments of some of the colleges, and partly because of the money flowing in to the sciences. Its humanities departments are not subject to the sorts of pressures they might face elsewhere. There is no talk of mass redundancies or of closing down entire disciplines. Nevertheless, one way to get attention is to raise more money, especially for new professorships. Often, this money arrives before anyone has decided what the new professorships are for. Arday’s position was one of scores of new ones that have been created to generate a sense of purpose. It can seem incredible that tougher questions weren’t asked at the time of his appointment and they certainly should have been. Yet there are now so many panels frantically trying to fill so many of these roles that it can be hard to find enough qualified people to sit on them.

The prevailing idea seems to be that a Cambridge professorship is sufficiently important that everyone involved should have given it their fullest attention, to the extent of checking all the further particulars. I’m afraid that’s another fantasy. Overworked people take shortcuts in Cambridge as they do everywhere else. And they prioritise what is important to them, which doesn’t always mean putting a premium on academic rigour.

When I ran the politics department I once called a meeting to remind my colleagues that because we studied politics we should be careful not to allow our own political views to become too visible if we wanted to be taken seriously. An academic discipline needs to be dispassionate, I suggested. The pushback was overwhelming, particularly from younger members of staff. Why, they wanted to know, should we do these poorly paid and frequently stressful jobs if we don’t get to use them to promote the things we think really matter?

I was conscious of how old-fashioned I sounded in trying to warn them against the dangers of grandstanding. I was also very aware that their need for ancillary compensations was driven by a real sense of hardship. A lot of the grunt work of teaching undergraduates in Cambridge is done by junior academics on short-term contracts with precarious career prospects. Meanwhile, the professors, especially the ones who have been tempted in on favourable terms to newly endowed chairs, often get off lightly. It is an increasingly unfair system, which is one way to ensure that it will be shot through with politics from top to bottom.

Professor Arday also seems to have neglected his teaching obligations, though in his case this may have been driven more by a sense of futility than of privilege. Some of his students claim they didn’t need supervising, which is hardly surprising from someone who must have known he had very little to teach them in academic terms. There are many extremely diligent and hard-working professors. Nonetheless, seen from the lower rungs of the pyramid, Arday is not the only one who looks like he was there just for show. And yet the lower rungs still get filled.

The fact is that it is not only onlookers who allow their fantasies about Cambridge to get the better of them. Whenever one of these poorly paid and precarious jobs gets advertised there are hundreds of applicants, most of whom believe it can’t be as bad as it appears from the outside once you get on the inside. In reality, it’s often worse.

My wife used to be a psychotherapist in Cambridge and she had a lot of stressed and miserable young academics as clients. She’s always remembered a line from one of them. “My mum loves telling everyone I’m a Cambridge don. But I’m the poor sod who has to do it.”

The use of Cambridge academic life for purposes other than purely academic ones does not only happen on the progressive side of the political divide. This is not simply a tale about wokery. Some right-wing commentators have linked the Arday scandal to an earlier example of left-wing bias getting in the way of intellectual standards when Jordan Peterson had a visiting fellowship to Cambridge rescinded in 2019 following a staff and student backlash. But what was someone like Peterson being brought to Cambridge for except as a way of generating attention?

It’s not as if he lacks a platform for anyone who wants to know his views on pretty much any subject under the sun. The academic who invited Peterson was James Orr, who works in the Faculty of Divinity. He is also, as of this spring, Reform’s head of policy. Orr is perhaps best known for his intellectual friendship with JD Vance and for the private chapel he has built in the grounds of his house outside Cambridge where he hosts like-minded thinkers for reflection and prayer. The chapel is constructed out of an old shipping container.

Cambridge has always had its secret right-wing cabals and networks, just as it’s always had its spies. But the point about them was that they used to be secret. The dons were sure enough of themselves that they played their political games in their cloistered rooms, confident that the corridors of power extended into Cambridge colleges. Not any more. So much of it now is just for show.

Arday’s case is egregious on many levels. Perhaps the worst of it is the university’s original response to allegations of plagiarism, which it immediately denounced as a witch hunt. It is one thing to fail to spot evidence of academic misconduct, but it is something else entirely to fail to acknowledge it when it is pointed out to you. Still, though, this sorry tale is symptomatic of a wider university culture in which so many people fear for their futures and are uncertain of what their purpose is.

Anyone who thinks Cambridge should be immune from this by dint of its prestige and privilege is missing the point. So much of the prestige and privilege of Cambridge is now bound up in leveraging the university’s – and the town’s – advantages in tech and scientific research. Social science and humanities academics can argue as much as they like about how important their subjects are for critical thinking and human flourishing – but as the new technology marches on, it gets harder and harder to feel confident that these arguments will win out.

AI is helping scientists capture Nobel prizes and helping mathematicians solve puzzles that seemed beyond human reach. What is it doing for people who read and write books for a living except to make them worry whether they can trust anything that matters again, including the essays being written by their students? Grandstanding can sometimes feel like it’s all that’s left. The joke used to be that academic politics are so poisonous because the stakes are so low. Now, it’s more like the politics are so performative because the real stakes are being played out somewhere else entirely.

Peter Oborne is in the same position, so I am not suggesting a hard and fast rule, but it cannot escape remark that James Orr and Edward Dutton were both married to clergywomen. And while Reform UK had given responsibility for potential Honourable Members to Councillor Jaymey McIvor of the notoriously dishonourable member, what policies are being formulated by the saintly Dr Orr? After transporting convicts to El Salvador, imprisoning the executives of Vodafone (would they be transported to El Salvador?), and what could only be described as invading France, we have the abolition of Personal Independence Payment, the nature and purpose of which Robert Jenrick cannot begin to understand despite his having been in government when it was created, and the abolition of the health element of Universal Credit, which has already been halved for new claimants, people who, unlike those who were on PIP alone, are by definition too ill to work. That was the “compromise” that was despicably accepted by Labour MPs.

Nothing involving Jenrick should be taken seriously, and no one who talked about “suicidal empathy” should be allowed beyond the Lower Sixth, although there would be a lot of suicides if this empathy-free programme were ever implemented. There is no such condition as “mild depression” or “mild anxiety”. The paperwork lists every condition that you have, but that does not mean that the award is for, say, tennis elbow; indeed, PIP is not awarded for specific medical conditions at all, but for how they affected your life. Of course people who were awarded PIP years ago are still on it. Their legs have not grown back, have they? A business with more than five employees would have to take out an insurance policy to pay for any of them who were off sick for the first two years. A policy from whom? And people who would previously have had PIP or the UC health element would have to convince the council or the mayor that they had “verifiable additional costs” that those latter-day Poor Law Guardians would decide how to meet. On both counts, Blairism lives even after Keir Starmer. As Albert Toth writes:

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been accused of an “assault on disabled people” by a charity chief after travel support he had received for 15 years was abruptly removed.

Kamran Mallick, chief executive of Disability Rights UK, said some of the funding he received through the department’s Access to Work scheme was pulled following a phone call in July.

Under the scheme, people with limiting health conditions can apply for a grant to fund practical support with their work, as well as manage their mental health.

It is designed to cover costs that employers are not expected to such as specialist equipment, support workers, travelling expenses and adaptations in the workplace.

But disability campaigners have warned that issues with Access to Work have seen applicants waiting longer for support, while existing recipients are increasingly having it stripped back or pulled altogether.

A report from the National Audit Office (NAO) in February found that processing times for the scheme rose from 28 days in 2020/21 to 109 days in November 2025, with fears this rise has continued.

Mr Mallick, 53, has been unable to walk since the age of three after contracting polio. He uses a wheelchair and has worked for disability rights campaign groups through several treatments and injuries.

His Access to Work enabled him to fund taxi journeys to and from his workplace alongside a support worker for 20 hours a week. He claims that the DWP told him that this support worker should instead also take on a role as his driver, a proposal Mr Mallick said is “not realistic”.

“I am left to absorb the cost of something entirely outside my control,” Mr Mallick writes.

“Driving and providing personal support are two distinct skill sets, and finding someone local enough, qualified enough, and willing to commit to a 20-hour role that also requires full-week availability is not realistic,” he added.

The issues have coincided with a rise in applications for the scheme, increasing from 76,100 in 2018/19 to 157,000 in 2024/25.

Over the same time period, spending on the programme has increased by 40 per cent, from £129 million to £320 million.

Despite reports of cutbacks, ministers have insisted that no changes have been made to the Access to Work policy. But campaigners say that pressure on the system means decision makers are reducing the generosity and length of the crucial support.

Around 66,000 Access to Work applications were waiting to be processed in March, according to a recent report from the Work & Pensions Committee.

Mr Mallick said: “It is infuriating to hear ministers insist on the importance of disabled people working, while the very support that makes that possible is quietly stripped away.

“What I went through ... is not an isolated glitch. It's part of a pattern that the evidence now shows clearly. A change in government has only accelerated these changes in the AtW scheme.”

The government has placed an emphasis on enabling more disabled people to work through initiatives such as Right to Try, which allows claimants to move into employment without the risk of immediately losing their benefits.

Last year, ministers were forced to row back on proposals to cut the Personal Independence Payment – Britain’s most-claimed health-related benefit – with disability minister Stephen Timms instead launching a review into the payment.

He is set to report his findings in the autumn, when it is expected that the new government will lay out further plans to change the welfare system.

A DWP spokesperson said: “We are sorry to hear about Mr Mallick’s negative experience and will consider his reconsideration request in due course.

“Access to Work is a lifeline, helping disabled people and people with health conditions to start and stay in work, but demand for the scheme has grown significantly in recent years. That’s why we’re working with disabled people and their organisations to improve it.

“No changes have been made to Access to Work policy, and we will announce any future changes prior to them being implemented.”

There are only 712,000 active job vacancies in the United Kingdom, the lowest in five years, and in any case PIP is an in-work benefit, paid to one in five people of working age in Clacton, where the absence of arrests in relation to Nigel Farage’s finances, while intended to avoid influencing the by-election, has in fact had exactly that effect. Farage has clearly lied about Essex Police, so might that be another count of misconduct to add to his running total? Fraser Nelson has the numbers: every Reform MP has a majority smaller than the number of constituents on PIP, while its top 20 target seats all have more PIP claimants than the majority over Reform in 2024.

In such areas and numerous others, including the entire North East based on the recent A-level results, the third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in primary schools are to identify potential future NEETs so that the third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in secondary schools could either pack them off to be sexually assaulted from the age of 16 in the tender care of the sacrosanct Ministry of Defence, or funnel them into a curriculum determined by “local employers” such as vape shops, phone shops, nail bars, carwashes, mini-marts, Turkish barbers, and American candy stores.

Not that all such establishments are necessarily questionable. Were all scrapyards, back in the day? The recent death of Eddie Richardson is a reminder that there has always been organised crime, including with extreme violence and not least involving drugs, and that it has always laundered money through certain types of business. The real objection to the ones that Andy Burnham was singling out is that the decline of the high street has brought them from the back street to the front street. As with the proposal to disperse asylum-seekers to the suburbs and the shires, the problem is that the emporia were now, as the migrants would be, visible to well-bred eyes. But even if they were not, then it would be another matter to want them to set the school curriculum in their localities. Even for the less academic, will the curriculum at Eton be set by the vape shops in Slough?

In the midst of all of this, France has shown the way by striking down the ban on social media for under-15s, even if one does understand the concern of the Macrons as they considered what their lives would have been like if there had been smartphones in the 1990s. The experiment in Australia has also failed. Should Britain learn the lessons, then those confined to their lane would still have at least some access to the deeper life of the wider world. Such advancement has already made it so much easier for Catholic teenagers to learn the Faith even while their schools taught nothing more than kindness to fluffy bunny rabbits, and taught it by having them colour in pictures of fluffy bunny rabbits all the way up to the age of 16.

Alongside the growing number of missionaries, especially from Africa, it is from that and from rather similar adult conversions that there springs the rising generation of priests. Last year, when Starmer advertised for a Director General of Propriety and Constitution, to oversee Standards and Ethics, then there were no applicants. Burnham is readvertising the position. If he meant what he said about the continuing importance of his Catholic background, then one of those priests would be appointed.

Sweet Caroline?

Richard Littlejohn compares Nigel Farage to Clacton’s previous claim to fame, Radio Caroline. For all its alleged left-wingery, and its ability to annoy the forces of conservatism no end, British Boomer rock’n’roll was made up of common or garden proto-Thatcherites, often tax exiles. The only notable exceptions were David Bowie and Eric Clapton, way out on the Far Right, at least performatively in Bowie’s case.

The Sixties Swingers hated with a burning passion the Labour Government of 1964 to 1970. The pirate radio stations were their revolt against its and the BBC’s deal with the Musicians’ Union to protect the livelihoods of that union’s members. Hence the Marine Offences Act 1967, which outlawed broadcasting from a boat off the British mainland. The Minister responsible was Tony Benn. Of course.

Behind this union-busting criminality was Oliver Smedley, who was later to be a key figure behind the Institute of Economic Affairs, an engine room of Thatcherism. Viewers of The Boat That Rocked, once a mainstay of late night television, should consider that the Postmaster General so mercilessly ridiculed in it was in fact Benn, and that the Prime Minister who legislated against pirate radio was Harold Wilson. Those Swingers used the lowering of the voting age to put what they thought were the Selsdon Tories into office in 1970.

They went on to entrench their moral, social and cultural decadence and libertinism, first in the economic sphere during the 1980s, when the pirate radio stations were entirely frank and accurate about their own impeccably Thatcherite credentials, and then also in the constitutional sphere under Tony Blair. David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak  and Keir Starmer have all accepted uncritically the whole package: moral, social, cultural, economic, and constitutional. Indeed, they have embodied it. As does Farage.

Stacking The Deck

From The Grayzone:

As the British state seeks to destroy Palestine Action, a new trial is underway in which a judge has threatened defendants with a ‘terrorism connection’ if they explain the motives behind their activism.

It is one of three such trials in which the government has muzzled defendants, blinded jurors and banned local media coverage to guarantee convictions.

The Grayzone can exclusively reveal that hearings have been underway in the trial of the so-called Teledyne Three. These three defendants damaged the clean room of a UK factory which produces parts for the F-35 aircraft which Israel has used to carry out an array of crimes against civilians in the besieged Gaza Strip, and beyond. They are members of the direction action protest collective, Palestine Action, which the British state has designated as a “terrorist entity” in the face of international condemnation.

The presiding judge in the Teledyne Three case, Driver, has imposed restrictions on the defense which threatens them with a “terrorism connection” if they attempt to explain the motives behind their actions.

The British media is currently forbidden from reporting on the trial or the draconian measures applied by the judge.

The Teledyne Three case is one of three ongoing trials in which the British state is intensifying its assault on Palestine Action by muzzling defendants and blinding jurors. Stretching the definition of terrorism to the point of absurdity, and applying it as promiscuously as possible, forms the heart of the government’s strategy.

This February, the government’s relentless attempts to designate Palestine Action as a terrorism entity was found “unlawful”. However, the Home Office’s July 2025 designation of the protest group as a “terrorist entity” remains under final appeal. Meanwhile, separate ongoing court proceedings against PA actionists testify to a systematic campaign of dubious legal tactics to sentence defendants as terrorists, drastically increasing their penalties if found guilty.

As first revealed by The Grayzone, British authorities stacked the legal deck against a group of PA defendants known as the Filton Six. A judge imposed severe restrictions on what the defense could say, what the jury was allowed to hear, and which defenses the jurors were allowed to consider. The jury was not even able to know that the defendants could be sentenced as terrorists if found guilty of lesser criminal convictions. The entire case appeared engineered to guarantee convictions. In June, four were convicted, receiving jail sentences as “terrorists” of five to eight years.

Amnesty International slammed the railroading of the Filton Six as a “dangerous” attack on British protest rights. Yet the authorities were clearly emboldened, and are now attempting to pull the same stunt in three separate cases.

On August 17, a trial of Palestine Action defendants known as the Teledyne 3 will begin. In October 2024, the activists managed to shut down a factory in northern England producing F-35 fighter jet parts. The site’s clean room, vital for building and repairing these components, which were used to carry out an array of atrocities against civilians in the besieged Gaza Strip and Iran, was put out of action for a substantial period of time.

The British media has been banned from reporting on the pre-trial hearings.

In court, the presiding judge, Driver, imposed strict limits on which defenses the three activists could employ at trial. Whether the defendants plead innocent or guilty, if they attempt to explain their motivations for disrupting the Teledyne factory’s operations to the jury, they will be punished by having a “terrorism connection” applied to the case in sentencing. The judge and prosecution alike have attempted to portray the trio’s actions as intended to “influence a government” – language central to the British government’s legal definition of “terrorism.”

According to hearing transcripts obtained by The Grayzone, the judge warned both defendants and the prosecution that the trio’s potential sentencing as terrorists was “not an issue” and “not part” of the case. Yet the judge has nonetheless forbidden the defendants from raising the issue at all, barred the jury from hearing about it, and blocked the media from reporting it.

The prosecution is similarly prohibited from mentioning the case’s supposed “terrorism connection” without submitting a formal application for permission to the court beforehand. Thus the court has established a coercive Catch 22 that muzzles defendants and imposes blinders on the jury. 

This July, a separate trial of PA activists who targeted the same Teledyne site was overseen by the same judge. Throughout the proceedings, the judge displayed overt contempt for the group and its activists, while attempting to limit their defense. In this case, the prosecution unsuccessfully attempted to introduce a “terrorism connection” in sentencing. However, the trial ended with the three defendants being convicted of criminal damage in the fairly trivial amount of £5,000 ($6,755).

An observer of the trial has informed The Grayzone that Judge Driver appeared “bored and irritated” when defense lawyers argued the accused should be free to explain the motive behind their direct action: preventing the factory from producing F-35 parts which would inevitably be used by Israel to carry out crimes far worse than petty vandalism. The judge summarily ruled against all their proposed legal defenses, admonishing defendants against telling the jury about their politics or morals, or about the flagrant illegality of Israel’s policy toward Gaza under international law.

Meanwhile, prosecutors were allowed to slander the defendants as an “organized criminal operation” engaged in a “campaign of violence.” The precedents set by the Filton Six trial, and PA’s draconian proscription as a terrorist group, have opened the floodgates for a “terrorism connection” to be applied in many other cases of direct action aimed at obstructing Israeli crimes.

In June, five Actionists were convicted of substantial criminal damage to a branch of Barclays Bank, which provides loans and investments to Israeli weapons manufacturers. Court filings indicate that the Crown Prosecution Service applied to add a “terrorism connected” designation only after the trial concluded. At no point during the two week trial were the defendants or jury aware that they were engaged in a terrorism trial. On August 21, a hearing will determine whether the terrorism designation will be applied. Two weeks later, the defendants are due to be sentenced.

The presiding judge in that case, Altham, previously made headlines due to his “manifestly excessive” punishment of three anti-fracking protestors, in September 2018. Charged with public nuisance for climbing atop a truck to block the delivery of equipment to a fracking site, those defendants received 18 months in prison. In their appeal of the sentence, the defendants pointed to Altham’s family ties to the oil industry as a blatant conflict of interest. They walked free after Britain’s Court of Appeal overturned their sentences.

Despite international condemnation and court challenges, the draconian legal assault on Palestine Action continues to escalate. Thousands of average citizens, including elderly pensioners and Holocaust survivors, have been arrested simply for expressing public support for the group or opposing its ban.

In their attack on the direct action group, authorities clearly aim to neutralize one of the most effective mechanism that British citizens have for obstructing the machinery of genocide which grinds away on their soil, with the protection of their government. In modern Britain, there’s no telling what forms of political activism will be categorized as “terrorism” next.

UK Freeports: From Exception To Rule?

Alexandra Hall writes:

In May 2023, Michael Gove, then Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, announced a government inquiry into the newly established Teesside Freeport. The inquiry followed a series of controversies that had begun to attract national attention. Environmental campaigners and local residents raised concerns about dredging operations linked to the site and their possible connection to mass marine die-offs along the North East and North Yorkshire coasts. At the same time, investigative journalists were scrutinising the project’s governance, raising questions about land transfers, public-private partnerships and rather murky relationships between political actors, private developers and local security operators.

The inquiry ultimately concluded that although governance arrangements required strengthening, there was no evidence of wrongdoing. By that point, however, Teesside had become a focal point for wider debates about transparency and accountability in British politics.

Only a few months earlier I had started fieldwork in the Teesside Freeport locale as part of my ISRF Fellowship. During this time, I spoke with residents, journalists, activists, councillors and MPs. It quickly became clear that Teesside’s significance extended far beyond any single local controversy, prompting broader questions about how contemporary economic development is governed and where responsibility ultimately lies.

Geographies of zoning

As the flagship of the UK’s new freeport programme, Teesside is frequently presented as a model for regional renewal – a vast brownfield redevelopment site promising thousands of jobs in green energy and advanced manufacturing in a region profoundly affected by deindustrialisation and austerity. Politically, it offers a compelling narrative in support of “levelling up,” the transformation of economic decline into opportunity, championed by local lad and Tory Mayor Ben Houchen.

The Teesside story of zoning is not unique. Across the world, governments have increasingly embraced similar initiatives as instruments of development, and the use of zones has proliferated and diversified at a remarkable speed. Zones take many forms — freeports, special economic zones, free trade zones, export processing zones, enterprise zones and investment zones — and vary widely in both scale and purpose. Some function as logistics hubs or manufacturing centres, while others operate as financial enclaves or specialised storage spaces. What they share, however, is a common logic: the selective modification of regulatory, fiscal and administrative arrangements to attract investment and accelerate growth.

Advocates present such zones as pragmatic solutions to economic stagnation. By reducing barriers to investment, streamlining decision-making and creating favourable business environments, they are expected to increase competitiveness and create jobs. In practice, however, their effects are often more complex. Research across different contexts has repeatedly linked zones to recurring governance challenges, including opacity, fragmented oversight, blurred public-private responsibilities and persistent accountability deficits. When wrongdoing does occur in a zone, responsibility can be difficult to locate.

My own interest in zones long predates the UK freeport programme. As a criminologist, I am interested in how rules are created, applied, circumvented and reorganised. Much of my earlier research focused on illicit trade, tracing the movement of pharmaceuticals, tobacco products, cocaine and consumer goods through global supply chains. Time and again, zones appeared as important nodes in these networks. As our research team examined counterfeit medicines passing through Dubai’s Jebel Ali Free Zone or drugs moving through Angolan SEZs, the same pattern emerged. These were not simply places where goods moved. They were places where governance itself operated in a different mode to produce criminogenic environments.

This observation challenges the common understanding of zones. They are often described as archetypal spaces of deregulation or exception, territories where ordinary rules are suspended. There is some truth in this characterisation, but it is also misleading. Zones are rarely lawless, nor are they simply weakly governed. Rather, they are governed through overlapping legal, administrative and contractual arrangements that create complex institutional environments. The issue, then, is not the absence of rules, but their reorganisation.

Scholars have described zones as hybrid institutional forms, what Jonathan Bach neatly coined as “nested exceptionalisms” operating across political and economic orders. Yet we still know relatively little about how these arrangements are established and stabilised in practice, or how they act as generative contexts for harm across various jurisdictions. Clarifying this distinction between deregulation and what might better be understood as rule-shifting is essential if we are to grasp the expanding geography of zoning in the global economy.

UK freeports and the state

This is an argument I develop in my ISRF report, which presents some of the data and analysis from Teesside. Freeports, I argue, are best understood not simply as sites of deregulation, but as sites of rule-shifting. Harm rarely arises simply because regulation disappears or enforcement weakens. Often it emerges where authority becomes fragmented, responsibilities become unclear and accountability becomes difficult to trace. More importantly, these governance arrangements do not operate in isolation. Their effects are shaped through interaction with broader political, economic and institutional conditions, as well as the histories, capacities and inequalities of the places in which they are embedded. UK freeports provide a useful illustration. Positioned as a cornerstone of post-Brexit industrial strategy, they combine customs incentives, tax reliefs, planning flexibilities and devolved governance arrangements. Their institutional structures bring together central government departments, local authorities, mayoral development corporations, private developers, port operators and investment partners.

From a technocratic perspective, these arrangements are presented as efficient solutions to administrative friction. They promise to accelerate development and coordinate investment more effectively. However, they also redistribute authority. Decision-making is dispersed across multiple actors and institutions, while accountability becomes layered, complex and at times opaque. Regulatory change occurs not through wholesale deregulation, but through selective regulatory reconfiguration. The result is not a governance vacuum, but a landscape characterised by a patchwork of layered governance structures.

This points to a broader paradox. Freeports are often framed as spaces of economic freedom, liberated from bureaucracy and excessive regulation. Yet this ‘freedom’ depends on extensive altered forms of state intervention. Their operation requires legislation, planning reform, infrastructure provision, public subsidy and complex governance architectures. In this respect, Daniela Gabor’s concept of the “derisking state” is particularly useful. Contemporary states increasingly intervene not by withdrawing from markets, but by actively reducing risks for private investment through institutional redesign and financial support. Freeports exemplify this tendency. They appear to reduce state involvement while in practice they intensify specific forms of state activity. The question, therefore, is not whether the state is present, but what kind of state is being constructed. 

A new normal?

It is in this context that I have begun to think about zones as renormative spaces, a concept I introduce and develop in my forthcoming book The Freeport Paradox. As zones proliferate across the global economy, their exceptional form increasingly risks becoming the norm. Renormative spaces do not simply exist outside established systems; they actively remake them. They establish new norms and practices around accountability, transparency, development and the allocation of risk.

From a criminological perspective, this shift matters because harm is not produced solely by illegal activity. It can also emerge through institutional arrangements that diffuse responsibility, normalise opacity and unevenly distribute opportunities and risks. Zoning initiatives therefore matter not only because they may create opportunities for wrongdoing, but also because they reshape the conditions under which harm becomes visible, attributable and governable in the first place.

Teesside Freeport is not simply a story about legal innovation or economic restructuring. It is equally a story about how these changes are experienced by communities through altered livelihoods, contested environments, shifting democratic expectations, and changing relationships between citizens, the state and capital. Legal and governance dynamics cannot be disentangled from their social and ethical consequences. As zoning continues apace, we must ask what kinds of futures we are designing: whose interests they serve, who benefits, who bears the costs, and what we are losing along the way.

The Ice Age That Never Came

Those with ties to Nathan Cofnas may think that Paul Knaggs is AI, but he is not, and he writes:

The 1970s cooling scare was a media myth, not a scientific consensus. With Britain burning through its hottest day on record, here’s what that story actually tells us about science, certainty, and who pays when institutions ignore both.

In May 1978, Leonard Nimoy stood in front of a television camera and told America that the ice was coming back. “Climate experts believe the next one is on its way,” he intoned in In Search Of: The Coming Ice Age, drawing on two brutal winters and a fashionable anxiety that had gripped part of the public imagination. Among the scientists he interviewed was a young climatologist named Stephen Schneider, who discussed the theory that industrial haze might be dimming the sun enough to tip the planet toward a freeze.

Forty eight years later, Britain is not freezing. Thursday 13 August brought the hottest day of 2026, 38.1°C at Kew Gardens, the fifth hottest day ever recorded in the UK, during the country’s fifth heatwave of the summer. That same afternoon, a grass fire broke out near Stourbridge Golf Club and tore into residential streets. By Friday morning, West Midlands Fire Service put the toll at nineteen homes destroyed and eighteen damaged across more than five hundred acres, with sixty eight people treated by paramedics and twenty five taken to hospital. Chief Fire Officer Simon Tuhill called it “one of the most significant incidents” the service had ever attended.

The same afternoon, smoke from a separate blaze forced National Highways to close the M6 northbound near Birmingham, and a Southern rail service derailed near Lewes in East Sussex, injuring twenty passengers, two of them seriously. Investigators have not yet established the cause, though rail analyst Christian Wolmar has pointed out that extreme heat is known to buckle track. The Fire Brigades Union is now demanding a National Wildfire Summit, warning that it needs five thousand more firefighters to cope with what it calls an unprecedented summer of dangerous and volatile wildfires.

Two Britains, one on ice, one on fire, separated by less than fifty years. It is a gift to anyone who wants to argue that science cannot be trusted, that today’s warnings are just yesterday’s cooling scare wearing a different coat. It is also, on the actual evidence, wrong. But the reason it is wrong matters more than the fact of it, because it tells you something true about how science works, and something else, quite separate, about how power uses uncertainty to buy itself time.

What the scientists actually said 

Seven cooling papers, forty-four warming: the real 1970s consensus 

Start with what really happened in the 1970s, because the popular memory of it has been rewritten by the very people who want to discredit climate science today. In 2008 the climatologist Thomas Peterson and two colleagues went back through the peer reviewed journals of 1965 to 1979 and counted every paper that made a prediction about future global temperature. They found seventy one. Seven forecast cooling. Forty four forecast warming. Twenty were neutral. Peterson himself admitted the imbalance was “a surprise to us.” There was no scientific consensus on a coming ice age. There was a media consensus, built on a handful of magazine covers, chiefly a 1975 Newsweek piece that dramatised patchy Northern Hemisphere cooling into a global crisis. Newsweek was wrong. It was wrong in the way tabloid science journalism is often wrong: it took a genuine, minority, honestly argued hypothesis and inflated it into a certainty no serious researcher had claimed.

Stephen Schneider’s own career is the best answer to the “gotcha” this story is usually deployed to deliver. He is the scientist most often wheeled out as proof that the 1970s establishment believed in cooling. In fact his 1971 paper with S. Ichtiaque Rasool explored whether industrial particulates might offset the warming effect of carbon dioxide, a genuinely open question at the time. Within a few years, as measurements of atmospheric CO2 and clean air legislation reduced particulate pollution, Schneider revised his position and became one of the most prominent voices warning of greenhouse warming, a position he held until his death in 2010. That is not a scandal. That is science functioning exactly as it should: a hypothesis tested, found wanting, and abandoned by the person who proposed it. Peter Hitchens has spent a career warning against mistaking confident prediction for settled truth, and he is right to. But the corrective to false certainty is not a different false certainty running the other way. It is watching what scientists do when the evidence moves. Schneider moved with it. That is the opposite of a cover up. 

The next ice age is 10,000 years away…and we’ve already changed it

Here is where the honest sceptic has a genuine point, and the Tribune will not pretend otherwise. Earth’s climate does run in vast natural cycles. Changes in the planet’s orbital eccentricity, axial tilt and precessional wobble, the Milankovitch cycles first properly confirmed by ice core and ocean sediment data in the 1970s, really have driven the ice ages and interglacials of the past million years. We are living in one of those warm interglacial windows now, the Holocene, which began roughly eleven thousand seven hundred years ago. Another glaciation is not fantasy. It is geology.

But the timescale is the whole argument, and this is where the 1978 documentary and its modern imitators fall down completely. A landmark study published in Science this February, led by Stephen Barker of Cardiff University and Lorraine Lisiecki of UC Santa Barbara, finally cracked the precise orbital mechanism behind the hundred thousand year glacial cycle. Their conclusion: left to its own natural rhythm, the planet would not begin sliding toward the next ice age for roughly ten thousand years. Not within the lifetime of Nimoy’s grandchildren. Not within the lifetime of anyone’s grandchildren for four hundred generations. And even that distant timetable, the researchers found, has already been altered. Co-author Gregor Knorr of the Alfred Wegener Institute concluded that human carbon emissions have “already diverted the climate from its natural course.” The very natural cycle that sceptics invoke to wave away global warming is, according to the scientists who study it most closely, being overridden by that warming before it ever had the chance to begin.

That is the uncomfortable fact for both sides of this argument. It is uncomfortable for anyone who thinks a 1978 television programme proves scientists cannot be trusted, because the programme was built on a media distortion the scientific literature never supported. And it is uncomfortable for anyone who treats the current scientific consensus as beyond question, because the whole point of this story is that consensus is not a wall, it is a tide: it moves when the evidence moves, as it moved under Schneider himself.

Science changes when evidence does… that’s the point

None of this should comfort the institutions that have spent three decades treating climate warnings as a reason to do everything except confront the fossil fuel interests driving the emissions. Working people in Stourbridge lost their homes this week while firefighters, on their own union’s figures, have had twelve thousand posts cut since 2010, one in five of the whole service. A passenger train came off the rails in Sussex on the hottest day of the year and nobody yet knows if the heat was to blame, because nobody built the infrastructure to survive this climate in the first place. Science does not owe anyone comfort. It owes us the closest available approximation of the truth, revised the moment better evidence arrives. Nimoy was not lying in 1978. He was reporting an honest, minority hypothesis as though it were the whole picture, and television has never known how to resist a dramatic headline over a careful footnote.

The lesson of the ice that never came is not that scientists cannot be trusted. It is that certainty sold as spectacle should never be trusted, whichever direction it points. The climate does not care what decade convinces itself it has the final answer. It simply keeps the record, in ash and ice, for those honest enough to read it. 

The climate does not care who felt certain. It only keeps the record.

In Not Joining The Unthinking Pack

Immediately upon the announcement of the death of Jason Arday, Nathan Cofnas gave a triumphant interview in which he said that “after the revolution”, he would be “the Head of the Department of Eugenics and Race Science at Harvard”. No inference that he was joking could have been drawn from the record on which Cambridge had appointed this alien, to whom a visa had therefore been granted and by whom it was presumably still held.

A backstory full of tall tales is no bar to an academic position any more than to being the PE teacher as which Arday had started out, and nor would it be a qualification even if the tales were true. No one is made a Professor for having run marathons, and Arday was already a Professor at Glasgow when he was offered his choice of two Chairs at Cambridge. Whether or not his PhD was any good, the nearest thing to plagiarism in it was a single reference to a secondary source where there should have been a reference to a primary source. I am not one for talk of white privilege, but the sheer gall of Matt Goodwin is almost admirable. Suicide of a Nation, indeed.

Also in a commercially published book, Rachel Reeves plagiarised The Guardian and, if you please, Wikipedia, but that is not the reason why she is no longer the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I would be amazed if she did not hold an academic sinecure in the very near future. Jonathan Reynolds is back as the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade and as the President of the Board of Trade; when he last held those ranks, styles and titles, then he was found to have misrepresented himself as a solicitor, which is a specific criminal offence. And Alan Rusbridger writes:

To a certain breed of British journalist, the Jason Arday story was irresistible catnip. He seemed to be the living, breathing proof that wokery was destroying our most august universities. Time for a pile-on. And now Professor Arday is no longer living or breathing. Death by a thousand headlines. Time to move on.

It was, in Fleet Street terms, exhilarating fun while it lasted. Torrents of verbiage cascaded from the pens of those who couldn’t believe their luck. A young academic who’d been given a prestigious Cambridge professorship turned out to be a probable plagiarist and something of a fabulist. And he was black!

There you are. In a single person you had the proof that our higher education system is biased towards minorities. His chequered life and writings conclusively exposed a two-tier system of promotion in higher education. Arday had been the poster boy for DEI… and now he was proof that academia is a conspiracy against the public. To one Telegraph columnist, he was “a symptom of Labour’s war on academic excellence” (though his questionable appointment happened under Rishi Sunak). Arday was, as the headline on a Spectator column by Toby Young—a Conservative peer—sniggered, “the gift that keeps giving.” [Remind us how Young got into Oxford.]

Among those apparently enjoying a good laugh was Dr Nathan Cofnas, the sleuth who claimed the credit for unmasking Arday. Five days ago, he shared an at times gleeful YouTube conversation with David Starkey, the TV historian whose own Cambridge career had come to a shuddering halt six years ago when he pronounced that slavery was not genocide because of the survival of “so many damn blacks”.

It was a meeting of discarded souls. Cofnas related at some length how he had himself lost his role at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, earlier this year after publishing a long, rambling blog post in which he opined that Harvard would have virtually no Black professors if they were appointed purely on merit. Black people are, genetically speaking, too stupid, apparently.

“The reason we are both grinning is that we are enjoying vengeance,” chortled Starkey at the top of the programme. “Good. honest, straightforward, and Christian vengeance … we can rejoice together.” [Starkey is a militant atheist, while Cofnas is Jewish.] Cofnas pronounced that “Sophocles himself could not have come up with a more appropriate person to break this story than me.”

You may think that Dr Cofnas’s own troubled history is every bit as intriguing as Professor Arday’s. How on earth did Cambridge give this oddball “racial realist”—whose own work had been comprehensively trashed by more senior colleagues two years previously—a plum role as a junior research fellow?

But no one was very interested in that question. Fleet Street in full pursuit can only manage one narrative at a time. And this one was surely about woke professors so blinded by an academic’s blackness that they didn’t spot the warning signs. It could only be because DEI policies (promoting diversity, equality and inclusion) were rampantly out of control.

This was certainly Cofnas’s own take on Arday’s appointment—“just another DEI hire,” he told Starkey dismissively.

“In a meritocracy,” he wrote in February 2024, “Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%.” He went further: without wokeism “[b]lacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” Quite the statement.

Cofnas had his association with Emmanuel College terminated—“they kicked me out!” he protested. A few people tried to turn it into a free speech on campus issue. Virtually no one defended his work or his views. But Cofnas, unlike Arday, was not used as a case history to illustrate broader questions about the calibre of academics who are offered juicy roles at this most prestigious of universities.

Cofnas had been banging on about what he calls “racial realism” for a few years, and questions had certainly been raised about the quality of his own thinking. In 2019, he had published a long paper in the journal Philosophical Psychology which was roundly denounced by nine tenured professors, who compared his ideas to anti-vaxxers, creationists and climate change deniers. It was “lamentable when these ideas seep into academic journals, where they certainly do not belong”, they wrote.

The academics added: “Although we cannot know for a fact whether Cofnas’s contribution was inspired by ulterior ideological motives, it is undeniable that his article can reasonably be read as pandering to proponents of scientific racism. These strands of society obviously enjoy it when scholarly forums publish work that in some way legitimises their harmful ideas.”

If these academics are to be believed, then, Cambridge recruited someone who, two years earlier, had been accused of promoting “unintelligible, wrong-headed …nonsensical ideas”.

But, anyway, it seems that no one cared very much about that and there were no calls for an independent inquiry into whether the Cofnas appointment tells us disturbing truths about Cambridge’s hiring processes.

Different story with Arday. The cases are, of course, not directly comparable. Cofnas’s role was much more junior, and there is no claim that he plagiarised or fabricated material. But it is striking how many commentators immediately leapt on the Arday “scandal” which Cofnas claimed to expose as symbolic of so much that is wrong with woke institutions that sign up to DEI policies.

The question is whether there is any evidence to support the proposition. If Cambridge is, indeed, now a citadel of wokery, you’d expect the appointments and admissions data to show a pattern. But it’s hard to find.

Last year, just 75 of Cambridge’s 6,180 academics identified as black, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. Apart from Arday, there were just five black professors, or 0.4 per cent of Cambridge’s rank of professors. You could almost say that Cambridge is just the sort of university that Dr Cofnas admires: one which employs virtually zero per cent of black professors. So, not very woke at all.

Nor does it appear that these supposedly achingly liberal academics are throwing open the doors to admit black students. The latest five-year figures for the university show that 542 places went to students identifying as black—about 4.6 per cent. Private schools continue to be disproportionately successful in winning places. Last year 27.5 per cent of places went to pupils from independent schools. They had a success rate of 21 per cent compared with 15.5 per cent from comprehensives.

I stared at the tables for a long time trying to sniff out wokery, but the data defeated me.

My own experience at the other place—as the head of an Oxford college—was that, while colleagues were keen to make modest changes to allow for the context of an applicant’s background, they were overall extremely wary of anything at all that could be interpreted as “lowering standards”.

There was a particular paranoia about what one might call Marlborough Man—a name I coined after speaking to a fellow college head who had just read an irate letter in The Times protesting at the failure of his Marlborough College-educated son (fees currently £64k a year) even to get an interview at Oxford despite stellar exam grades.

“You see, we have to tread carefully,” said my cautious colleague. “It’s only a matter of time before the system is judicially reviewed. Its ability to behave sufficiently consistently across the piste will be exposed.”

The unspoken Marlborough factor will also be at work at Cambridge: the anticipation that a litigious rejectee (or his parents) might hold the system up to challenge on the grounds that Old Marlburians—and not black or working-class white pupils—are the ones being discriminated against.

Something clearly went badly wrong with the appointment of Arday. Multiple investigations have been launched into Arday’s claims, his background, his research—and into why Cambridge not only appointed him, but also defended him when doubts were raised.

But, just as the parallel story of Dr Cofnas probably tells us very little about Cambridge and its tolerance for obsessive “race realists”, it may be that there was less than meets the eye in the parable of Professor Arday.

But maybe his death can offer us lessons in not rushing to glib judgements; in not joining the unthinking pack; and—above all—in keeping a sense of proportion and plain humanity.

It was well before the 2022 appointment of Cofnas to Cambridge that Evolutionary Psychological Science published him at least twice, including once in dialogue with Edward Dutton, whom I knew at Durham, where he once tried to seduce me after Mass, so that I know his little secret. In 2018, Evolutionary Psychological Science also published this masterpiece by Dutton, who is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda.

On the Editorial Board of Evolutionary Psychological Science is the archetypal Epstein Class academic, Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, although one does have to wonder for how much longer, and not only because the revolution would replace his Chair and person with those of Cofnas. In 2021, Pinker wrote that, “Oliver Kamm’s urbanity, erudition and compassion are raised to the power of two in Mending the Mind. He put them to work in crafting this gorgeous and urgent book, and on every page they remind us of his moral that enviable gifts are no protection against the affliction of depression.” Kamm, Pinker, Dutton, Batterjee. Batterjee, Dutton, Pinker, Kamm. Truly, an Axis of Evil. It is lamentable when these ideas seep into academic journals, where they certainly do not belong.