Distinct Decline?

Can this be true? Four-year undergraduate Masters degrees in science were a different matter, as were Scottish MA Honours degrees, with both having the same classification system as a BA. But around the turn of the century, the pass mark for an English postgraduate MA was 60, or at least it was at Durham, and a distinction was presumably awarded from 70 up, although we never thought about it, and I cannot remember one. It was taken as read that you were a big boy or girl now, so you would either get your MA or you wouldn’t. You certainly either got a distinction or, in fact, you didn’t. There was no bronze medal.

Yet it has been suggested that there now existed a distinction, 70 or above, like a First; a merit, 60 or above, like a 2:1; a pass, 50 or above, like a 2:2; and a borderline pass, 50 or above, like a Third. At postgraduate level. At least there is no equivalent of a pass degree. The man who first called me “a populist, not an academic”, not that I have ever claimed to be either, went on to take a 2:2 to my 2:1 in the same year of the same BA, and then failed to be awarded the MA that I hold, the only person of whom I have ever heard to have handed in an MA and just have it failed outright. Even he, though, will not have scored as low as 39. So these days, he would have his MA. Can that be true?

Black Marks

When he grows up, then Nigel Farage wants to be Nayib Bukele. The Palestinian President of an overwhelmingly mixed-race country. Yes, Farage’s idea to transport prisoners to El Salvador is a joke. But to have made it, then how worried must he be about Count Binface? And in what way? That Binface was funnier? Tastes shift, and Farage is looking at the move from television to provincial panto and seaside summer season. Binface, please note, was not given an hour of live coverage by Sky News today, and nor was any of the other 33 candidates at Thursday’s Clacton by-election. Apart from Farage.

Of 650 MPs, Reform UK has seven, including neither Farage nor Zia Yusuf, whom Farage has repeatedly blocked from standing for Parliament. Four of those seven, the majority, were elected as members of a different party. Since some Independent or localist councillors would be things like scrutiny chairs, then a caucus of them would have more credibility if it tried to do something like this, and indeed Independent Left and Workers Party councillors, along with Independent Left MPs, should indeed try to bring the Cuban medical missions to their areas, to clear up the mess left by Wes Streeting, who himself nearly lost his seat to an Independent Left candidate.

A national poll today has Reform in third place. On the select committees of the House of Commons, precisely one seat is filled by anyone who was either elected for Reform or now sits for it, and that is Rupert Lowe. On the Public Accounts Committee, no less. A man who believes that the King is not White British. Since the King is undeniably white, then Lowe must believe that the King is not British. We await Lowe’s endorsement by Nathan Cofnas, who believes that black and brown Jews, who are now the majority in Israel as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon clearly failed to see when he was there, are not “real Jews” and have “low IQ”. For Cofnas, it is all about IQ, which does not really exist.

I have never taken an IQ test in my life. I question whether anyone who sets any store by them is sufficiently intelligent to be allowed out alone, if at all. The whole thing depends on “mental age”, whatever that may be. The IQ of children in numerous countries has “improved” dramatically over the years when IQ tests have been set in schools, and therefore taught to. The publications of Mensa are a particularly rich seam of amusement. “More people than you might think are above average”? I’m guessing about half of them. “One person in 20 is in the top five per cent”? You don’t say! And so on. Yet you could never do anything to acquire a high IQ even if there were such a thing. Having it would be no cause for congratulation, still less for self-congratulation or for the creation of an international society of mutual congratulation.

Cofnas has published nothing more significant than the output of Jason Arday, but hawking his martyrdom is more suited to his abilities. Likewise, Arday submitted plagiarised drivel as his PhD, he applied for jobs for which he was obviously unsuited, and he invited journals to publish dross, again plagiarised. But he did not award his own PhD, he did not appoint himself to a succession of positions, and he did not force anyone to publish his rubbish. Cambridge appointed a “race realist” before it appointed a race hustler. Heads should roll for both.

But although Arday was not one of them, many of the most distinguished academics have either been dreadful teachers of undergraduates, or have simply not done it at all. I know that I am 102, but Fiona Brown asked a lecturer, any lecturer, to justify his mark of her essay? How times change. And watch out for an academic sinecure for Rachel Reeves, who plagiarised The Guardian and, for pity’s sake, Wikipedia on an industrial scale, having claimed in Who’s Who to have been published in a much more prestigious journal with a similar name to the one in which she really had been. Sadly, Cofnas was right about Arday. No less sadly, Arday’s defenders may also be onto something.

Crime Scenes With Corporate Logos

Drought in Britain ought to be a joke at any time, never mind after the first half of this year, but there is nothing funny about the fact that the bankrupt Thames Water paid one million pounds to Steve Buck merely to sign on as its Chief Financial Officer, 15 months after he had done so. What would you pay for shares in that company, or indeed in any of the water companies? That is what they are worth. If there must be compensation, then, for this and all renationalisations, it should be yes if possible to pension funds, perhaps under very exceptional circumstances to private equity, no to transnational corporations, and nothing fit for this site to foreign states.

Yet with no questions asked, the money is found to funnel through the limitlessly wasteful Ministry of Defence to the death-peddling past, present and future private employers of the men who were assumed to speak with unquestionable authority because they dressed up as Biggles or insisted on being addressed by their old job titles.

So Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a particular kind of insolence that belongs only to the custodians of essential services in modern Britain. It is the quiet, bureaucratic entitlement that allows men in suits to treat a public catastrophe as a private dividend.

At the end of July, as Britain’s largest water monopoly teetered on the precipice of financial collapse, Thames Water quietly handed a £1 million signing-on fee to its finance chief, Steve Buck. The money did not come from stellar performance, nor did it reflect a single mile of repaired pipework or a single river cleansed of human effluent. It was drawn directly from an emergency borrowing facility provided by a syndicate of lenders attempting to keep the company solvent.

In plain English, a utility carrying £21 billion in debt, warning that its cash reserves will run dry before the end of the year, borrowed money at emergency rates to hand a seven-figure sum to an executive who joined the enterprise only fifteen months ago.

This is not a market functioning under pressure. It is an extraction mechanism operating at peak efficiency.

The disclosure came via a letter sent by Sir Adrian Montague, the chairman of Thames Water, to MPs on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee. In it, Sir Adrian acknowledged what every household in London and the Thames Valley already knows: that customers will regard these payments as deeply unfair while service standards remain in the gutter. Yet, having acknowledged the injustice, the board paid the money anyway, while negotiating retention settlements for fourteen other executives, including two who have already departed. Meanwhile, chief executive Chris Weston saw his total pay package climb past £1 million last year.

Fairness demands that we look at the board’s justification. Sir Adrian’s defence rests on the cold mechanics of employment law and corporate survival. Thames Water had taken formal legal advice; Mr Buck’s package had been contractually agreed upon when he was poached from Pennon Group, and its payment had merely been deferred. The board argues that during an unprecedented three-year crisis, the company cannot attract or retain senior financial leaders without offering competitive packages. Without executive continuity, they claim, any hope of a solvent restructuring vanishes, leaving millions of customers in regulatory limbo.

It is a neat, lawyerly argument. It is also entirely hollow.

Contractual obligations are treated as sacred scripture when they run toward boardroom bank accounts, but they evaporate the moment they concern the public. Thames Water holds a fundamental contract with the British public: to provide clean water and safely dispose of sewage. That contract has been violated daily for years. When ordinary citizens fail to meet their contractual duties, they face court orders and disconnection. When water executives oversee systemic failure, they claim immunity behind legal advice and demand seven-figure retention checks to stay at the wheel.

If a corporate leadership team cannot navigate an enterprise through a crisis without extracting millions in personal bonuses from emergency credit lines, then that leadership has failed its primary test. Paying executives lavish sums to stay at a collapsing company does not secure talent; it rewards the management of decay.

The underlying illness, however, lies deeper than boardroom greed. It lies in the financial architecture that allowed private equity to treat a vital natural monopoly as a cash-generating asset.

A syndicate of fund managers known as the London & Valley Water consortium, including Apollo Global Management, Elliott Management, Farallon Capital Management, and Silver Point Capital, currently holds £17 billion of Thames Water’s debt. They have proposed a £10 billion restructuring plan, offering to inject equity and write off £9.6 billion in existing debt, on the condition that they retain control and eventually float the business back onto the public markets in the 2030s. To ensure their leverage, these distress investors have already retained litigation specialists, threatening to sue the government if the state steps in. 

They are holding the water supply of fifteen million people hostage to protect their financial yield.

This presents an immediate, inescapable test for the Environment Secretary, Angela Eagle, and Prime Minister Andy Burnham. The government has flirted with compromise, proposing “golden shares” and vague notions of “public control” to satisfy political rhetoric without dismantling the private structure. Her predecessor, Emma Reynolds, rightly rejected earlier rescue proposals as inadequate for consumers. Continuing to search for a private buyer or a creditor-led bailout is a failure of statecraft.

The mechanism to end this scandal already exists. The government must place Thames Water into a Special Administration Regime immediately. Placing the company into special administration would wipe out the speculative equity, force corporate lenders to take their losses, and return the management of Britain’s most critical natural resource to public hands, where it belongs.

Water is not a commodity to be traded, leveraged, or milked for executive bonuses. It is the primary common wealth of a nation. A state that allows private financiers to draw emergency loans to pay million-pound signing bonuses while rivers rot has surrendered its authority.

When a system reaches the point where failure is incentivised and collapse is financed on credit, it cannot be reformed by legal tweaking or regulatory sternness. It must be taken back.

When the boardroom treats insolvency as a bonus scheme and emergency loans as a payroll facility, that is not a business in distress; it is a crime scene with a corporate logo.

And:

On 13 July this year, at the University of Manchester, the defence minister Luke Pollard launched an alliance of thirty-five British universities with the Ministry of Defence. It comes with a £182 million skills package, five new technical excellence colleges, and a charter committing member institutions to grow research capacity in defence and national security fields and to channel their graduates into defence careers. The Ministry describes the thinking behind it as a “whole of society” approach. It is, whatever else you call it, industrial planning: the state deciding what gets built, who gets trained, and where the money goes.

Fifty years ago, in the same industry, in some of the same towns, a group of shop stewards proposed the exact reverse. They wanted the planning without the war. 

They lost. It is worth understanding precisely how they lost, because the usual explanation, that the idea was lovely but impractical, is the one thing the evidence does not support.

The Combine 

Lucas Aerospace was part of Joseph Lucas Ltd, a Birmingham firm whose name was stamped on half the electrical components in British industry. By the mid-1970s its aerospace division employed somewhere between eleven and thirteen thousand people across seventeen sites, from Burnley to Willesden, organised in around a dozen separate trade unions. Roughly seventy per cent of the work was military, paid for by the taxpayer.

That fragmentation was not an accident of history. It was an asset on the balance sheet. Management negotiated centrally and the workforce negotiated locally, site by site, craft by craft, which meant management could play Bradford off against Burnley and draughtsmen off against fitters indefinitely. Between 1969 and 1973 the stewards built the thing that made everything else possible: the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards’ Combine Committee, a cross-site, cross-union body meeting at independent venues, with the deliberate architecture of one site, one vote. It bridged the oldest division in British industry, the one between the men who designed the thing and the men who made it.

Then came 1974, restructuring, and the promise of thousands of redundancies dressed in the familiar language of international competition and technological change.

In November of that year thirty-four Combine delegates went to the Department of Industry to ask Tony Benn, then Secretary of State, to nationalise Lucas Aerospace. Benn told them he did not have the power. He suggested instead that they write their own corporate plan, something the government could point to as justification for intervention. It was a piece of advice offered almost casually, and it produced one of the most extraordinary documents in the history of British labour. 

The Combine’s first instinct was to ask the experts. They wrote to around 180 universities, research institutes and official trade union bodies asking for ideas for socially useful products. They received three replies. The intellectual establishment of a country then still calling itself an industrial nation had, on this question, almost nothing to say.

So they asked themselves. Questionnaires went out across every plant: what machine tools do we have, what skills sit on this floor, what could we make that people actually need? Over fourteen months the workforce produced more than 150 detailed product proposals, with drawings, costings and training requirements attached. 

What was in it 

The list reads today less like a period curiosity than a leaked memo from the future. Kidney dialysis machines and portable life support. Artificial limb control systems and sight substitution aids for blind people. Heat pumps, solar collectors, fuel cells and combined heat and power units for social housing. Wind turbines, on the reasoning of Combine delegate Phil Asquith that the step from an aircraft power generator to a wind turbine is not a large one. Hybrid petrol and electric power packs for road vehicles. Braking and retarder systems. Submersibles and oil spill recovery gear, taking underwater telemetry developed for hunting submarines and pointing it at the seabed instead. And telechirics, remote manipulators designed on the explicit principle that the machine should extend the worker’s hands rather than replace them.

They did not stop at paper. A prototype road-rail vehicle was built and demonstrated, a bus capable of running on both tarmac and standard railway track, aimed at rural areas where the Beeching cuts had left the rails and taken the trains.

Nobody should claim the Lucas workers invented the heat pump or the hybrid engine. They did not. What they did was harder and rarer. Working from a shop floor in Burnley, without market research budgets or consultants, they identified in 1976 almost every technology that half a century of subsequent industrial history would validate. Benn’s judgement on it has aged rather well. He called it one of the most remarkable exercises that has ever occurred in British industrial history.

The Plan carried on its front page a sentence that ought to be carved somewhere in Westminster: there cannot be islands of social responsibility in a sea of depravity.

The argument beneath the argument 

The Plan is usually remembered as a list of products. Its intellectual core was something more dangerous. 

Mike Cooley was a senior design engineer at Lucas, chair of the local branch of the technical union TASS, and the man who gave the Combine its philosophy. In Architect or Bee? he took Marx’s contrast between the bee that builds by instinct and the architect who builds the structure in imagination first, and turned it on the drawing office. Technology, Cooley argued, is not neutral. Machine design, shop layouts and control systems are engineered choices, and under industrial capitalism they are engineered to concentrate judgement upwards and strip it out of the hands below. 

Cooley was watching computer-aided design arrive at Lucas and he understood immediately what it was for. Taylorism had already been done to the assembly line, timing and fragmenting manual work until the worker became an appendage. CAD, he warned, was Taylorism arriving for mental labour: capturing the tacit, uncodified knowledge of experienced engineers, formalising it into software, and then discarding the engineer. His alternative was human-centred systems, machines built to augment the person operating them. He was sacked, effectively, in 1981. That same year he received the Right Livelihood Award for the theory and practice of human-centred, socially useful production, and he gave the prize money to the Combine. 

Read that argument again in 2026, with generative AI being trained on the accumulated work of software developers, illustrators, translators, radiographers and writers, and then sold back to their employers as a reason to employ fewer of them. Cooley described the mechanism forty-six years ago, in a book about drawing offices in the West Midlands. The workers are the experts, he said. It was not a slogan. It was a claim about where knowledge actually lives, and the entire AI industry is currently proving him right by mining it. 

How it was killed 

Three institutions closed the door, and it matters which three. 

Lucas management refused to negotiate on the Plan’s contents at all. Not to reject specific products, but to refuse the premise. What a company makes is a managerial prerogative and a property right, and admitting the workforce to that decision was intolerable regardless of the merits. The Combine had not proposed a wage claim. They had proposed a different constitution for the firm. 

The official trade union machinery, particularly within the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, was cool at best and hostile at worst. A cross-factory, multi-union combine committee that bypassed national bargaining structures was a challenge to the unions’ own hierarchy as much as to the company’s. There is an uncomfortable lesson in that for the movement, and it has never really been absorbed. 

And the state walked away. Benn was moved from Industry to Energy in June 1975, before the Plan was even published. The Industry Act 1975 contained the statutory planning agreements that could have compelled a company taking large volumes of public money into genuine co-determination over its future. They were never used on Lucas. The government kept paying for the military contracts, kept paying the redundancy money, and declined to pay for the alternative. 

The serious objection deserves a serious answer. Was the Plan commercially naive? In parts, certainly. Lucas Aerospace was a components supplier, not a consumer manufacturer, and some of the 150 ideas were sketches rather than propositions. Shop stewards are not marketing departments. 

But that objection collapses on contact with what the Plan actually asked for, and with what the British state is doing right now. The Combine never proposed that Lucas simply start selling dialysis machines into a void. They proposed a phased conversion underwritten by the state, on the reasoning that public money was already the customer. That is not utopian. That is the exact model by which the Defence Investment Plan, published this July, commits £298 billion over four years, holds core defence spending at 2.7 per cent of GDP from 2027-28, and puts £5 billion into drones and autonomous systems. Guaranteed public demand is precisely what makes an industrial sector viable, and Whitehall knows it, because Whitehall does it every single day for weapons. 

The Lucas Plan was not rejected because industrial planning does not work. It was rejected because industrial planning works extremely well, and letting workers do it would have shown who else could.

An Idea whose time must come: Lucas Plan 50th Anniversary Celebration 

Britain’s manufacturing sector now accounts for around 8.5 per cent of national output. In the decade the Lucas workers were writing, it was closer to a quarter. Into that hollowed landscape the government is now pouring the largest sustained defence build-up since the Cold War, £250 million in Defence Growth Deals, £182 million in skills, thirty-five universities signed up for life, 24,000 apprenticeships a year, all of it directed by the state towards a single purpose. 

Everything the Combine asked for exists. The capacity to plan, the money to fund it, the institutional machinery to align research and skills and procurement behind a chosen outcome. All of it is operational. It is simply pointed somewhere else. 

Which is why the most instructive Lucas Plan of 2026 is not in Britain at all. In July 2021 the private equity house Melrose Industries announced the closure of the GKN Driveline plant at Campi Bisenzio outside Florence, sacking more than four hundred workers by email. The GKN Factory Collective occupied the plant and, instead of negotiating better redundancy terms, drafted a conversion plan: cargo bikes and photovoltaic panels, built under workers’ control, in alliance with the climate movement. Five years on the sit-in continues, the workers have raised hundreds of thousands of euros in popular shareholding, and they have formed a cooperative. 

The crucial part is what happened around them. Tuscany passed a regional law on industrial consortia in December 2024, and in July 2025 the Industrial Consortium of the Florentine Plain was established between the region, the metropolitan city and three municipalities, creating the legal vehicle to take on a plant abandoned by a British fund and reindustrialise it. That is the statutory backing Lucas never got. It is what a planning agreement looks like when a government is prepared to use one. 

So the demand at fifty is not commemorative. Give the Defence Diversification Agency that the TUC voted for in 2017 and Unite has argued for since real statutory powers, public capital and a duty to bargain with the workforce over conversion, not just over severance. Attach conditions to defence contracts requiring genuine co-determination on product strategy where public money dominates the order book. Extend the same principle to the technology question Cooley identified, so that the introduction of algorithmic management and AI systems into a workplace becomes a matter for negotiation rather than announcement. And accept the Combine’s founding insight, that the people who know what a machine can do are the people standing in front of it. 

The men who built the Combine are mostly gone now. Mike Cooley died in 2020. Their archive is being digitised, their film exists, and their anniversary is being marked this year by trade unionists and environmentalists, including at Manchester Friends of the Earth’s An Idea Whose Time Must Come, under a title that has hardened since 2016, from a question to an imperative. 

We looked at this idea ourselves six years ago, in Five Lessons From The Lucas Plan. The lessons have not aged. Only the excuses for ignoring them have multiplied. 

They were told their plan was unrealistic by an establishment that has spent the following half century failing to build the wind turbines, heat pumps, hybrid vehicles and dialysis capacity they designed, while presiding over the fastest deindustrialisation in the Western world. 

Nobody has ever refuted the Lucas Plan. They only ever refused it. Refusals can be overturned.

We Live In This Handcuffed Fear

Sian Bradley writes:

Nearly 160 miles from home in Manchester, Clara White lay awake. She could not shake the sight of her brother, Thomas, crying during her visit to the psychiatric hospital in Northumberland where he is being held.

“I can see in the way he looks, the way he sits, that there’s absolutely nothing left in him to give,” she said. “He’s prepared to die in there.”

In 2012, Thomas White was arrested for stealing a mobile phone from two Christian missionaries while he was heavily intoxicated. His family say the exchange was non-violent and involved no weapons, though it was legally classified as a street robbery because the item was taken directly from the victims. He received an imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence, a two-year tariff with no maximum term.

Fourteen years and four months later, he still has no release date. White, now 43, was moved to hospital nine months ago after a political intervention. He had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and an independent psychiatrist concluded the IPP sentence was the probable cause of his illness.

Clara White says that IPP prisoners like her brother are trapped. They need to complete a rehabilitation course to be eligible for release, but they are deprioritised in favour of people who have a specific release date. Transferred across 14 prisons in 14 years, Thomas White was never given the chance to complete a “progressive programme” that can have waiting lists of up to four years.

Andy Burnham has called for a review of IPP sentences as part of efforts to tackle the prison overcrowding crisis. Introduced in 2003, IPP sentences were intended as a preventative measure to protect the public from “dangerous” offenders whose crimes did not legally merit life sentences, but who still posed a significant future risk to society. IPPs were abolished in 2012, but not retrospectively.

James Daly, then the Conservative MP for Bury North, told the House of Commons in 2023: “If Thomas had been sentenced four months later, he would not be in prison now.”

Lord Clarke of Nottingham, the former home secretary, told Times Radio on Sunday that he “never imagined” that 14 years after abolishing IPPs, 2,329 people would remain “indefinitely detained, perhaps until the day they die, some of them having served far longer than the maximum sentence for the crime they actually committed”, costing taxpayers nearly £120 million a year.

In 2016, Thomas White, held at HMP Norwich, began speaking in Roman numerals on calls home. He was seen walking the wing wrapped in a bedsheet, “presenting himself as Jesus Christ” and promising to heal people.

After he was repeatedly sent to solitary segregation while experiencing psychosis, “something died inside of him”, Clara White said. “If he rings now, I think, ‘Oh, there’s my brother’ for three or four minutes, then he meets you with a Bible scripture at every conversation.

“You’ve got to remember that he was a normal person. It’s the system that’s done this to him. It’s love that’s going to get my brother well, not negligence in these institutions.”

Growing up in poverty in Moss Side, Thomas White began shoplifting and stealing bikes, from the age of 12 and, from 2004, had a record of 16 previous convictions for theft and robberies that legally triggered the “dangerousness” clause under IPP.

“What Thomas did was wrong,” Clara said, but insisted he had “served his time”, adding: “If he would have committed that same crime three months after the abolishment, he would have done two years, he would have been out.”

Thomas White was held at HMP Strangeways until last year. Reports reached his family that he was jumping on wing safety netting, trying to break his legs through cell bars, smashing his face against the floor and trying to set fire to himself.

During a visit with her MP, James Frith, Clara White was outraged to find out that her brother was being kept among the general prison population, and told staff: “If my brother dies at the hands of your prison, I promise you won’t forget his case.”

He was transferred to a secure hospital after interventions by Lord Blunkett, the former home secretary, and Lord Timpson, then the prisons minister, yet he now faces being sent back to prison as hospital staff claim he is “not engaging” with therapy.

Thomas White told his sister he felt “like a Rubik’s Cube where they’re just turning and turning” and that he was never getting out, whether or not he talked to support workers.

Although she welcomed Burnham’s review of IPP, Clara White struggles to feel optimistic. “In the face of an injustice so painful, the words begin to lose meaning. When you’ve got hope and you’re dropped again, it’s a long drop to the ground. One of mine and my mum’s darkest fears is: will he make it out?”

According to official data, 96 IPP prisoners have killed themselves in custody. “To live is a race in IPP,” Clara White said. “Not everybody is going to cross that finish line.”

Clara White was ordained as a priest last year, to work with Church on the Street to continue her social and criminal justice campaigning. She was raised in the Christian faith by her grandmother, a former Irish Magdalene sister, and religious belief keeps her going. “Justice goes beyond stained-glass windows. My faith tells me where there is injustice, you bring justice,” she said.

Yet fighting for her brother has taken a personal toll: “We live in this handcuffed fear. They owe him his bloody life, and I want his life back.”

Demanding that Burnham intervene to move her brother to a community hospital near Manchester, she said “prison ministers are small fish now in an ocean. You have to go straight to the top, to the organ grinder.”

The Ministry of Justice said: “It is right that these sentences were abolished, and as the IPP annual report shows, support has significantly improved for these offenders, with greater access to rehabilitation and mental health support. We are now looking at what more can be done.”

The ministry added that resentencing IPP prisoners to determinate terms would give automatic release dates to offenders assessed as dangerous by the Parole Board, noting that 488 recalled prisoners were released over 12 months.

And Simon Hattenstone writes:

In January 2015, Tommy Nicol told his family that he was suffering “psychological torture of a person who is doing 99 years”. Nicol had been given an imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentence six years earlier for stealing a car from a garage and injuring the owner. He was already two years beyond his four-year tariff – the minimum time you can serve in prison before being considered for release. Nicol was given another two-year knock-back from the Parole Board and was in despair. If and when he got released, he would be on a lifelong licence. Eight months later, aged 37, Nicol hanged himself at The Mount prison in Hertfordshire, England.

By the time he took his own life, the inhumane IPP sentence had already been abolished for three years. The problem is, it didn’t apply retroactively. Those already serving IPP sentences stayed on them. This, despite David Blunkett, who devised and introduced them as home secretary in 2005, calling it “the biggest regret” of his political career. And this despite UN special rapporteur on torture Alice Edwards agreeing with Tommy Nicol that the sentence was “psychological torture”. Astonishingly, more than 2,000 people are still serving IPP sentences in England and Wales.

Last week prime minister Andy Burnham announced a new review into indeterminate sentences as part of his plan to reduce the prison population. Reviewing a sentence that was abolished 14 years ago seems Kafkaesque. And what exactly is left to review? We all know IPPs are wrong – they are no longer handed down, and those serving them should be resentenced. Review after review has said so. Surely it makes more sense to simply introduce legislation to make that happen?

IPPs were given to people who didn’t merit life sentences, but were regarded as a risk to society. With an IPP, once prisoners have served their tariff, they have to apply to the Parole Board for release. The Parole Board only grants release if satisfied that the offender no longer poses a risk to the public. This means that an IPP prisoner could be detained indefinitely. It was expected that very few prisoners would receive IPPs (an estimated 900 at any one time) and only for serious crimes.

The reality couldn’t have been more different. Between 2005 and 2013 (a handful of people were sentenced after the cut-off of 31 December 2012), 8,711 people were given an IPP sentence. While some had long tariffs, most were on low tariffs for minor crimes. Nevertheless, many never got released. Or if they did, they were recalled to prison for the slightest breaches of their licence, such as being late for appointments with probation officers.

Often the people who were imprisoned on an IPP were already vulnerable. Not surprisingly, many prisoners lost hope, like Nicol did. Ninety-four people had taken their own lives up to March 2025 while serving the sentence in prison. Forty-four people are known to have taken their own lives while out on licence, though these community-based figures have only been tracked since April 2019, so are likely to be higher.

The IPP horror stories are legion, and many concern young people such as Martin Myers, who served 18 years for attempting to steal a cigarette, despite having an original tariff of just 19 months and 27 days when sentenced aged 24; Ronnie Sinclair served 16 years in jail on a three-year IPP tariff for stealing a flowerpot at the age of 17; and Wayne Bell was 17 when he was imprisoned on an IPP for punching a boy and stealing a bike in 2007 on a tariff of one year and 350 days. He is still in prison 19 years later.

Although the lifelong licence was removed for IPP prisoners in 2024, many are still serving the sentence. As of June 2026, there were 2,271 IPP prisoners jailed in England and Wales – 856 unreleased prisoners and 1,415 recalled prisoners.

This proposed review would be the third since 2022 when the cross-party Justice Committee Inquiry concluded IPP sentences were “irredeemably flawed” and recommended resentencing. Nothing was done. Last year the Howard League expert working group recommended fixed-release windows for IPP prisoners. Nothing was done. A private member’s bill sponsored by (Lord) Anthony Woodley urged a comprehensive, retrospective resentencing exercise for all prisoners still subject to an IPP. The bill passed its second reading in the House of Lords and progressed to the committee stage, but the government blocked it.

The campaign group Ungripp fears that any new review will have the same outcome as previous ones. “Each review meant more wasted time, more people on IPP despairing and inevitably, more suicides,” it says. “How can we be confident this will be any different?”

Shockingly, all but three of the 2,271 people serving IPP sentences in prison are past their tariff. With resentencing, these three prisoners would be given a fitting determinate sentence, while the 2,268 remaining IPP prisoners would gradually be released with appropriate social care and housing to ensure they were safe within the community and the community safe with them. The £60,000 a year saved in prison costs would go a considerable way towards paying for this.

So why hasn’t it yet been done? Simple. Political leaders are terrified of looking soft on crime – so they have consistently kicked the IPP can down the road. Yet IPP sentences are universally recognised as unjust. Not a single mainstream politician defends this barbaric sentence.

Last year Keir Starmer said: “It is right that the IPP sentence has been abolished”, but he wasn’t brave enough to resentence IPP prisoners. Andy Burnham must be braver.

The former supreme court justice Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood called IPP “the greatest single stain on our criminal justice system” in a 2020 report for the Prison Reform Trust. If Burnham wants to show he means business, he will not bother with another review and will simply legislate to get this shaming stain removed once and for all.

Resentencing is too late for Tommy Nicol and the many others IPP prisoners who took their own lives, but it’s not too late for those still behind bars, tortured by not knowing whether their imprisonment will ever end.

In Defence of Sociology

What a time for Rod Liddle to have died. He would have encouraged his entire readership and listenership to have applied for the newly vacant Chair in Sociology of Education at Cambridge, on the grounds that anyone was as qualified as the previous occupant, and he would have led by example. Having passed a most pleasant afternoon in largely Oxonian company in Edinburgh, celebrating a real Professor’s three score and 10, I am pleased to find that Dr Lisa McKenzie writes:

Sociology, as both a discipline and a subject, has long been questioned and ridiculed by sections of academia and the media. ‘It isn’t a real science’ is the common response when I tell people I am a sociologist.

So during what are already horrendous times for those working in higher education, the last thing sociologists needed – a month before term starts and, more importantly, before clearing – was a scandal that undermines higher education and helps delegitimise the whole subject of sociology. Unfortunately, that is precisely what has happened in the shape of the Jason Arday affair.

The now ex-sociology professor has been the star of Britain’s so-called silly season, when parliament closes and news reporters look elsewhere for stories. As many will now know, Arday has been accused of plagiarism, fabricating data and creating a seemingly Walter Mitty-esque backstory – one featuring incredible feats and jaw-dropping triumphs over adversity. And up until this week, he was the professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge – a prestigious position at one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

The Arday fiasco has unfortunately fuelled the widespread mockery of the discipline in which he found it all too easy to ‘excel’. So, as a sociologist with an undergraduate degree, a master’s in social-science research methods and a PhD in sociology, I feel the need to defend the subject I love and reclaim respect for the sociologist.

I want to reassure students currently preparing to start, or re-start, their studies in September that sociology is far from a ‘Mickey Mouse’ subject – this despite the damage done by university HR departments forcing through dense, complicated yet inane statements about equality, diversity and inclusion, and by some social scientists themselves.

Sociology matters because it reveals how power works and moves through society. It questions what appears to be ‘normal’, especially when the practices, views and activities ‘normalised’ cause harm. Social scientists have changed and challenged the worldviews of millions of people – their work has done a tremendous amount of good.

If we go back to British sociology in the 1950s and 1960s, we find Family and Kinship in East London, a research project by Peter Willmott and Michael Young, the father of Toby Young of the Free Speech Union. Fondly called ‘FAKINEL’ by the working-class East Enders whose lives it examined, the study followed families from bombed-out post-war Bethnal Green as they embarked on their new lives on council estates in Essex.

The research was groundbreaking because it showed that family ties and networks were crucial to working-class people. It argued powerfully that a sense of community needed to be built into the modern council estates appearing across the country during the mass council-house-building programmes of the mid 20th century. It is a message and a sentiment we still need to remember today.

Another important contribution came in the form of the Affluent Worker studies, carried out in Luton in the 1960s and undertaken by academics concerned with class in Britain. Their research in Luton’s car-manufacturing plants showed that some working-class people held relatively well-paid and skilled jobs. This made them ‘affluent’, insofar as they could buy homes, cars and consumer goods, a marked difference from other sections of the working class and from earlier generations.

Why was this important? Because it told the story of how work can offer working-class people dignity and a real chance to escape poverty. Although the study is almost 60 years old, I believe its message about the importance of work remains vital. Then there is Paul Willis’s 1977 study, Learning to Labour. It used ethnography, another research method now being lambasted because of the ridiculous rise of Arday, some of whose papers are based on something called ‘auto-ethnography’ – which boils down to writing from one’s own experience.

Nevertheless, Willis’s research still resonates today. He found that working-class lads in schools in working-class areas were being taught and trained specifically for manual work. The academic side of education was denied to them because it was (wrongly) assumed that it would be wasted on them. This work seems particularly resonant right now given our new Labour prime minister and education secretary recently floated the idea that it would be better for working-class sections of society to focus on a more practical, less academic education leading to apprenticeships. Willis’s work shows how easily we can step back into the old class tropes – that some of us are not suited to academia, and that education is therefore wasted on us.

I know this to be untrue from first-hand experience. I am a working-class woman. I worked for many years in factories, grew up and lived on council estates, and I can also read and critique high academic theory.

So, in light of the Jason Arday affair, I ask the public to look beyond the stupidity and Marie Antoinette-like practices of elite universities, and remember what the discipline of sociology can achieve when practised properly.

I also make a plea to my fellow academics: stop allowing this to happen. Stop allowing academic institutions to make appointments and pursue policies that denigrate everything we do. We need to go back to first principles. We need to forget the identity politics, the DEI quotas and the tick-boxes, and support and fund what we do best – deepening knowledge of what is really happening in society and arguing why that matters.

All My Own Work

Associate Professor seems to be roughly Reader in old money, and while Jason Arday was not at Durham long, I am told that he was well-liked by his peers even if they did resent the way that the great and the good hung on his every word, which was hardly his fault.

"If there is one thing of which you will never be accused," my MA supervisor at Durham told me, "then it is plagiarism." And I never have been. Therefore, I would be available to serve on any inquiry or what have you. Otherwise, every day of its existence would see the necessary resignation of yet another member, until there were none left.

Who’s To Blame For Jason Arday?

In a most welcome addition to the increasingly stellar New Statesman, Professor Steve Hall writes:

The Jason Arday affair has turned into a global furore. Arday is a young black man who, in 2023 at the age of 37, was appointed professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge. The scandal erupted after Arday was accused of plagiarism in his PhD thesis, among other publications, and of pepping up his biography with fake stories of remarkably diverse personal achievements. His fantasised triumphs ranged from authoring a non-existent book to running a 600-mile charity marathon that would have defeated a prime Mo Farah. Despite initial protests from staff at Cambridge, his PhD supervisors at Liverpool John Moores University, and many academic colleagues across the country, the allegations mounted to a point of demanding a formal investigation. Arday resigned on 5 August.

Commentators with a stack of rather predictable axes to grind joined the fray. Far-right figures threw in crude racist tropes about the inherent cerebral inferiority of black people. Liberals and conservatives alike complained in haughty tones about the so-called long march of woke culture through Western institutions and the inevitable failure of equality, diversity and inclusion policies (EDI). Some rather uncharitable practitioners of science joined crustier academics from traditional humanities disciplines to condemn Arday’s qualitative brand of sociology as a low-value pseudo-science. Given that internal investigations had found some substance in the accusations, activists who might instinctively have sympathised with Arday were divided, hesitant and relatively muted in their support. Public reaction therefore quickly degenerated into a rather ugly free-for-all. However, as usual, underneath the noise lies a context. Academia’s top tier might well contain a number of over-promoted individuals, but Arday quickly became a scapegoat for what some see as a general decline in academic standards. And while that is a simplistic reading, Arday’s story belongs to higher education as much as it does to him, and his failures belong to academia.

Over the past few decades, all academics have noticed a change. Students weaned on technological aids and soundbites seemed increasingly ill-prepared for academic study. Academia found itself compelled to meet the demands of indebted students who regarded themselves as customers, rather than apprentices in need of self-improvement. Academics struggled to do much about it. The time and energy they were able to devote to teaching preparation had been reduced by the demands of administrative roles, which meant floods of emails, and meetings to organise restructuring and networks of accountability. “Meetings about meetings” and “restructuring of restructuring” became standard faculty jokes as managerialism expanded to fill every available space in the working day.

Academics also had to deal with the pressures of an increasingly competitive research culture. After 1992, the university system was allegedly “democratised’ and converted into a research marketplace. Each university was given a chance to impress, which ramped up the pressure to publish an increasing quantity of research. Success was rewarded with income and prestige. The Research Excellence Framework (Ref), which translates the quantity and metricised quality of “outputs” – formerly known as books, articles and reports – into government funding, made research compulsory at all levels of the system.

But given the existing pressures of teaching and expanded administration, the ability to actually conduct research became increasingly reliant on “buying time” with grants from various external funding bodies. This imperative simply added another duty to the roster – the seemingly endless writing of grant applications in the full knowledge that the chances of actually receiving any money was quite low. Such difficulty increased the pressure to conform ever-more rigidly to research themes set by these external bodies, which tend to seek policy-friendly findings, and have little time for deep, original thought or paradigm-shifting ideas.

The principal research theme guiding the humanities and social sciences is often described as “social justice”. And this can be traced to a major shift in the political zeitgeist in the early 1970s. Concerned by the soixante-huit troubles in France, the big US funding bodies such as the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation tried to accelerate away from the politically dangerous areas of class and economy in the social sciences and the humanities. This financial network was midwife to the rather comfortable birth of the post-structuralist movement, which saw the real impetus for progressive social change not in a politically informed and organised working class but among women, gay people and minority cultural groups. The new culturally grounded movement – given various names, such as the “cultural turn”, “cultural politics” or “identity politics” – was initially quite effective in representing minorities. But it posed no real threat to the neoliberalism which achieved power and hegemony across the West after 1979.

Whereas mid-20th-century civil rights struggles had often been associated with socialist or revolutionary movements, the new “identity politics” was quickly incorporated and institutionalised to help forge what political theorist Nancy Fraser called “progressive neoliberalism”. Leaving working-class women and members of ethnic minority groups to their fate as precarious workers competing in the service sector, progressive neoliberalism flooded all major public and private organisations in the policy-friendly guise of EDI. Lockheed Martin and Disney could claim to be doing their business on the same bedrock of liberal values as the University of Cambridge. Universities began to act as advertising hoardings for the meritocracy and tolerance that progressive neoliberalism claims to safeguard in the West’s deindustrialised and, since 2008, fragile economies.

The impact on academia was significant. A common complaint among scientists about their own disciplines was always that only a minuscule number of papers introduced new concepts or triggered interpretive shifts. The rest are merely niche-bound interventions prescribing minor adjustments to existing analytical frameworks. Post-structuralism offered the humanities and social sciences a seemingly endless expansion of niches in which such gently revisionist studies could take place. Each niche ended up with its own journal, or small group of journals, and its own specialist books, whether monographs or weighty tomes. This led to a process of fragmentation and dilution.

The academic publishing industry is a vast commercial concern. The roughly 20,000 niche humanities and social science journals are valuable vectors for career progression and for universities’ prestige and funding. While a few standout specialist publications receive hundreds of citations, many are read only a handful of times. Given the conflict between this overproduction in multiple niches and academics overloaded with work, editors struggle to find appropriate reviewers for book proposals and journal submissions. It’s virtually impossible to maintain intellectual standards in this fragmented, marketised milieu. Indeed, standards had taken a backseat behind the two products of this revolution inside higher education: a sprawling, unmanageable system of academic publishing; and a prioritisation of a university’s ideological appearance over its internal reality.

Modern academics forge their intellectual identities, adopt their personal styles and plan their career progression around these conditions. And that includes Jason Arday. Arday appeared to Cambridge management as a young, rather sensitive black man from a poor background who had surmounted extreme personal difficulties to achieve wonders. Aligning nicely with the diktats of critical race theory, he was a spectacular, made-to-measure poster boy for a university trying to demonstrate its anti-racist credentials. Employing Arday allowed Cambridge to present the vanities of fairness, tolerance and pristine meritocracy as realities to the general public, and to sell an attractive PR image to government. He was not an opportunity to be missed.

Unfortunately, Cambridge underestimated how far both intellectual and administrative standards have fallen. Issues with Arday’s work should have been detected and rectified by staff at Liverpool John Moores University during his PhD studies. If it had, he may have been prompted to improve the originality and rigour of his thesis. Improvement could have displaced the fantasies he thought necessary to enhance his image and employment prospects. At Arday’s previous jobs, the standard of his publications should have been scrutinised to ensure the quality was up to professorial standard. The fantastic claims in his biography should also have been questioned and verified. All this is nothing more than routine administration. But, in the turmoil of today’s fearful marketplace, it didn’t happen.

We can’t help but wonder how many academics have been a little too hastily fast-tracked to the top tier for reasons other than discipline-leading intellectual sophistication. Conversely, have others with the required qualities been overlooked and restricted to the lower tiers? Arday is neither a victim nor a crook, just an ambitious young man with a penchant for telling tall tales, actively recruited by a system keen to capitalise on his image.

However, in a precarious service economy in which hard-working, lower-tier academics producing incisive and sophisticated work are receiving redundancy notices, the revelations that followed his appointment at Cambridge were bound to cause some degree of broad-spectrum resentment. And, of course, the whole debacle hands ammunition to the racist far right. The university sector should be a refuge entirely independent from the prevailing political-cultural zeitgeist, not its nervous, uncritical servant. It is a quintessential public service that, like health, utilities and energy, requires public funding and should never have been marketised. Had Arday settled down as a senior lecturer in such a system, he could have avoided this scandal and still be working now.

It is also a sign of progress that Jason Okundaye can now publish this in The Guardian:

“To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.” That was the breathtaking response of Prof Jason Arday when The Guardian interrogated the details he provided of an alleged racist campaign of intimidation against him, which involved a severed pig’s head, a masked man wielding a knife and bullets in the post. Arday had been unable to provide evidence, and when The Guardian contacted the relevant parties, including a south London butcher and the police, his claims were either refuted or could not be verified.

Arday, whose appointment as professor of sociology of education at Cambridge became a widely lauded moment in the aftermath of Black Lives Matter, has found himself in the eye of the storm. Allegations of extensive plagiarism in his doctoral thesis, completed at Liverpool John Moores University, recently made their way from the Substack of self-described “race realist” academic Nathan Cofnas into the national press. The defence of Arday had rested on the fact that an investigation had already been conducted, and cleared him of plagiarism. And yet the case has taken on a life of its own.

In recent weeks, more of Arday’s story has come under scrutiny: from claims of having installed water points in South America and west Africa with the charity WaterAid (WaterAid said it does not send volunteers abroad), to having run 30 marathons in 35 days, the last dozen or so after suffering a hairline fracture in his leg. After mounting pressure, Cambridge announced that it had launched a formal investigation into his academic qualifications and honorary appointments. Following this announcement, Arday resigned from his positions at the university. Though he has chosen to step aside to preserve his “wellbeing”, this has become a national story that will not go away.

Allegations of plagiarism in a doctoral thesis do not usually make for riveting, front-page news. Indeed, in 2023, when the Cambridge history professor William O’Reilly faced allegations of plagiarising student essays, the press coverage consisted of barely half a dozen articles (a tribunal ruled the plagiarism was “the product of negligent acts but was not deliberate”). Few people could care less about what academics get up to.

But Arday could not expect to be similarly insulated by academia’s remoteness. This story has endured, stubbornly, because it is so perfectly calibrated for some of the most combustible charges of Britain’s culture wars: namely, that academic standards have been surrendered to a woke orthodoxy, and that minorities are unfairly advanced in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

The instinct of progressives had been to defend Arday; indeed, many went on to sign an open letter in support of him, seeing him as simply another black man under a sustained press attack. This was not least because the charges against him originated with Cofnas, who had been dismissed from his post at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 2024 after making pseudo-scientific claims that under a true meritocracy black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”. And for many in the rightwing press, this is their victory lap, their vindication. The spectacle of it is just too grim to behold. The headlines of “DEI darling” and “diversity poster boy” barely conceal their excitement. Gotcha!

I do not care to examine the quality of Arday’s scholarship, research or life story beyond what has already been written elsewhere. What concerns me is how little space remains for a genuinely progressive critique of institutional diversity practices – one capable of scrutinising how for many organisations and corporations symbolic representation has been a substitute for deeper reform, leaving it vulnerable to just this kind of backlash. It has also meant that the right has enjoyed a near monopoly on criticism of DEI, leaving it to frame it entirely on its own terms.

Let’s take a look back at the coverage of Arday’s appointment at Cambridge in 2023. The headline was that Arday, then 37, was to become the “youngest black professor” ever appointed at Cambridge and that his feat was particularly remarkable considering that he supposedly only learned to speak at 11, and to read and write at 18, having been diagnosed with global development delay and autism spectrum disorder as a child. The media circus around this appointment rivalled Hollywood press junkets, with newspaper, television and radio slots covering him on both sides of the Atlantic, including an NBC News item on his “inspiring story”.

I am not privy to the hiring process for a professorial chair at Cambridge. I do not know exactly why and how Arday got the job or who else was in the running. But what happens when an academic’s story is sold through him being the “youngest black ever” (sitting alongside familiar monikers such as “the first black” or “black excellence”) and asterisked by a tale of hardship? You are not encouraged or invited to engage with the substance of their scholarship; instead, you are invited to clap. Instead of his appointment conjuring the question “what new opportunities for research will this lead to?”, it was “doesn’t this make you feel good?”

What this means is that Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot, one who was particularly expedient for an institution that had been regularly embarrassed by its historic record on race: too few black students (in my cohort at Cambridge matriculating in 2015 there were only 15 black males out of 3,449 students); single-figure black academics (which is still the case); allegations of institutional racism. Independent of the merits or pitfalls of his own scholarship, what success looked like for Arday in this role was limited; what accountability could look like if misconduct occurred was constrained by him being a vehicle for Cambridge to signal its institutional progress.

These are not arguments that progressives should shy away from. Instead, they should own them. There is a real risk of this case being used to undermine black academics and others in positions of seniority. For all the talk of preferential treatment for black people in academia, it remains true that there are documented, systemic barriers for black students, including in their access to funding to advance their studies.

The mass investigation into Arday’s PhD may be presented as the pursuit of public and intellectual integrity, and yet the origin of this is grievance politics from those who feel diversity has blocked their own advancement. It comes with that malign charge of being a “DEI hire” or being in your position to “fill a quota”, the accusation that so often stalks black people elevated to senior positions. And so with Arday as an avatar for the black colleague who was promoted over you, the black child who was made head boy over your son, that process turbocharges.

In Arday, those on the right feel that they have found what they are looking for; that is why every drop is being wrung out of this story. His resignation will not end that. The next step will be to make this single case bear the weight of the ideological arguments they pile on it.

How do you resist that? By embracing and learning from the mistakes that were made here, not avoiding them out of discomfort. That means advocating for diversity without tokenism, the celebration of excellent black scholarship without the need for exceptionalism or academic celebrity. If we let only our opponents tell the story, then it becomes a parable about the hazards of striving for progress and equality, rather than about the institutions that reduced equality to a mere PR exercise.