Middlesbrough: Children of the Hydra

Paul Knaggs writes:

Nine people are dead in Middlesbrough this week, and a great many of the nation’s loudest broadcasters spent that week arguing about Nigel Farage.

Start with the facts, because the facts alone should stop anyone in their tracks. In the early hours of Saturday 22 August, a Volkswagen Passat travelling the wrong way down the A66 at South Bank collided head-on with a marked police vehicle. Seven people died at the scene: PC Tom Clough, 38, and PC Matthew Blades, 37, along with five young men in the Passat, Cole Worthy and Theo Rae, both 17, Makai Saddington, 18, and Michael Robert Cahill and Jakub Matusiak, both 23.

On Wednesday, less than a mile away, a house fire on Birchington Avenue in Grangetown killed seven year old Valentina Foster and her aunt, thirty four year old Natalie McDonald. Two men have been arrested on suspicion of murder. On Thursday morning a car rammed the wall of an empty house in South Bank. That afternoon a thirty nine year old man was stabbed in Eston. Cleveland Police, already stretched thin, have called in two hundred extra officers from forces as far away as Northumbria and South Yorkshire, along with the National Crime Agency, to hold the town together. 

That is the town James O’Brien invited his listeners to consider this week, under the title Why Middlesbrough Is Such A Dangerous Place To Live. He suspected the coverage would look very different “in modern Britain, in Brexit Britain, in the land that Nigel built” had the men responsible come from an ethnic minority background. O’Brien is an avowed and longstanding opponent of Brexit, and Brexit is exactly what he reached for, along with race, in a week when neither had anything to do with the deaths on the A66 or the fire on Birchington Avenue. Middlesbrough voted to leave the European Union by nearly two to one, 65.5 per cent, in a town where more than four in five residents identify as White.

Those two facts sit together uneasily with any theory that pins the vote on racial grievance rather than economic abandonment, because a straightforwardly White, working class town does not need a scapegoat of a different colour to explain why it voted the way it did. It needed, as the political economist Mark Blyth has argued of Brexit and its American cousin alike, a target for a working class backlash against decades of macroeconomic policy that had quietly declared their labour, their industries and their towns expendable. What we have everywhere, Blyth has said, are creditor-debtor standoffs, and Teesside has been on the losing end of that standoff since long before anyone had heard of Nigel Farage. Whether Reform’s leader has anything to say about this week’s events is frankly beside the point; the crash happened and the fire happened regardless of what he thinks. It was always easier to relitigate 2016 than to explain 2026.

Test his own theory against the calendar. In June, two brothers were jailed at Sheffield Crown Court after hunting down a rival with a car and, in the chase, running down sixteen year old Abdullah Yaser Abdullah Taleb, a boy who had fled war torn Yemen only months earlier and who, in the judge’s words, was simply “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Zulkernain Ahmed was jailed for life for his murder, his brother Armaan for manslaughter.

In May, two men were jailed in Manchester after filming themselves inhaling nitrous oxide at speeds up to 139 miles an hour through a red light, killing fifty year old Sylvester Abayomi as he drove to work, then discussing whether to report the car stolen rather than call for help. Sylvester’s partner, Denise Doyle, told the court afterwards: “You left Sylv to die alone.” Under O’Brien’s own test, perceived ethnic minority background, both cases qualify. Neither drew a fraction of the national outrage visited on Middlesbrough this week, and I can find no public record of either James O’Brien or Nigel Farage devoting so much as a segment or a post to either boy.

That is not proof of a conspiracy of silence. It is proof that the dividing line was never race to begin with. It is whether a death can be folded into a pre-written argument about Brexit and racism. Abdullah and Sylvester do not fit that argument, and so almost nobody outside Sheffield and Manchester ever learned their names.

What actually links Zulkernain Ahmed, Armaan Ahmed, Uways Hussain, Usmon Mahmood and the young men currently terrorising Middlesbrough is not their background. It is that every one of them is a child of the same hydra. So let us listen instead to the people who have spent years living with the thing itself, rather than the people arguing about it from a studio.

Abandonment: What Middlesbrough Is Really Telling Us

What the Two Andys Got Right, and Where They Stopped

Andy Preston, Middlesbrough’s mayor from 2019 to 2023, put it in language that will not surprise anyone who has lived near it. He described small, chaotic drug crews rather than criminal masterminds, men in their twenties who are, in his own phrase, gormless and stupid, but they are dangerous. Middlesbrough, he said, carries the highest crime rate of any English town outside the City of Westminster, where the figures are inflated by tourists. Andy McDonald, the town’s Labour MP, reached for a different word entirely. What residents living in fear are experiencing, he told LBC, is terrorism, and he is right that the diagnosis cannot be simple. His own summary of the cause was blunt: no jobs, no guidance, no consequences.

Preston wants faster justice and a police force that, in his words, bosses the streets. McDonald wants the same swift response, plus a serious conversation about causes he does not fully specify. Between them they have identified the entire shape of the problem without once naming its origin. A criminal underclass did not spring from nowhere, and it did not spring from Brexit, and it did not spring from a radio phone in. It was built, over five decades, out of decisions taken a long way from Middlesbrough by people who never had to live with the consequences.

The First Abandonment 

Teesside’s story starts with steel. The Redcar works, opened by Dorman Long in 1917, once supplied bridges from the Tyne to Sydney Harbour. By 2015 it was gone, its blast furnace and coke ovens closed for good with the loss of around two thousand direct jobs and thousands more in the wider supply chain. That closure was itself a repeat of an older story. Coal, shipbuilding on the Tyne, Wear and Tees, and heavy engineering across the North East had already been dismantled through the 1970s and 1980s as output shifted to cheaper producers overseas. What followed was supposed to be a second economy built on lighter industry, garment factories, food processing plants, meat packing lines, much of it staffed by women whose wages had kept working class households afloat once the men’s industries went. That replacement economy did not last either. Retailers chased the same cheap labour abroad that had already hollowed out the pits and yards, and by the 2000s those plants were closing too. Teesside was deindustrialised twice in one lifetime, and each time the compensation on offer was smaller than the last.

The Second Abandonment 

Here is the part of the story that gets left out entirely, and I have watched it happen to men I grew up alongside. When the industries closed, workers were told, in effect, to get on their bike. Many did. They retrained as bricklayers, joiners, electricians, plasterers, went self employed, chased contracts up and down the country the way the old industries once offered a job for life. And what they found, particularly after 2004, was a labour market flooded with EU tradesmen willing to work the same jobs for less. The Migration Advisory Committee’s own modelling found only a modest effect on wages overall, but it also found low skilled workers from the newer EU member states earning around four per cent less than comparable British workers doing the same job, and construction was one of the sectors where EU labour became most heavily concentrated.

Four per cent on a spreadsheet in Whitehall does not capture what it felt like on a building site in Stockton, watching a job you needed go to a man who would do it for less because he could live six to a house and send the rest home. The statistics and the lived experience do not fully agree, and that gap between the official picture and what people felt happening to them is not a footnote. It is the whole story. It is why so many post-industrial towns voted to leave the European Union, not out of hostility to any nationality, but because free movement was the second time in a generation that the market had been allowed to underprice their labour without anyone asking whether that was a price worth paying. Bradford, Oldham, Leicester and Birmingham, with their large British Asian populations, voted the same way for the same reason. This was never a white grievance dressed up as economics. It was a class grievance that the London commentariat has never quite forgiven the working class for having.

I grew up on the streets of Dunscroft and Stainforth, two small pit villages on the edge of Doncaster, and I know what abandonment looks like close up because I watched it happen from the inside. Stainforth South and Dunscroft Station Road have sat among the five most deprived neighbourhoods in the entire borough for years running, out of nearly two hundred. It was always a hard place. What it has become is something else. It was tough when I was a boy. It is hopeless now, and there is a difference between those two words that people who have never lived through it tend not to understand.

And this is not confined to old coalfield towns that wear their scars openly. I live now in Chesterfield, a small, quiet market town on the edge of the Peak District that most people would never think to mention in the same sentence as Middlesbrough, and I am watching the same disease take hold here in real time. This spring a sixteen year old boy was stabbed near his school on Storrs Road. In March, fourteen year old Finley Dawson was killed on an electric motorbike on Newbold Road, one more child in a national wave drawn to bikes that are illegal on the road precisely because nothing legal has been offered to them instead. This summer, gangs on and off electric bikes have been tearing through Queen’s Park, weaving between families and children on the cricket pitch, and it took the police the best part of an hour to reach two separate 999 calls about it.

Chesterfield sits on its own old coalfield, the same seams that once ran under Dunscroft and Stainforth, quietly hollowed out through the 1960s, 70s and 80s until there was nothing left to hollow. Nobody in Westminster thinks of Chesterfield as a crisis. That is exactly the point. The teeth do not care whether the town they land in has a reputation for trouble or a market square people call charming. They only care whether the ground has been sown.

Alienation, by Another Name 

There is an old speech that explains all of this better than any minister has managed this week. In April 1972, a Clydeside shop steward named Jimmy Reid stood up in Glasgow University’s Bute Hall to deliver his address as the university’s newly elected rector, and the New York Times reprinted it in full, calling it one of the great speeches of the century. Reid’s subject was alienation, which he defined as the despair of people who felt like pawns of economic forces beyond their control, permanently shut out of decisions being made about their own lives. He warned that a society built the wrong way round could dehumanise people, make them insensitive and self-centred, and that those who refused to be pawns in that game would simply be filed away by the establishment as malcontents.

Reid was talking about shipyard workers facing redundancy. He might as well have been talking about a nineteen year old in a tracksuit in Thornaby who has never had a job worth keeping, whose father lost the same chance in a different decade, and who has learned, correctly, that nobody in Westminster is coming. That does not excuse a single act of the violence and intimidation Middlesbrough has endured this week. Nothing excuses ramming a car into a house, or torching a vehicle to settle a score, or the almost unthinkable cruelty of a fire that killed a seven year old girl. But if you want to understand why a criminal underclass grows rather than shrinks, Reid supplies the mechanism better than any Home Office press release: exclude people from any real stake in decisions about their own lives for long enough, and some of them will stop believing the rules were ever written for their benefit.

Swift justice treats the symptom, not the cause 

Preston’s instinct, that consequences must come first and rehabilitation after, deserves to be engaged with honestly rather than waved away. He is not wrong that slow justice emboldens criminals and terrifies witnesses into silence, and a system where courts are backlogged for months does real damage to public confidence in exactly the way he describes. Nobody serious argues that intimidation of witnesses should go unpunished, or that a stabbing in broad daylight is a matter for sociology rather than a courtroom. Two hundred extra officers on Teesside’s streets this week were necessary, not optional, and the families who buried police officers this week deserve nothing less than a state that takes their killing with total seriousness.

But swift justice treats the symptom at the point it has already become criminal. It says nothing about why Middlesbrough keeps producing the raw material for that criminality in greater volume than almost anywhere else in England, faster police response times will not rebuild a steelworks, and a longer sentence will not hand a nineteen year old the apprenticeship that never existed. This publication reported last week that nearly a million young people across Britain are not in education, employment or training, and that the government’s response was a work experience scheme at Sainsbury’s, launched from Downing Street by a prime minister whose leadership campaign had just received over £164,000 from the supermarket’s former chairman. A generation offered noticeboards instead of jobs, and workshops instead of housing, is not a Middlesbrough problem. Middlesbrough is simply where it is currently visible.

Breaking the Chain 

Britain has already run the experiment that would fix this, and it did not require billionaire donors or a talk radio segment to work. Clement Attlee’s government built 806,857 council houses between 1945 and 1951, in a country that had just spent six years bankrupting itself to win a war. Public building on that scale did two things at once: it gave people secure, affordable homes, and it gave tradesmen guaranteed, well paid, local work that no undercutting migrant labour market could touch, because the employer was the state and the contract was permanent. A council with its own construction yard training its own apprentices to build its own housing stock is not nostalgia. It is the only policy on record that has ever actually solved the problem Andy McDonald says he wants solved, and it does more for the causes of crime than any sentencing guideline ever will.

None of this is an argument for indulgence toward the men currently terrorising their own neighbours in Middlesbrough. It is an argument about what happens next if the state contents itself with punishment alone. Heracles learned this the hard way at Lerna. Every head he struck from the Hydra grew back as two, because a blade alone cannot kill a wound that keeps its root. The monster only died once his companion began cauterising each stump the instant the sword fell, burning the ground that would otherwise have regrown it.

Middlesbrough’s own hydra was deindustrialisation, and in dying it sowed its teeth across the town, the closed yards, the shuttered high street, the flats with nothing left to save for. What grew from that ground is not a monster. It is a generation, and like the skeleton army that rose from Jason’s field in Colchis, they do not turn on whoever sowed them. They turn on each other, torching one another’s cars, ram-raiding one another’s houses over a debt or a slight, while the field that grew them goes untouched and ready to sow again. Arrest this crew and the ground remains sown. Another will rise to fight whoever is left standing, because the blade was never going to be enough on its own. It never has been. Only the cauterising was. The ground is still sown. Somewhere else it is already growing.

The Story London Keeps Missing 

James O’Brien’s audience, and much of the London commentariat with him, will move on from Middlesbrough within the fortnight, once the next segment presents itself. The more instructive response came from the man actually meant to be running the country. Speaking not from Middlesbrough but on a visit to South Wales, Prime Minister Andy Burnham offered his condolences and said “all of the support will be provided” to get to the bottom of what had happened.

It was a decent enough sentence, and also roughly nothing, the kind of promise any prime minister can make about any town without saying a single word about why that town keeps needing rescuing. While broadcasters and politicians hurl chants at each other about what they have or haven’t said, the subject itself goes on being ignored. And that is the real failure sitting underneath this week’s horror: not a newsroom’s bias, real or imagined, but the fact that Middlesbrough is being covered as a single, freakish, local horror story rather than as one field among many that got the same seed.

Consett got it. Corby got it. Hartlepool, Bootle, Sunderland, the Doncaster coalfield towns I grew up in, and great stretches of the Welsh valleys, all sown from the same hand for the same reason, all left to grow whatever grows when a place is stripped of work and offered a supermarket work placement scheme in its place. Nearly a million young people across Britain are currently not in education, employment or training, a figure this publication reported only last week, and every one of that million is standing on ground that was sown decades before they were born. Middlesbrough did not fail on its own. It is simply the field that came up first this year. 

Jimmy Reid closed his own address in 1972 with a line that has outlived every policy document written since: “A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings.” Middlesbrough has spent fifty years being treated like the former. It buried two police officers, a woman and a child in the same week, and the loudest response from London was an argument about Farage. Rebuild what was taken, and the town rebuilds itself. Keep asking why the natives are restless while refusing to say what unsettled them, and Middlesbrough will not be the last place this happens. It will simply be the first one anybody bothered to notice.

Something Irreplaceable

The Daily Telegraph has excelled itself with this conclusion:

Carl Dean died in March 2025. There were no children from her marriage, although Dolly Parton was a surrogate mother to her younger brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces, many of whom spent time living with her.

She is survived by her husband.

In spite of that, Lexi Ellingsworth writes:

As the topic of surrogacy ascends the ladder of political priorities, governments are wrestling with how to regulate this global marketplace and balance “ethical” models so supply can meet demand.

This inevitably leads them into a moral quagmire, involving complex issues ranging from child trafficking and the exploitation of women to the questions of what we know from basic reproductive biology and the false claim of a right to a child. It’s no wonder some governments cannot square this circle and say “no, it’s not for us”.

Some have. Kazakhstan has recently reached this conclusion. An increase in complex legal disputes, problems with citizenship and parentage, gaps in regulation and lack of oversight with agencies ultimately drove the decision to ban international surrogacy — but perhaps witnessing non-residents coming to the country for the purposes of getting a baby from Kazakh women is what finally motivated the government to close its doors.

In 2014 it was reported that domestic surrogacy in Kazakhstan was rising, with surrogacy pregnancies growing 10 per cent year by year — and Kazakhstan did not feature on the list of countries for parental order applications in England and Wales until 2023. So it’s a remarkable development, not because Kazakhstan is an obvious moral leader in women’s and children’s rights or that the issue was caught relatively early, but because governments with vastly different political traditions are arriving at the same conclusion: human reproduction should not be a global marketplace.

In 2024, Italy expanded their twenty-year-old law to criminalise surrogacy tourism. Though it has been disingenuously framed as anti-LGBT, large fines now apply with possible prison time for commissioning parents of babies born abroad.

Just last month, Taiwan voted to drop surrogate motherhood from an assisted reproduction Bill because of a lack of public support and pushback from feminist groups. Both Texas and Florida are reviewing state laws and two Bills have been tabled at the Federal level — one to prevent some foreign nationals and another to prevent sex offenders from obtaining a child through surrogacy. Many would naturally assume that a ban on convicted sex offenders obtaining a child through an arranged pregnancy was already in place. Sadly not. It’s about time, surely, that this particular loophole was closed.

Not for Ireland. An amendment that would have secured this was voted down in the 2024 debate and a deadline to expand EU human trafficking laws to include surrogacy was just missed. (The date of the deadline? Ironically, the World Day of Trafficking in Persons.)

Earlier this year, Chile’s Family Commission of the Chamber of Deputies unanimously approved a comprehensive ban and a cross-party bill to prohibit and criminalise surrogacy, as well as any intermediary or commercial activities related to the practice, is currently advancing through Parliament.

But where one door closes, another inevitably opens.

Malta has emerged as a potential surrogacy hub and the women there could be asked to pick up the slack from nearby Greece, which closed international surrogacy last year.

Australia also appears ready to relax their laws, with the Attorney General considering recommendations from the Law Reform Commission that would likely make domestic altruistic surrogacy substantially easier by eliminating legal obstacles. Pro-surrogacy stakeholders describe this as compassionate legislation that aligns with “modern family life”. In reality, it risks embedding surrogacy more deeply, making this ethically contested and harmful practice more convenient for the baby buyers.

For years, the industry has been quietly nomadic. When a country decides that it no longer wishes to rent out women’s bodies or export babies to wealthy foreigners, agencies pack up their bags and move.

Thailand banned surrogacy in 2015 following a series of scandals and that same year India enforced an administrative ban before fully closing its commercial market in 2021. Russia prohibited foreign intended parents, which arguably just pushed customers to target Ukraine’s women. With the invasion in 2022, this shifted again to neighbouring Georgia.Women in Africa are in the global market’s eyeline. Reports of agencies bribing Kenya’s Senators hit headlines in April and Nigeria is now the second most popular country for British baby-buyers after the USA.

It doesn’t stop there. I predict that Azerbaijan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan will soon become the new hotspots as Facebook facilitates agents who focus on these countries. The problem, in other words, is not just inadequate nation-level regulation but the market itself.

Beneath the euphemisms lies a disturbing logic. One woman is contracted and paid to conceive, carry and surrender a child to another person, with clinics managing the conception, agencies brokering the deal, and lawyers negotiating and getting paperwork signed. The child becomes the successful completion of a contractual obligation, with everything else being public relations.

The industry insists that international surrogacy empowers women — and yet we can’t ignore obvious economic imbalance. Wealthy commissioning parents almost invariably travel to countries where women have fewer economic opportunities. Poverty offers effective negotiating leverage, and the relaxation of laws always prioritises the buyers.

This is what makes the decision from Kazakhstan so significant. It represents another rejection of reproductive tourism — the idea that affluent Westerners should simply be able to shop around the globe until they find a jurisdiction prepared to produce and legally permit the family they desire.

Will Britain travel down the same road? Parliament will debate surrogacy reform this September, with proposals that would transfer legal parenthood to commissioning parents from the moment of birth, replacing the current parental order process which operates currently for both domestic and international arrangements. Gone are the days when half, or even the majority, of surrogacy in the UK was carried out on British soil. Now, 77 per cent of parental order applications are for babies born abroad.

This represents a profound constitutional shift. Motherhood no longer begins from the age-old principle that the woman who gives birth is a child’s mother. Instead, parental rights for others begin whilst the umbilical cord is still attached. Far from being an administrative tweak, this represents a legal and social revolution.

Campaigners frequently invoke emotional cases. Their suffering is often real and powerful, and yet compassion cannot answer the central ethical problem. Does the longing for a child entail a right to obtain one from someone else? Is it okay as long as you pay her enough? Is a baby a blank slate that strangers can imprint upon?

My answer to all this is a hard no. No one has a human right to a child. Parenthood has always involved limits imposed by biology, circumstance and opportunity. Science can overcome many of those limits, true, but technical possibility does not demand a legal entitlement.

The surrogacy industry depends on one claim: that every adult’s desire for parenthood should be met with a legal mechanism capable of satisfying it. Increasingly, governments around the world appear unconvinced. This is right and proper. The moral compass of society does not depend on a small section of society who wants the law to bend to their desires.

And Janice Turner writes:

When a celebrity has a baby via surrogacy someone is usually missing from the Instagram photo. Typically we’re shown doctors, a midwife, the commissioning parents, often a man posed semi-naked in a hospital gown as if he’s given birth. Meanwhile the woman who did lies exhausted and bleeding off-camera.

Under commercial surrogacy contracts banned in Britain, this woman may even be forbidden from holding the baby before it is swept away to a new home and she is left struggling with her hormones and emotions alone. This global industry — worth $17.9 billion in 2023 and projected to reach $139 billion by 2032 — is classified by the European parliament as human trafficking. Its objective is to turn a baby into a product created with one stranger’s egg and another’s rented womb: the concept of “mother” erased.

On September 7, MPs will debate abolishing the last vestige of humanity accorded these women by the UK: the right to change their mind. After appearing on This Morning, fashion entrepreneur Adam Frisby and his partner Jamie Corbett, who had a daughter via an American surrogate, raised over 100,000 signatures for a government petition calling for a surrogate mother’s rights to be removed at birth.

Currently, whether a baby is bought abroad or born after an altruistic surrogacy arrangement in Britain, commissioning parents must apply for a parental order to ensure the surrogate genuinely consented and to allot a social worker to assess the child’s welfare. Checks are far less rigorous than for adoption: these orders are almost always granted. Even so the surrogate’s name appears on the original birth certificate as “mother” and she can assert her rights to the baby for six months after it is born.

We have the late moral philosopher Mary Warnock to thank for preventing surrogates here from being reduced to Handmaid’s Tale vessels. As author of the landmark 1984 report on reproductive ethics, which established the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), she wrote: “Perhaps what I am saying, is motherhood is somehow sacred, as other aspects of nature may be; and if babies become commodities, we shall have lost something irreplaceable.”

Frisby and Corbett argue they still need the American surrogate’s consent if their baby needs urgent medical treatment, though it is inconceivable the NHS would so risk a child’s life. In fact the couple’s core objection is that any official recognition of the birth mother is an insult to families “like ours”. For wealthy gay men winning unimpeded, even state-funded, access to surrogacy has become a new human rights frontier, and most are impervious to the competing rights of often poor, exploited women they inconveniently need to realise their dreams.

I attended a London surrogacy convention where agencies boasted of recruiting foreign surrogates who were healthy, drug-free and biddable: good brood mares. In California and Mexico, surrogates lose their parental rights in utero, leading to a recent case where a couple ordered a surrogate to abort a foetus found to have a heart condition. She refused and fled across state lines. The baby was successfully treated at birth, then handed over — but the parents are still suing the surrogate.

So Frisby and Corbett are right: the government urgently needs to review our outdated surrogacy laws. How can commercial surrogacy be illegal in Britain — as it is in France, Germany, Spain and Italy — yet we allow anyone, even sixtysomething single men who we’d never let adopt, travel abroad and buy a child in often dangerous and amoral jurisdictions?

After all, the Home Office website has a list of countries with special restrictions on adoption. They include Ethiopia (where private orphanages may be paid to supply children), Haiti (lack of adoption safeguards) and Nigeria (concerns about corruption). Britain should follow Spain, whose embassies now refuse to issue passports to all babies born via commercial surrogacy. But in the first instance why not draw up a similar list for nations with the most lax and exploitative regimes?

Number one should be Northern Cyprus, a byword in unregulated reproductive medicine. Here no one is too old or dodgy for doctors to make them a cut-price baby using “travelling surrogates”, aka women trafficked from poor Caucasian republics. Sir Andrew McFarlane, president of the High Court family division, ruled last year on an “entirely self-centred” sixtysomething lesbian couple who each paid a “commercially exploited” Ukrainian to carry a baby there.

Next is Ukraine, where after the Russian invasion, commissioning western parents whined when surrogates refused to abandon their own kids in wartime to give birth in Polish clinics. What will these selfish people tell their children about the women who gave them life? Ukraine’s surrogacy trade has since moved to Georgia, where a recent New York Times exposé revealed Thai women being trafficked to Tbilisi, their passports removed, to carry embryos for Chinese men created with eastern European eggs. In Mexico, surrogacy is entwined with violent human trafficking gangs.

The list will need to be constantly updated: after India and Thailand banned surrogacy in the wake of baby farm scandals, rapacious agencies relocated. This year Taiwan, Chile and Kazakhstan instituted bans, but now clinics are eyeing Malta, Armenia or Kyrgyzstan. Africa, with many poor women, is an expanding destination: but why do we admit surrogate-born children from Nigeria when we have ethical qualms about its orphans?

Far from being the moment to abolish surrogate protections, it is time to examine our hypocrisy on commercial surrogacy. Baroness Warnock was right: motherhood is sacred. It is not a service to be bought from a woman forced to give up her name on a birth certificate, her face in a baby’s photo.

Protecting The Space

Andy Burnham may not be bothered enough to vote on assisted suicide, but Tim Sigsworth writes:

A university has warned an academic for opposing assisted suicide on social media. Dr Kevin Yuill, emeritus professor of history at the University of Sunderland, accused the institution of a “Kafkaesque” attack on free speech after he was sent a warning letter by one of its executives.

The academic was told to “reflect carefully” in June after the university received a complaint about the the “tone and nature” of his social media presence, which he uses to campaign against assisted suicide. Dr Yuill, 63, told The Telegraph the letter was a “veiled threat” that was “out of order” and risked harming academic free expression. “It’s an outrageous thing for them to do,” he said. “It seemed to be a veiled threat, and I think it’s too reactive.”

The university did not ask Dr Yuill for his response to the complaint and initially did not disclose to him what it was about. In the emails, seen by The Telegraph, he was instead asked to “reflect carefully” about his emeritus title because “carries an expectation that its use does not adversely affect the institution or conflict with its core values, including respect and responsible public discourse”.

“That was out of order,” Dr Yuill said. “It’s fair enough if they want to say something like, ‘Oh, we’ve received this complaint, what is your response?’ That would have been a reasonable thing. It’s a bit Kafkaesque when you get a complaint that you have no idea what it’s about, and or even which medium it was about. Where have I said this? When have I said this? To whom have I said this? If they had just said, ‘Look, obviously, please don’t bring the university into disrepute by anything you say’, I would have assured them that I don’t.”

Dr Yuill, who is chief executive of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia, was not initially allowed to see the complaint on the grounds that it was “submitted by a private individual and contains that individual’s personal and sensitive information”. It was later disclosed to him with his offending posts and the complainant’s details redacted, meaning he still does not know what the comments which prompted the complaint were.

The complaint centred on four accusations, including that he had shown a “lack of empathy” in debating assisted suicide and had described pro-assisted suicide campaigners as “Orwellian”. It also claimed he was causing “reputational damage” to Sunderland by “weaponising his public platform” and that his advocacy opposing assisted suicide meant he did not have the “objectivity expected of a university academic”. The university – which said in the emails that it “recognises and supports the principles of academic freedom and lawful expression” – did not take any disciplinary action in response to the complaint and Dr Yuill remains emeritus professor.

Lawyers for the academic are now asking the university to “make amends” by apologising to Dr Yuill and making a public statement expressing its support for freedom of speech. They argue that Dr Yuill’s beliefs are protected under the university’s code of practice on freedom of speech and academic freedom, the Equality Act 2010 and the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. “I’m hoping it will make them think twice before reacting to complaints of a similar nature, so my hope is it will be a bit of a lesson for them, which is why I’ve gone full on with this whole thing,” he said. “Not because it’s a threat to me, but for younger colleagues who are in paid positions, I don’t think it’s in anybody’s interest to have Sunderland censoring their ideas or even pushing them to self-censor their ideas.”

 Freddie Attenborough, research director of the Committee for Academic Freedom, which is supporting Dr Yuill, said the case was concerning. “Academic freedom means little if academics have to worry that expressing controversial views within the law might put their institutional status or privileges at risk,” he said. Universities should be protecting the space for those disagreements, not adding institutional pressure to one side of them.” Elliot Hammer, the employment solicitor representing Dr Yuill, said: “Academic freedom is incredibly important for the proper functioning of our higher education sector, and so I’m proud to represent Dr Yuill in this case.”

A spokesman for the University of Sunderland said: “The university has always supported, and will continue to support, the rights of its academics to freedom of speech, academic freedom and freedom of expression. The university requested that Emeritus Professor Yuill consider how his association with the university is presented in his own public communications and take steps where appropriate to ensure there is a clear distinction between his personal views and those of the university.”

Britain’s Common Sense Crisis

Aris Roussinos writes:

In her classic 1974 monograph Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village, the anthropologist Juliet du Boulay offers a telling vignette. A peasant woman is readying loukoumi, or Turkish delight, before guests arrive at her house for a name-day celebration, and du Boulay offers to extract the sweets from their untidy-looking box, and display them in a dish for better decorative effect. The woman disagrees, saying “No, that’s not as it should be”. The anthropologist disagrees in turn, provoking the woman’s final word on the matter: “It’s not that you don’t agree, it’s that you don’t know.” The woman cannot explain why her instinctive, customary approach is correct and the anthropologist’s reasoned innovation is not. It is simply a matter of common sense, in the literal sense of the shared but unspoken assumptions, “the common body of values and beliefs” that make up the lifeworld of the community, such that “in every statement, judgement, and action which is referred to or is derived from this body of traditional beliefs, the individual who is speaking or acting does so in his capacity not as a solitary individual but as a member of the total community”. By not knowing the “correct” placement of the sweetmeats, in contrast, du Boulay is shown, in a superficially minor way, to be outside the community: she simply does not share in its common sense.

It is perhaps instructive in the wake of the Arday affair, in which both progressive commentators and sociology departments have found themselves in want of “common sense” as most of us instinctively perceive it, to further examine common sense as a concept within anthropology, sociology’s academic daughter and rival. For the influential cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, making explicit a long-implicit concern of the discipline, common sense is a “cultural system” which “can vary dramatically from one people to the next”, and “rests on the same basis that any other such system rests; the conviction by those whose possession it is of its value and validity”. For the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld, suggesting the idea first as a “mischievous” provocation and then entirely seriously, “Social and cultural anthropology is simply ‘the study of common sense’” which is itself “the socially acceptable rendition of culture, and is thus as variable as are both cultural forms and social rules”.

As Herzfeld remarks, “common sense — the everyday understanding of how the world works — turns out to be extraordinarily diverse, maddeningly inconsistent, and highly resistant to skepticism of any kind”. It is, indeed, precisely the cultural misunderstandings between the anthropologist conducting his fieldwork and the people who he lives among that reveal “the mutual incommensurability of different notions of common sense — our object of study”. What is anthropologically significant about common sense is not that it is sensible but that it is held in common. It is common sense for the Azande tribesman, stubbing a toe or breaking a pot, to ascribe his misfortunes to witchcraft, where the Western observer would point to what are for us more pertinent causes: the two common senses differ wildly, demarcating two different cultural worldviews.

We may never fully understand what attracts such journalistic and legal luminaries as Carole Cadwalladr and Jolyon Maugham to the cause of the late fabulist and self-promoter Jason Arday. Certainly the many fantastic and self-contradictory claims Arday made over the course of his first stratospheric and then tragic career are an affront to the common sense of the cultural community as a whole. Perhaps, we wonder, trying to make sense of their worldview through our own cultural priors, they have simply gone too far and staked too much of their reputations to accede defeat now, despite the nonsensical nature of the claims they still defend. Could it be pure cynicism, we wonder, defending positions they surely now know not to be true to establish their positions within a political community? But instead, borrowing a way of interpreting the world from anthropology, perhaps it is more fruitful to focus not on the sensibility of their claims but their commonality. For while it is common sense to us that they have settled on an absurd and intellectually indefensible position, it is clearly self-evident common sense to them that they are correct. Beliefs that seem bizarre and outlandish to us provide them with social meaning, reinforcing the boundaries and worldview of their culture and allowing them to make sense of a confusing world.

The common sense of our own culture would, for example, make even an ambivalent observer of the Arday affair think twice before claiming that the forensic Guardian investigation, by a black journalist, of Arday’s fabulism was an example of racist “lynching” by the “right-wing press”. But to this strange and nascent culture within our midst such truths are self-evident. Perhaps “racism”, or its presumed progenitor “whiteness”, those invisible but omnipresent forces whose malignant presence they discern throughout our society, function for them as witchcraft does for the Azande. As Geertz observes, “It is when ordinary expectations fail to hold, when the Zande man-in-the-field is confronted with anomalies or contradictions, that the cry of witchcraft goes up. It is, in this respect at least, a kind of dummy variable in the system of commonsense thought. Rather than transcending that thought, it reinforces it by adding to it an all-purpose idea which acts to reassure the Zande that their fund of commonplaces is, momentary appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, dependable and adequate.”

Indeed, Geertz continues, “the cry of witchcraft functions for the Azande as the cry of Insha’Allah functions for some Muslims or crossing oneself functions for some Christians, less to lead into more troubling questions– religious, philosophical, scientific, moral– about how the world is put together and what life comes to, than to block such questions from view; to seal up the commonsense view of the world… against the doubts its inevitable insufficiencies inevitably stimulate.” Rather than unsettling their worldview, as our common sense would expect, the effect of the Arday affair upon the progressive tribe has been to reinforce it, allowing them to double down on their beliefs and further elaborating their all-encompassing moral cosmology. Absurd to us, the entire worldview makes sense to them, and clearly serves a social function. One need not agree with their precepts, as Evans-Pritchard did not agree with Zande cosmology, to recognise their importance as social facts, and value as an object of study.

Gently placing the Arday affair to one side, we can apply such methods to the Right as well. It is, after all, a political tribe just as much as the progressives, and one which places greater emphasis on its worldview aligning with the common sense of the wider national community. The recent proposal to ban first-cousin marriage, for instance, aligns with British “common sense” — we know, without needing to be told, that we do not do such things here. Such marriage patterns are anomalous and alien to the cultural community. And yet, as the anthropologist Adam Kuper makes clear in his 2009 work Incest and Influence, first-cousin marriage was the preferential choice of the rising bourgeois class of early 19th-century England, giving rise to such powerful “clans” as the Darwin-Wedgwoods, and the Macaulay-Trevelyans, which would dominate English cultural life, through their descendant spinoffs like the Bloomsbury Group, into the mid-20th century.

Like the Mirpuri clans of Northern England who are the object of the current proposed legislation, such preferential marriage arrangements were undertaken to maximise the economic resources of what became corporate kinship groups, outcompeting rivals and creating mutually reinforcing networks of patronage and influence. This pattern was broken up by economic liberalisation, reducing the material necessity for such arrangements, and by the outsized impact of fatalities in the First World War on the upper-middle class, forcing eligible women to widen their pool of marriage partners.

That the first-cousin marriage taboo, like the racism taboo, may be relatively new does not make it less widely held or natural-seeming — even “common sense” — today. Like the progressive appeal to racism as a causative factor operating within our society, the present-day political currency of that anthropological staple of differing “common sense”, the kin marriage taboo serves a social function: to distinguish between “us” and “them”, by demarcating the differing values of two distinct societies. The logical solutions for the Mirpuris addressed by the proposed legislation are thus binary: to jettison first-cousin marriage, and become “like us”, or maintain it and become legally as well as culturally outside the boundaries of the national community.

Britain’s dissident Right is increasingly adopting quasi-anthropological frameworks to make sense of the modern UK. The fact that the values of the liberal, upper-middle-class Victorian “130+ IQ Anglos” they laud did not, historically, differ all too greatly in this instance from the immigrant populations with which they are contrasted does not detract too much from the inner logic of their project, any more than the aberrant relationship between objective fact and their worldview does from the progressive one. Much of the newly-anthropological outlook of the British Right has much to recommend it: what is “the blob” if not a governing caste, a cultural superstructure which uses bureaucratic and legal power, shared social norms, rituals and beliefs to advance its collective interests? These norms are enforced with powerful taboos, and fearsome tests of ritual purity which the Arday fall-out has greatly accelerated, to the discomfort of cautiously sceptical progressives like Novara Media’s commentators, compelled to submit their errant cosmologies to the judgment of the tribe. Rather than gaining new adherents, this caste seems to prioritise thinning its own ranks through ever-stricter enforcement of its social norms. Theirs is a political project, or a culture, which sets itself apart from the interests of the political community or wider culture from which it is sprung, and that sees its purpose as either dismantling or overturning it.

Whether we should view modern progressives as a culture, or as a politically-orientated social structure, reflects older fissures within anthropology. As a discipline, anthropology was historically divided between British Social Anthropology, derived from Durkheimian sociology, and with a politically-minded focus on the notionally empirical social structures of “societies”, and American Cultural Anthropology, derived, via Franz Boas, from contemporary German notions of discrete and holistic “cultures”, which make meaningful sense of the world in their own interpretative ways. What they share, and what sociology now apparently appears to lack, is the emphasis on cultural interpretation through fieldwork, the seeing the world “from the native’s point of view”, as Bronisław Malinowski famously summarised the discipline’s craft, which provides a constant check to the cultural assumptions of the anthropologist himself. An “insider-outsider” in an alien society, the anthropologist is forced, through encounter with its differing notions of common sense, to reflect on the partiality of his own. It is an in-built check to cultural solipsism that sociology, the study of advanced Western societies by members of those same societies, inherently lacks. The practice of autoethnography as practised by Arday and his Cambridge patron Hilary Cremin shows nominal social scientists conducting a form of anthropological technique briefly fashionable in the first flush of the discipline’s engagement with critical theory, but which was always predicted by serious anthropological theorists, as it has since proved, to become a solipsistic intellectual dead-end.

But this is not merely a matter of abstruse social-scientific debates. When Arday could blame “whiteness” for questions being raised about his credentials and competence by his academic peers as well as his students (as in this paradigmatic work of autoethnographic solipsism), while valorising, as his posthumous defenders do, his own blackness as a defence of his probity and moral worth, we have moved beyond an anthropological understanding of “culture” into the world of power politics and hierarchy: the meat and drink of social anthropology. Who is subaltern and who is dominant when Arday could set the police on the Times Educational Supplement, summon the legal power of London’s most intimidating law firm on sceptics of his manifold claimed achievements, and weaponise accusations of racism against his academic critics, just as his defenders today invoke this most powerful taboo to muzzle the press in advance of their own political power? These are political matters, relating to the fundamental distribution and exercise of power within our society, and are thus legitimate areas for intellectual enquiry and debate.

As the anthropologist Terence Turner cautioned in 1993, progressive “multiculturalists use the term culture in different ways, and for different purposes, than anthropologists”, as a political tool “of the cultural nationalists and fetishists of difference, for whom culture reduces to a tag for ethnic identity and a license for political and intellectual separatism”. Sniffily disregarding its intellectual output, Turner observes that “to the extent that it has developed a theoretical analysis, it is primarily a conceptual framework for challenging the cultural hegemony of the dominant ethnic group”, so that “Culture, as such, becomes a source of values that can be converted into political assets, both internally as bases of group solidarity and mobilization, and externally as claims on the support of other social groups, governments, and public opinion all over the globe”. For Turner, prefiguring today’s febrile discourse, at its worst all this is merely “an intellectual pseudopolitics that implicitly empowers the theorist while explicitly disempowering real cultural subjects”.

Yet in doing so, he notes, the essentialist claims on identity — on race, gender, religious belief — made by progressive multiculturalists for political ends mirror and thus reify those of the presumed dominant culture. Just as Kuper observes, multiculturalism preserves “insidious assumptions” on the organic wholeness of cultures long jettisoned by anthropology itself, which are put to fundamentally Romantic and reactionary ends, and are “distantly related to certain Counter-Enlightenment discourses about ethnic identity”. As Kuper notes, “how can one know whether a person’s cultural identity is authentic? Only if it is further assumed that identity is fixed by descent.” Arday’s Labour Party defender Dawn Butler, for example, is, by virtue of her apparently self-penned poem on the spiritual, physical and moral superiority afforded to her by her skin colour, in common sense terms clearly a racist. Yet her racism is surely an inversion of what she perceives as white racism, similar to the way medieval black magic was merely an oppositional inversion of Christianity rather than a coherent belief system in itself. If whiteness and blackness are parallel constructs of the colonial encounter then why should the modern progressive not deconstruct blackness, and drive it out of the academy?

These are questions, provocations that anthropology can pose but which it is not its role to answer: the mere destabilising of the culturally-specific assumptions behind them, the grappling with their own partiality and cultural boundedness is enough. Can sociology in its current parlous and solipsistic state pose these questions? One does not imagine that career advancement in today’s Cambridge Department of Education would result. This is where anthropology, with its broader and more quizzical perspective, comes in, for, as Turner claims, “much as St. Paul revealed to the Athenians the identity of the unknown god they had been worshipping, anthropologists might play a useful role in helping multiculturalists realize the revolutionary implications of the course upon which they have embarked”.

For just as academic sociology, taken as a culture, is marked by an aversion to “common sense”, which it broadly views as something to be overturned rather than a spur to deeper analysis (as it is for anthropologists), progressives have seemingly settled on a social system or political project — it is not entirely clear which of the two is preferred — set on the destabilisation, dismantling or total destruction of the “common sense” norms of the wider national culture.

As an object of anthropological enquiry, such a development is fascinating and worthy of study. As a political project within democratic conditions, it is obviously disastrous for its adherents, as our last prime minister found. The sheer hatred Keir Starmer inspired among ordinary voters goes beyond rational analysis of his strengths and weaknesses: he ruled according to the common sense of his own social and cultural tribe, and against that of the wider society. Laws, intended to produce positive outcomes, were followed zealously because they were laws, whether their outcomes were positive or not. Such a course of affairs was deemed so unnatural, such an affront to our common sense that Starmer became a folk devil quite out of proportion to his bumbling and incompetent nature.

It is in this literal culture war — a term, as Kulturkampf, incidentally coined by the German anthropologist Rudolf Virchow — that our new prime minister finds himself. Much of Andy Burnham’s recent messaging — on North Sea oil, or the Net Zero push — seems intended to position him as aligned with the common sense of the wider political or cultural community and against that of his progressive caste. The relentless northwestern messaging of the Burnham government is not because he is a provincial bore, though he may be, but because it correlates to widely-held stereotypes within the British cultural zone — commonsensical beliefs — about the no-nonsense pragmatism of Northern English culture. He is invoking, and appealing to, a different type of commonsensical worldview than Farage, who addresses himself primarily to the tradesmen of southeastern England. On some matters, the two groups may hold a shared common sense — and indeed the next election will be decided on this question.

What Burnham appears to understand is that, however intellectually interesting the cultural worldview British progressives have now settled on may be to observe from without, does not present a viable path towards political success. Insofar as, viewed from outside, their beliefs take a coherent form, it appears to be one of direct opposition to common sense, in which the most outlandish and bizarre claims are made precisely to alienate as many potential adherents as possible, and reinforce the purity of the in-group. When they have lost The Guardian and Private Eye, we can deduce, they have lost even the establishment centre-left, still tentative adherents to our society’s common frame of understanding the world. For the progressive part, even The Guardian and Novara are now “polluted”, in the anthropological sense, by their perceived contact with “the Right-wing”, the theodicy against which their moral world is constructed.

When we say that policies or outcomes are wrong or unfair, what we mean is that they violate our understanding of how things ought to be; they simply go against our common sense. The fundamental issue highlighted not so much by Arday’s various fables as by the political furore following his death is that the way in which our society is run in large part goes against the dominant cultural understanding of how our society should be run, to what ends and with what guiding beliefs. The belief systems professed by some within the highest ranks of the British establishment are, to most of us, as self-contained, unfalsifiable, and as alien as if they belong to an entirely different culture, a distant society we can only puzzle at from outside. It is common sense to them, but not to most of us. This creates a cultural disturbance inviting in, though not limited to, extreme political turbulence. The electoral collapse of the Left results not from the fact that progressives do not agree with us, but like du Boulay in her Greek mountain village, that they do not know: they are outside the bounds of the wider society.

But Burnham is not a social scientist: what is of meaningful interest to him is not what hidden patterns the opposing worldviews unlock about their respective cultures, but which sense is more common, and thus commands more votes. His future therefore rests upon whether or not he can realign the Labour Party with common sense — in both the detached anthropological and our instinctive folk usages of the term.

The Political Rub

The acronym in Britain is “EDI”. “DEI” is American, the E stands for something different, those two letters are a universe, and the use of “DEI” in Britain is as indicative as the use of “Lake America”.

What mattered for his academic appointment was not Jason Arday’s life story, however embellished as is common among teachers at all levels and always funny when it is found out, but his academic work, which does seem to suggest unduly accelerated promotion, in that it was not yet professorial. Nathan Cofnas, on the other hand, publishes only contributions to a wholly discredited field that has had horrific consequences far beyond any ivory tower.

Freedom of speech does not include the right to a particular platform. Both Cambridge and Ghent now need to explain how and why they ever appointed Cofnas, while both the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Belgium, each of which has played no small part in those horrors, need to explain why they ever granted him a visa. As Professor Steve Hall writes:

Cofnas, race science and genetic politics. Please allow me to explain. Bear with me - it's complex but I'll try to boil it down as much as possible.

How does skill/intelligence specialisation work? Very simply - and a lot of further reading recommended here - a master protein called HIF-1 activates a configuration of specific survival genes required by the environment, although it doesn't deactivate or destroy but temporarily relegate others. There's no permanent genetic 'fixation', only a temporary and sometimes spectacular configuration which gives the impression of 'fixation' to the uninformed. The basic genome, the core, flexible, multi-tool DNA sequence, remains unchanged. A few generations in a different environment would activate a different configuration. This explains the varieties of culturally heritable but genetically and affectively/cognitively flexible 'intelligence' and practical skills we find in different environments.

Take Kenya as an example of specialisation. Generations of living and training at altitude altered phenotypic plasticity, allowing Kenyans to be relatively and famously good at long-distance running. They also developed specific farming techniques such as terracing, trenching and microclimate selection to cope with issues such as climate, steep inclines and soil erosion. All of this required constant attention, development and maintenance. They had neither the time, the educational infrastructure nor the survival incentive to sit around in a luxury apartment like John von Neumann doing maths puzzles and learning languages with the help of paid governesses, the environmental source of his highly developed but rather narrow IQ-friendly intelligence.

Which brings us to the politics. White, middle-class right-wingers in the West are in an extreme panic. Their 'successful' imperial background encouraged the specific and admittedly broad intellectual qualities required for the environment they were creating - science, technology, militarism, competitive individualism, hierarchical organisation, markets, financial operations, increased surplus production and so on. A temporary genetic configuration was established, no doubt, and some individuals excelled on that specific landscape.

Then, as always, history moved us along. Former agricultural nations such as Russia began to catch up. The foolish financial 'creditor class' exported too much of its manufacturing to the East. The consumerised, market-worshipping West faced cultural decadence, de-skilling, anti-intellectualism and incompetent leadership as successful but stupid oligarchs bought their way into power, aided by the narrow intellectual skills of the tech and media industries. The populations of the ascending nations faced a whole new set of requirements for intellectual and practical development. It takes a few generations, but they adapted quickly and their flexible genetic, cultural and institutional systems responded.

And here's the political rub. You can see the nervy panic in the faces of the likes of Cofnas because, quite simply, the white Western middle classes are slowly but inexorably being outcompeted in all the dimensions of their own rather ugly game. The success of those abroad risks inspiring those at home. Reacting like frightened animals, the extreme right wing of the middle class are attempting to recall obsolete racial pseudoscience in a desperate attempt to reaffirm their superiority as a fixed quality and justify the continuation of the privileges that maintain their dominance. They also hope that the pseudoscience might 'fix' their new competitors as genetically inferior, a justification for denouncing them, controlling the flow of social mobility and keeping at least most of them trapped in the lower tiers of their societies, deemed unworthy of the long-term educational investment they need. Thus, the principal focus of attack is the 'woke' public education system. Destroy that, and they might win the day and maintain their dominance. We can't allow that to happen.

While Fleur Hargreaves and Imran Mulla write:

Academics at the University of Cambridge privately argued in 2024 that Nathan Cofnas, who accused Jason Arday of plagiarism last month, should not have been hired, Middle East Eye has learnt. Cofnas, a self-described race realist, has been in the headlines after sociologist Arday died earlier this month. His death followed a media campaign accusing him of being a serial plagiarist and fabulist. Cofnas has since been placed under investigation by his employer, Ghent University in Belgium, over public comments he has made. But he has been supported by the US government and tech billionaire Elon Musk, and promoted by right-wing media outlets and podcasts.

Now scrutiny is growing into Cofnas’s academic record, particularly at Cambridge, which was also Arday’s university. Cofnas was dismissed by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in April 2024 after a blog post he wrote in February that year claiming race was linked to academic ability. Cofnas said black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” under a true meritocracy, and argued that there “must be some barriers set up between races in order for each one to express its own unique genius”.

On 23 February a private meeting was held responding to student protests over the blog post. It was attended by Bhaskar Vira, the pro vice chancellor for education, as well as members of the Cambridge philosophy faculty - which Cofnas was part of - and around 20 philosophy students. During the meeting, according to minutes seen by MEE, the pro vice chancellor said that many among the university’s senior management were “outraged” by the situation. 

Vira explained that while Cofnas was a fellow of Emmanuel College, one of Cambridge’s constituent colleges, the university itself was now considering how it could respond to the blog post. Vira also said that in his personal view, Cofnas had crossed the line regarding concerns over “freedom of speech”, but that it would be “foolhardy for us not to seek legal advice” on the legal issues surrounding free speech.

Angela Breitenbach, then the chair of the philosophy faculty, said that “if one could’ve Googled, one would’ve found out more” about Cofnas’s views before he was hired. She admitted the hiring process was “not satisfactory ultimately”. Cofnas was appointed in 2022 as a Leverhulme Trust early career fellow. Breitenbach said the hiring process had involved one or two people who did not necessarily read everything on an applicant’s CV, but that the process had since been changed so applications would be available to the whole faculty. Sophie Dandelet, an associate professor, suggested Cofnas’s views on race could negatively affect his ability to teach students. MEE has contacted the University of Cambridge, Dandelet and Brietenbach for comment.

Cofnas dismissed by Cambridge college

In March 2024 a petition by Cambridge students and academics calling for Cofnas’s dismissal gathered more than 1,200 signatures. After Cofnas was dismissed by Emmanuel College that same month, he sued the institution for belief discrimination. But the college won the lawsuit on the grounds that Cofnas’s blog post had caused it reputational damage. However, Cambridge dismissed student complaints against Cofnas in late 2025 after an investigation. The university had adopted free speech rules in 2024 which allowed “controversial or unpopular opinions within the law”.

Ghent University, which currently employs Cofnas as a postdoctoral researcher, suspended him last week pending a disciplinary investigation into “recent public statements” that he made. This followed the death of sociologist Jason Arday, who resigned from Cambridge after it announced an investigation into his academic record earlier this month following a storm of press coverage. US Ambassador to Belgium Bill White condemned Cofnas’s suspension and said the Trump administration would review its relationship with the university. President Donald Trump has often criticised Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) legislation, a political framing that has increasingly been imported to the UK - so much so that it is widely referred to by its American term, DEI, rather than the British equivalent, EDI.

Cofnas announced on Thursday that he was being allowed to stay at the university to work on his research and thanked the US ambassador for his help, although the university said his disciplinary inquiry remains ongoing. Aside from being supported by the US government, Cofnas has also been promoted in the past week by Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X.

Criticism of Cofnas’s work

The Guardian reported this week that professors at Ghent University earlier this year accused Cofnas of having “very limited expertise” for his academic role. Ghent’s philosophy department sent an official statement to the university’s rector on 28 May questioning his qualifications and "limited expertise”. The Guardian quoted a leading academic in the philosophy of science, who described Cofnas’s work as “abysmal” and “shoddy”, and accused him of presenting “speculative racial theories as science without providing even a shred of evidence”. “We find it very improbable that Nathan Cofnas was the best out of 14 candidates,” the philosophy department’s statement said, alleging that there had been a lack of transparency around his selection, which a “large majority” suspected had been “an ideological choice … decided in advance”.

In response Cofnas said: “My academic qualifications are a matter of public record.” He added: “The silliest accusation is that I am ‘uninterested in the academic exchange of ideas’. The people who said this are trying to get me fired or even thrown in jail for expressing my ideas.” In 2023 Cofnas posted on X: “There are obviously personality differences between Jews and non-Jews… On average, Jews are better than gentiles at capitalising on their [intelligence]”.

Cofnas accused Jason Arday of plagiarism in a Substack post last month, basing his allegations on an AI detection software. Cofnas described Arday as “retarded”, “mentally disabled” and “just another DEI hire” in public comments. Cofnas’s allegations were picked up by The Telegraph, which published the story on 24 July under the headline “Cambridge diversity poster boy in plagiarism row”, and subsequently published 42 articles about Arday before his death.

‘The hegemonic hounding of Professor Arday’

An analysis by media watchdog NewsCord has found that 229 articles were published on Arday by numerous media outlets in just 22 days. Of these, 188 appeared in the nine days before his death, averaging almost 21 articles a day, after Arday resigned from his role at Cambridge, saying he had reached “the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure”.

Although newspapers claimed their reporting was “in the public interest”, NewsCord founder Nima Akram pointed out that only 166 articles were published about Peter Mandelson in the two weeks after the Epstein files were released - many merely mentioning him - despite accusations that Mandelson leaked sensitive government information to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“The hegemonic hounding of Professor Arday by UK media as a collective can only be described as a shameful witch-hunt,” Akram told MEE. More than 218,000 complaints have been made to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) through NewsCord’s campaign website - well over doubling the previous record set by its complaints tool for the media campaign against Misan Harriman, and almost 10 times the number lodged against Jeremy Clarkson’s 2022 Sun column about the Duchess of Sussex, which held the record before that.

Numerous opinion columns and online posts claimed Arday had a largely fabricated backstory. He was widely accused of being a serial plagiarist and fabulist. But last week a Middle East Eye analysis found that key claims Arday made, which had become central talking points in attacks on him, appeared to be true. Another MEE analysis this week found that the characterisation of Arday as a serial and unrepentant plagiarist does not stand up to scrutiny. Instead, an examination of his work and the controversies surrounding it revealed a more complex picture. 

“Elements of the press boast that they are watchdogs, but they are also attack dogs,” Des Freedman, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths University, told MEE, adding that “instead of punching up ... they punch down,” going after vulnerable people under the guise of acting in the “public interest”. “It is a fake public interest because it is so utterly disproportionate to what they need to know about in terms of interrogating, of asking questions of power,” Freedman said. He argued the frenzy was the product of a “coordinated, international right-wing movement”, using Arday as a scapegoat to promote culture war issues and anti-DEI policies.

Cofnas’s network of supporters and allies

Byline Times reported last week that Cofnas’s allegations against Arday were boosted by a network linked to Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of US spy firm Palantir. After Emmanuel College Cambridge had sacked Cofnas in 2024, the Free Speech Union (FSU), a pro-free speech advocacy group, launched a fundraiser for Cofnas, portraying him as a victim of an attack on academic freedom.

A series of investigations by Byline Times linked the FSU to a wider network of academics supported by Thiel’s chief of staff. James Orr, an academic in Cambridge’s divinity faculty and an adviser to FSU, hosted a series of talks by Thiel at Cambridge in January, known as the “Antichrist” Lectures, and held student meetings at his home alongside race science advocates and right-wing political figures. Orr also serves as Reform’s head of policy, and has been described as Reform leader Nigel Farage’s “kingmaker”, while US Vice President JD Vance, called him “my philosopher king”.

Online magazine Aporia promoted Cofnas’s arguments through a series of essays and interviews, and published an article on 8 August calling Arday’s case “the bitter fruit of equalitarianism”. Aporia serves as the public-facing arm of the Human Diversity Foundation, now known as Polygenic Scores, which is linked to the far-right German party Alternative für Deutschland.

Indeed, Cofnas is too much even for Spiked, where Albie Amankona writes:

The Jason Arday saga unfolded like a fable: the allegations of plagiarism, staged racist attacks and fabricated achievements captivated the world before his tragic and premature death. In the weeks since, one thing has bothered me: the media’s relative lack of curiosity about the man who helped spearhead the crusade against him, Nathan Cofnas.

Cofnas is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University and a former fellow at Cambridge. His trajectory has been extraordinary. The Jewish-American academic built his early reputation dismantling Kevin MacDonald’s pseudoscientific anti-Semitic theories, arguing that sweeping evolutionary claims about Jewish power were methodologically dubious, heavily cherry-picked and fundamentally incapable of proving causation.

He then went on to establish his own biological explanation for Jewish exceptionalism, based on a hereditary, above-average IQ in Jewish populations. Intentionally or not, this move flattered his own ancestry while edging close to granting scientific legitimacy to one of anti-Semitism’s oldest tropes.

Cofnas has since deployed theories of ‘race realism’ against black populations. In a display of pure hubris, he compares his banal ideas in ‘A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution’ – which advocates rolling back 20th-century civil-rights advances – to Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a claim as absurd as Jason Arday’s wildest myths.

Across both mainstream and alternative media, interviewers have proved completely incapable of challenging Cofnas. On LBC, Nick Ferrari pressed him on his assertion that, in a meritocracy, ‘blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment’. Yet Ferrari flinched when Cofnas laundered the claim through a Harvard study on undergraduate admissions, which projected black enrolment dropping to 0.7 per cent under strict academic criteria and without a DEI leg up. This let Cofnas falsely attribute his own sweeping generalisations about race to Harvard itself.

Even within the national context of the United States, Cofnas’s defence collapses. Extrapolating the 0.7 per cent figure, referring to graduates at one elite Ivy League institution, to claim there would be no high-profile, high-achieving black people in a nation of 330 million people is statistically unsound.

I do not deny the heritability of individual human traits. While studying education and economic development at the London School of Economics, I examined Nordic adoption studies showing that some children’s educational outcomes align more closely with their biological parents than their adoptive ones. Individual heritability is a documented scientific reality.

However, it is absurd to extrapolate narrow, localised datasets into sweeping pronouncements about billions of people based on race, especially when two populations in sub-Saharan Africa can share as much genetic distance as an African and a European – a point argued by Angela Saini in Superior: The Return of Race Science. What’s more, working in finance has taught me a fundamental truth: statistics are easily massaged, whether to cover up a bad balance sheet or to promote abject nonsense. Asserting an intrinsic biological hierarchy across entire continents based on sparse data from developing regions or a single Ivy League admissions projection is lazy at best and farcical at worst.

Crucially, the assumption that IQ tests measure raw intelligence independent of environment is fundamentally flawed, as Joseph Henrich has demonstrated. If we accept Cofnas’s rigid hereditarian logic, how do we account for the birth-order effect, where older siblings consistently score higher on IQ tests than younger siblings born to the exact same parents? Furthermore, the 20th-century surge in global IQ scores – the Flynn effect – was largely driven by expanded schooling, public health and cognitive enrichment, not by rapid genetic selection. To isolate a true biological racial IQ gap, one would need to control for every conceivable cultural, socioeconomic and environmental variable, a task that remains virtually impossible.

Indeed, every metric Cofnas uses to infer black cognitive inferiority – including lower test scores and higher crime rates – is routinely documented among white working-class populations in post-industrial Britain and America. If group-level disparities proved biological unfitness, Cofnas would be forced to conclude that the white working class is genetically unsuited for modern society.. White British pupils rank among the lowest-performing demographics in the UK, trailing almost every ethnic minority group. In fact, low-income ethnic minority students on free school meals regularly outperform white British children who are not economically disadvantaged. Some of the top-performing state schools in England educate a disproportionate number of black students, such as Katherine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School, Brampton Manor Academy and St Olave’s, to name a few. Across the Atlantic, historical precedents tell a similar story. Under Jim Crow segregation, black schools like Dunbar High School, in Washington, DC, regularly outperformed white schools despite receiving significantly less funding and facing systemic discrimination.

Do conservatives who uncritically endorse Cofnas’s claims about black capability also accept the logical conclusion of his framework, that white working-class families are also ‘biologically hardwired’ for failure? I should hope not.

Let’s be frank, there is nothing ‘real’ about Cofnas’s so-called race realism. If I’d submitted an essay with methodology this porous, my tutors would have picked it apart line by line. He has relied on flawed methodologies to construct a rigid racial hierarchy, one that conveniently places people of his own Jewish ancestry near the top and people of my black ancestry near the bottom. I worry about the broader ramifications of such appalling scholarship gaining mainstream currency – for Jews, for black people and for everyone else.

If our media class cannot dismantle arguments this banal and structurally unsound, we are leaving the door wide open for more batty ideas to permeate through society unchallenged.