In Defence of Sociology

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.

Supply: A Practical Answer

Paul Knaggs writes:

On 6 August, the Morning Star published a substantial reply to an argument I have made repeatedly in these pages: that the unrestricted movement of labour can serve capital as surely as the unrestricted movement of goods, by expanding the available workforce, weakening bargaining power, and letting employers import workers rather than invest in wages, training and the people already here. Roy Wilkes named me, named this publication under its former title of Labour Heartlands, and went back through Marx, Lenin, the Comintern and the history of immigration controls to argue that the socialist tradition stands against my position.

Our disagreement lies somewhere harder than either of us first admitted: what happens when capital is free to move production, money and labour across borders, while the working class is told that controlling even one of those movements is morally beyond the pale?

Britain has just supplied a practical answer.

In 2025, some 15,723 doctors trained in British medical schools applied for specialty training in the NHS. So did 25,257 doctors trained overseas. Between them they were chasing 12,833 posts. More than two thousand British graduates judged appointable, who had passed everything, who had cost the public purse the better part of half a million pounds each to produce, were offered nothing at all.

The British Medical Association went to war over it. Resident doctors struck in December. The government blinked, and on 5 March this year the Medical Training (Prioritisation) Act received Royal Assent after being driven through the Commons in a single sitting day. NHS England’s June figures show what it did. Offers to non-prioritised applicants fell from 2,168 to 163 in one recruitment cycle. For the first time, every GP training place in the country went to a UK graduate or to someone already working in the health service.

That was a migration control. It was demanded by a trade union, drafted by a Labour government, and welcomed by the people it protected. No detention centres, no dawn raids, no British ICE. Nobody was deported. A rule was written about who gets first call on a publicly funded training place, and the careers of two thousand young doctors were saved by it. 

I raise this because Roy Wilkes, writing in the Morning Star, argues that no such thing is possible.

THE GENEROUS PART 

Wilkes has done something the British left rarely bothers with. He read an argument he disagreed with, named the man making it, and answered it at length. He names me, he names this publication under its former title of Labour Heartlands, and he reaches for Marx on the Irish, for Lenin, for the Comintern and for the Chinese Exclusion Act. That deserves a reply rather than the usual scrap.

It deserves one all the more because a good deal of it is correct.

He is right that deindustrialisation, not immigration, gutted the towns I write about. The mills and the pits did not close because of arrivals at Dover. They closed because capital discovered it could break production into pieces and reassemble them wherever labour was cheapest and least organised, and because a British state that could have stopped it chose not to. 

He is right that the small boats coverage is theatre, wildly disproportionate to its share of the numbers, and useful chiefly to politicians who would rather discuss anything at all than the price of a two bedroom flat.

He is right that scapegoating is the oldest management technique there is, and that a workforce arguing about accents is a workforce not arguing about pay.

I have written all of this myself, more than once. Our disagreement is narrower than his framing suggests, and a great deal more interesting.

TURIN AND KRAGUJEVAC 

Here is where his argument comes apart, and it comes apart on his own strongest ground. 

Wilkes treats the movement of capital and the movement of labour as opposites. Capital, he says, keeps the reserve army penned in the southern megacities through border controls, so removing those controls would loosen its grip. Outsourcing is the enemy. Migration is the remedy. 

Go and look at a car factory. 

Stellantis built 475,090 vehicles in Italy in 2024, the lowest figure since 1956. Passenger car output fell by 46 per cent. Production at Mirafiori in Turin, the birthplace of Fiat, collapsed by 70 per cent, and around 2,400 workers were put on furlough at roughly 1,100 euros a month against a normal 1,600. Its chief executive at the time, Carlos Tavares, explained publicly that building the Alfa Romeo Junior in Italy rather than Poland would have added something like 10,000 euros to the retail price. He was not being coy. The differential is the strategy. 

Now look at Kragujevac in Serbia. As Mirafiori stutters through shutdown after shutdown, the Serbian plant is running twelve-hour shifts across Saturdays and Sundays to meet demand for the Fiat Grande Panda, and has taken on hundreds of extra staff. Its workforce of around 4,500 includes roughly a thousand workers brought in from Italy, Spain, Turkey, Morocco, India, Pakistan and Nepal.

This is not outsourcing versus migration. It is one firm, in one quarter, using both levers on the same balance sheet. The Italian worker on furlough in Turin and the Nepali worker on a twelve-hour shift in Kragujevac are being managed by the same people according to the same logic. Wilkes has correctly identified one hand and then argued that the other hand is our friend.

THE SENTENCE THAT GIVES THE GAME AWAY 

He answers me directly, and in answering me he hands over the argument.

Capital as a whole, he writes, does not want open borders. It wants something more precise: “Employers only want those limited numbers of migrants who meet their precise needs.”

Quite so. That is not a refutation of my position. That is my position, stated by Roy Wilkes, and stated rather better than I stated it. 

If employers obtain the quantity, the category and the terms of labour they require, then migration policy is being written to specification. Someone does the writing. And we can name them, because they publish. 

Britain now operates a Temporary Shortage List, live since July 2025, granting visa access below the normal skill threshold to occupations judged important to the government’s Modern Industrial Strategy. From the middle of this year, employer bodies must file approved workforce plans to keep their occupations on it. A Labour Market Evidence Group can advise restricting visas where a sector is deemed over reliant on foreign labour. Engineering technicians are in. Construction trades are in. Chefs and butchers are out. Care workers were shut off entirely. 

That is not a border. It is a procurement system. Employers state requirements, government converts them into Immigration Rules, and the composition of the British working class is adjusted accordingly. 

Wilkes has examined this machinery and concluded that because it is selective rather than open, it cannot be serving capital. The selectivity is the service.

THE EXPERIMENT WAS RUN, AND THATCHER SIGNED IT 

There is a version of this argument in which we cannot know what unrestricted labour movement does to wages, because it has never been tried. 

It has been tried. For two decades. Across a continent. 

The Single European Act was signed in 1986 by Margaret Thatcher, who then championed the eastward expansion of the Community into the former Soviet bloc. Dennis Skinner, who watched the whole thing from the green benches and set it down in his memoir, put the purpose plainly: “The Single Market’s main aim was to supply cut-price workers to capitalism.” 

He was not describing a conspiracy. He was describing a design brief. Free movement of labour was one of four freedoms, and the other three were capital, goods and services. It was never a workers’ charter that capital reluctantly tolerated. It was a single mechanism with four settings, and the wage differential between Wigan and Wroclaw was not an unfortunate side effect of it. It was the operating principle. Asparagus was cut in Norfolk at Polish rates because that is what the system was for, and a Fiat is assembled in Poland rather than Turin for precisely the same reason. 

The left spent thirty years defending one setting on that machine while attacking the other three, and called the arrangement internationalism.

THE QUOTE THAT ISN’T THERE 

Wilkes builds the historical spine of his case on California in the 1870s. Denis Kearney whipped up anti-Chinese agitation that fed into the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The American writer Henry George demolished Kearney’s arguments in an 1880 essay, and Wilkes tells his readers that Karl Marx “warmly welcomed” the piece and “agreed wholeheartedly” with George’s position. 

That did not happen. 

Marx’s actual verdict on George survives, in a letter to Friedrich Sorge dated 20 June 1881. George, he wrote, was “theoretically… utterly backward.” He accused him of understanding nothing about the nature of surplus value, dismissed his land tax as the work of a “panacea-monger,” and, reaching for the very kind of writing Wilkes praises, remarked that George’s article on California showed nothing but a talent for what Marx called “Yankee-advertising.” A theorist filing a rival somewhere just above snake oil is not a comrade shaking his hand. 

There is a second claim doing even more work in Wilkes’s argument: that the state’s exclusion of Chinese labour is what strengthened the employers and dragged wages back down by 1898. On his own source, California’s daily wage rose to $2.42 after exclusion in 1884, then fell to $1.59 by 1898, below where it started. Wilkes reads that fall as proof that a repressive state weakens the working class whenever it acts. He does not ask what else happened to America between 1884 and 1898.

Quite a lot happened. Through the 1870s California’s wages sat above the rest of the country partly because the state was still cut off, a Gold Rush economy trading at a premium behind a wall of distance. That wall came down in 1885, when the Santa Fe line broke into Los Angeles in direct competition with the Southern Pacific, triggering a rate war that opened California to the cheap, mass-produced goods of eastern factories. Local industry now had to compete on national terms or close. Then in 1893 the country fell into the worst depression it had yet known: more than fifteen thousand businesses and hundreds of banks failed, several of the very railroads that had opened California to the national market went down with them, and unemployment climbed past one worker in five. 

Wages fell across the whole of the United States in those years, in states that had never heard of Denis Kearney and excluded nobody. If a repressive state acting against migrant labour is what drove wages down, the effect should appear only where that state acted. It appears everywhere, because the actual cause was a national depression, not a Californian statute. 

Capital does not need a compliant state to weaken workers. An oversupplied labour market does that on its own, whether the surplus arrives on a boat from Guangdong or is manufactured by a banking collapse in New York. Scarcity is what gives workers leverage. Panics, monopolies and unregulated competition are what take it away, and open borders stop none of the three.

MARX SAID BOTH THINGS, IN THE SAME LETTER

Wilkes reaches for the letter of 9 April 1870 to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, in which Marx describes the English worker’s hatred of the Irish worker as a division deliberately cultivated by the ruling class, the secret of English capital’s power. 

He is quoting a real letter and quoting it accurately. He is also quoting the second half of a paragraph.

Read the sentence immediately before it. Marx writes that Ireland constantly sends its surplus population to the English labour market, and that this “forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position” of the English working class. That is not an aside. It is the premise. The antagonism Marx goes on to describe is manufactured, yes, but it is manufactured on top of a real material injury that Marx names first and does not deny.

Marx held both propositions at once, and any honest reading has to hold them too. The wage effect is real. The racial hatred built on top of it is a weapon aimed at stopping workers from acting on that wage effect together, against the employer who engineered it. Take away half of that and you get either the Reform UK position or the Morning Star position. Marx held the whole of it. 

Nor is the canon as settled as Wilkes suggests. In 1907 the Second International met at Stuttgart and condemned in terms the employers’ importation of cheap labour used to break workers’ organisations and depress wages. Its answer was not exclusion by race. It was the outlawing of coercive contract labour, minimum wages, shorter hours, and migrant workers organised into unions on equal terms. Same movement, same century, different conclusion. 

ASK CESAR CHAVEZ 

If the claim is that every immigration control in history has been a racist instrument wielded by white workers against black and brown ones, then there is a name that has to be answered. 

Cesar Chavez led the Delano grape strike from 1965 and marched to Sacramento in 1966. He fought to end the Bracero programme precisely because it delivered captive, deportable Mexican labour to growers at a price they set. And in 1969 he marched through the Imperial and Coachella Valleys to the Mexican border, alongside Ralph Abernathy and Senator Walter Mondale, in protest at growers importing undocumented workers to break his strike. 

A Mexican American union leading a mostly Mexican membership, demanding that the state stop the flow of workers being used against them. Not one part of that is explicable within Wilkes’s framework.

And I will state the rest of it, because leaving it out would be the same trick I have just accused him of. The UFW reported undocumented strikebreakers to the immigration service. It ran what it called the Illegals Campaign. In 1973 it strung a wet line along the Arizona border near Yuma, and men under the direction of Chavez’s cousin Manuel beat people who tried to cross. Dolores Huerta objected to the language in the room and was slapped down. It is an ugly episode and I am not going to launder it. 

But consider what it actually demonstrates. When there is no lawful, democratic, accountable control of who enters a labour market, and organised workers can see with their own eyes that they are being undercut, they do not shrug and reach for a leaflet on international solidarity. They go to the border themselves, and it turns violent, and the people who get hurt are the poorest workers on the crossing.

The wet line is not an argument against border control. It is a picture of what fills the vacuum where border control should be. Wilkes proposes to make that vacuum permanent and universal, and calls it internationalism. 

WHAT ROY WILKES IS ACTUALLY PROPOSING 

Roy Wilkes does not stop at humane treatment or equal rights, both of which I support and have argued for repeatedly. He proposes abolishing the status of illegality altogether, so that everyone enjoys full civil and employment rights regardless of how they arrived. And he proposes that once the grouse moors and the great estates are in common ownership, Britain could comfortably sustain ten times its present population.

Ten times. Something close to seven hundred million people on these islands. 

I do not say this to sneer. I say it because his readers deserve to see the proposition whole. This is not a case for better managed migration against a cruel alternative. It is a case for no immigration enforcement of any kind, resting on a land settlement no British government has attempted since the Conquest. 

There is also a shadow over his historical analogy that he does not acknowledge. He praises the emigration of seventy million Europeans between 1850 and 1920 as a safety valve that relieved wage pressure at home. Those Europeans went overwhelmingly into colonies and settler societies. The valve opened onto other people’s land. 

Whatever lesson we take from that century, it cannot be a template for today. The Aboriginal peoples of Australia, the Māori of New Zealand and the indigenous nations of North America already paid the price for Europe’s so-called safety valve.

THE THING HE GETS EXACTLY BACKWARDS 

Follow his deepest argument through to the end. If labour can move without restriction to wherever capital has settled, capital sets the price of labour on a single global market. The wage floor is not London’s. It is Dhaka’s. Bernie Sanders understood this long before it became unsayable. 

Exit is not solidarity. It is the individual escape of the fortunate few from a condition the many cannot escape, and it leaves the employer’s power entirely intact, because the employer never needed a passport in the first place. Ask the man on furlough in Turin whether the Nepali worker in Kragujevac has weakened Stellantis. 

The answer to capital’s mobility is not workers’ mobility. It is control of capital. Capital controls, public ownership, sectoral bargaining, industrial planning, training our own people, and a state with the nerve to use all five. Every one of those requires a political community with a border around it, because that is the only unit in which anyone has ever made capital do what it did not wish to do. 

Wilkes says there is only one way to defend a border, and that is to turn the state’s repressive apparatus on fellow workers. The Medical Training Act says otherwise. It defended a labour market with a rule about who gets first call on public investment, and it did so because a union asked. Controls need not mean raids. Insisting that they must is a counsel of despair, and it hands the entire terrain of border policy to Nigel Farage, who will use it in ways neither of us wants. 

That is my quarrel, in the end. Not that his position is too generous. That it surrenders the argument.

The left cannot demand a planned economy and then declare the single largest input to that economy off limits to planning. It cannot campaign to nationalise water while treating the number of people drinking it as a question no decent person asks. Workers in this country need homes, and 172,420 children were living in temporary accommodation last June, and every serious housing plan begins by knowing how many households there will be. 

Roy Wilkes and I want the same employer in the dock. We disagree about whether the working class is permitted to hold a lever. 

A border is not a weapon aimed at workers. It is one of the very few levers workers have ever got their hands on. Which is precisely why we keep being told it is beneath us to touch it.

General Dynamics

Adam Johannes⁩ writes:

In 2018, Plaid Cymru stood alongside campaigners who forced an arms fair out of Cardiff. Today, a Plaid Cymru-led Welsh Government is helping organise one.

That contradiction lies at the heart of the controversy surrounding the Defence Security Resilience Cymru summit – an event campaigners have dubbed, “The Welsh Government Arms Fair” – taking place on September 3 and 4 at the International Convention Centre at Celtic Manor in Newport.

Anti-war and anti-arms trade groups are calling on the Welsh Government to cancel the event. 

This is not only about one event, but the gap between Plaid’s rhetoric in opposition and its decisions in government. 

In 2018, I was arrested, handcuffed and detained in a police cell for 12 hours while peacefully protesting the Cardiff Arms Fair, an event that we successfully drove out of our city. 

At the time, Plaid Cymru said it stood with campaigners like me challenging the global arms trade.

Plaid MPs condemned the event in Parliament, tabling an Early Day Motion that referred to the Defence Procurement, Research, Technology and Exportability (DPRTE) exhibition as the “Cardiff Arms Fair”. The motion expressed “disdain” for an event connecting government departments with “weapons dealers and suppliers” and criticised the British arms trade for fuelling conflicts that caused “significant civilian suffering from Gaza to Yemen”. 

Leanne Wood, Plaid Cymru’s former leader, challenged Welsh Labour’s Ken Skates over his involvement, asking how support for what she called a “bazaar of brutality” could be compatible with Wales’s human rights obligations. 

Heledd Fychan, now a Welsh Government minister, was also a vocal critic of the previous Welsh Government’s involvement in the DSEI arms fair in London, describing it as a “contemptible event”.

Only last year, Rhun ap Iorwerth criticised Eluned Morgan’s Labour administration for giving £500,000 of Welsh public money to an arms company whose products may have been used by Israel against Palestinian people. He called the decision “shocking and shameful”. 

But now Plaid Cymru is in government, and the position has changed. Welsh public money is being used to co-organise an event involving General Dynamics, a major arms company connected to Israel’s military supply chain, while BAE Systems, another major arms manufacturer supplying Israel, will be exhibiting. 

What changed? Did the weapons become less deadly? Did the suffering caused by war become less important? Or did political power make it easier to abandon principles that once appeared non-negotiable?

Arms Fair? 

Some may question describing the summit as an ‘arms fair’. But this is the same term Plaid Cymru itself has used when opposing similar events.

The organisers state that the summit will bring together more than 2,000 attendees and over 60 exhibitors to “connect buyers, suppliers and innovators across defence, security and national resilience”. They say the purpose is to help businesses gain a “competitive advantage” by entering defence supply chains and benefiting from increased UK military spending.

That is precisely what arms fairs do. They bring together governments, military institutions, weapons manufacturers and suppliers in order to expand arms production and sales.

The Welsh Government is co-organising the summit with Business in Focus, ADS Group and General Dynamics Land Systems. 

ADS Group has been described by Campaign Against Arms Trade as the trade body for the UK arms industry, representing major weapons companies and promoting the interests of arms manufacturers. 

General Dynamics Land Systems is a subsidiary of General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest arms companies. General Dynamics has supplied weapons to the Israeli military during what First Minister Rhun ap Iorwerth has described as a genocide in Gaza. It has also supplied arms to authoritarian governments including Saudi Arabia.

By partnering with major arms suppliers to Israel, the Welsh Government risks contradicting Plaid Cymru’s own 2024 conference vote in favour of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, including an arms embargo. 

Military Expansion 

But the issue goes beyond individual companies. It is about what kind of economy Wales should build. 

The summit aligns Wales with the UK Government’s programme of military expansion and a wider global arms race. Across Europe, dramatic increases to military spending is being funded through deep cuts to public spending. Rearmament has consequences, and those consequences are being felt by ordinary people through austerity. 

The Welsh Government argues that expanding the arms industry will create jobs. But research by the Transition Security Project suggests that while increased UK military spending will create some employment, funding it through cuts to other areas of public spending will result in nearly twice as many job losses overall. 

Wales already has the highest unemployment rate of any UK nation. The skills of our engineers, technicians, scientists and workers should be directed towards socially useful production in areas such as renewable energy, public transport, affordable housing and rebuilding our public services. 

Every pound diverted into excessive military spending is a pound not invested in tackling the real crises facing Wales, from climate change and poverty to the shortage of affordable housing and pressure on public services. 

Wales also has the highest poverty rate in the UK. A government that claims to stand for social justice should stand for welfare, not warfare. 

If the Welsh Government proceeds, the anti-war movement will organise a mass demonstration outside the summit on its opening morning. The message will be clear: Stop the Welsh Government Arms Fair. 

If Plaid ministers are prepared to put their names to the arms trade, those opposed must make their opposition impossible to ignore.

The Focus Firmly Back

Victoria Munro writes:

Eight days into the two-week inquest of Peter Lynch — a Rotherham grandfather jailed for his part in the 2024 riot outside an asylum seeker hotel — the tension that has been simmering since the beginning finally boils over. After a short shouting match with the lawyer representing his family, coroner Nicola Mundy orders the jury out, retires to her private chambers and, minutes later, abruptly boots everyone out of court. Her staff periodically emerge from the locked room to apologise that they can’t tell us what is going on, before eventually sending us for an early lunch.

It’s no surprise that this inquest proved explosive, on more than one occasion. Following his death two years ago, Peter Lynch went from a total unknown — one of 120 people sentenced for taking part in a mob several times that size — to a right-wing cause célèbre. “Peter Lynch was one of us,” Tommy Robinson posted to his approximately one million followers on X at the time. “Tormented to suicide? Away from his family!” A week after his death in late October 2024, thousands attended a demonstration which Robinson organised in his memory, with some wearing custom t-shirts that declared “I AM PETER LYNCH”.

Just days after his death, Telegraph columnist Isabel Oakeshott wondered whether the 61-year-old was Britain’s “first political prisoner” before describing his sentence and eventual death as “a stain on the British state”. The Guardian’s Owen Jones argued jailing those with racist views could never cure them of their bigotry. But the media’s fascination with Lynch hasn’t extended to time-consuming reporting about his death. For all but the first and last two days of his inquest, I was the only journalist in the room.

Back on day eight of proceedings, we are eventually allowed to shuffle back into Doncaster Coroners Court. “What happened before, frankly, I hope I never have to see again,” coroner Mundy tells us sternly. “In 20 years sitting as a coroner, I have never been subjected to such open disrespect in court.” Though this specific argument began after she objected to some of the body language displayed by the family’s barrister Richard Copnall — she alleges he has been looking at the ceiling, raising his eyebrows and pulling faces — it’s not the first time she has grown frustrated with him. At several points, she steps in when Copnall attempts to challenge witnesses on whether Lynch’s actions, both outside the hotel and in prison, were actually racist. “I have said many times that this inquest is not to prove whether Mr Lynch was a racist,” she tells him at one point, “but rather to explore his mental health.”

After Copnall apologises to the court “unreservedly,” adding that “no disrespect was intended,” coroner Mundy seems satisfied that we can resume. “I want to put the focus firmly back on Mr Lynch,” she insists.

Many readers will be familiar with the disturbing events that took place outside a Holiday Inn in Manvers on 4 August 2024, but it’s worth outlining Lynch’s involvement that day. 

The riot targeted a hotel housing asylum seekers in a small town on the Rotherham/Barnsley border, one of several pockets of unrest around the country that summer triggered by the shocking murder of three young girls at a dance class in Southport. The killer, Axel Rudakubana, was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents, but viral rumours spread on social media suggested he was an asylum seeker who had arrived on a small boat.

Lynch arrived at the hotel that day wearing a Tommy Robinson t-shirt and bearing a hand-written placard listing the people and organisations he believed were “all corrupt”, including MPs and journalists. Parts of his list were more baroque and suggested he had fallen into the world of online conspiracy theories, mentioning NASA, the Deep State and a smudged section that appears to read “freemasons working for the elites”.

At first, the protest outside the hotel was not unlawful, according to sentencing remarks from Judge Jeremy Richardson KC. Even once the crowd became “difficult to control and increasingly violent,” at which point Lynch started yelling abuse at the officers present, Richardson suggested that the 61-year-old would only have been charged with the relatively minor offence of threatening behaviour, if things had stopped there.

Things did not stop there. Photos show rioters hurling chairs at the hotel’s ground-floor windows and setting a large bin on fire next to the building — our reporter Dan, present that day, overheard a man remark “burn them all”. Despite acknowledging Lynch never attacked anyone or the hotel, Richardson argued he had “encouraged others to behave violently” through his behaviour. “You were abusive to officers, you would not move, you made racist remarks, shouting ‘scum’ and ‘child killers’. You were unquestionably endeavouring to rev up the situation as best you could.” Since the court had a duty to make it clear “that participating in this form of violent disorder will be punished severely,” Richardson noted he would have handed out the most severe sentence possible — four years — had Lynch not pleaded guilty. Instead, his sentence was two years and eight months.

“I didn’t know my dad was attending the Save the Children rally,” Lynch’s son Lewis told the court, in a pre-written statement read out in court, “but it didn’t surprise me as he felt passionate about ensuring the country was safe for his grandchildren.” Lewis was also sentenced to two years and eight months for taking part in the riot and was sent to the same prisons — HMP Doncaster and later HMP Moorland — as his father. “He didn’t understand what he had done to get such a harsh sentence,” Lewis’ statement added, “and he felt like his whole life had fallen apart.”

Throughout the inquest, there is much discussion of the fact that Lynch had never been in prison before and how overwhelming prison life can be to those unused to it. At one point, the prison offender manager assigned to Lynch in HMP Moorland says: “He was 61 and had found himself in prison, he came across as embarrassed about his situation.”

It’s clear that Lynch, who was born in Mexborough and lived with his wife Andrea in Wath-upon-Dearne at the time of his arrest, was a regular attendee of demonstrations focused on grooming gangs. A YouTube video posted last year shows both him and Lewis at a protest outside Parliament in 2019, which called for an inquiry into the scandal. (In late 2025, over a year after Lynch’s death, the government finally set one up.) Joel Goodman, a freelance photographer who has covered many similar protests, believes he photographed Lynch at a Tommy Robinson rally in Leeds a year earlier. In several of the notes Lynch wrote from his cell, he references attending a rally organised by Robinson in Trafalgar Square the month before the riot.

In a note Lynch addressed to his family from his cell, he denied that his motivations for attending were racist. “I have not hurt anyone, other than their feelings, for not protecting our children. The police and prosecution people seemed to turn it all into racist slurs.” In a letter addressed to the judge, which he did not send, he insisted: “I have worked with many people of all colours, creeds and religions and I have never had problems with anyone.” Another letter to his family recounts a conversation with his solicitor, in which he allegedly insisted he had no problem with immigrants “so long as they are checked so they are not rapists, murderers or terrorists, as it will be our neighbourhood where they are placed and our families and children at risk”.

Lynch was far from the only Rotherham resident still harbouring resentment over the town’s infamous grooming gangs scandal. The fact that the majority of those who perpetrated the abuse were of Pakistani heritage has led some to insist that local authorities did not act out of a fear of being deemed racist. Indeed, in her 2015 review of the council, Louise Casey noted a culture of “suppression and misplaced ‘political correctness’” and said council staff and councillors lacked the confidence “to tackle difficult issues for fear of being seen as racist or upsetting community cohesion”. (Professor Alexis Jay, whose 2014 report revealed the scale of the abuse, disagrees, arguing it was instead due to a “desire to accommodate a community that would be expected to vote Labour”.)

Casey’s report found that by “failing to take action against the Pakistani heritage male perpetrators of CSE in the borough, the Council has inadvertently fuelled the far right and allowed racial tensions to grow.” When I visited Rotherham two months before the riot, a white resident admitted: “You can see that bubbling under the surface. It seems as though they were allowed to do what they wanted.” / Outside the hotel, when Lynch shouted at officers from South Yorkshire Police that they had failed to protect kids, he arguably had a basis for that specific claim. In September last year, the police watchdog IOPC upheld a complaint that senior officers in the force had “failed in their statutory responsibilities to protect children”. Then again, Lynch was not protesting outside a police station, he was protesting outside an asylum seeker hotel. When he shouted “scum” and “child killers,” it could be taken two ways: did he mean the police officers, or those cowering within the building?

Carole Bradley, an employee at asylum seeker charity ASSIST Rotherham, remembers she was on her way to offer support to those in the hotel on 4 August and couldn’t understand at first why police were refusing to let her anywhere near it. “Some friends of ours were there, who are socialists and quite big supporters of asylum seekers,” she tells me over the phone. “They were a bit misguided, to be honest, because their presence actually made things a lot worse.” Over the 25 years she has worked supporting asylum seekers in Rotherham, she has seen a significant increase in hostility. “I think people have got to a point where they are absolutely fed up with everything and don’t know enough about asylum to make informed judgements,” she says, “and they are just kicking back at anyone available at the time.”

‘He didn’t trust me’

On 10 August, six days after the riot, Lynch was arrested and taken to Shepcote Lane Police Station for questioning. Witnesses who met him there tell the court that he refused to answer any questions put to him, other than to confirm he was: “Peter, living man, son of Michael and Lily”. The court later hears from interviewing officer DC Lisa Yates, who suggests this phrase indicated a belief in “sovereign citizenship,” a radical movement that argues all forms of government rule are illegitimate. Some adherents, she explains, reject any legal document, including birth certificates. “They choose to introduce themselves through biological lineage. That’s how I took that phrase.” 

At this point, the court begins to explore what will prove to be a thread that runs throughout proceedings: whether Lynch’s more unusual behaviour should have raised concerns about his mental health, despite there being no such issues in his medical record.

For example, towards the end of the inquest, HMP Moorland prison officer Paul Friend notes that Lynch seemed to believe “the whole legal system was conspiring against him”. When Copnall suggests this belief might have been evidence of delusional thinking, Friend insists it’s par for the course. “I have seen many prisoners before that believe the system is out to get them personally and they have never exhibited mental health issues or gone on to self-harm in my knowledge,” he says.

Lynch appeared in court, submitted a guilty plea and was immediately remanded to HMP Doncaster on 12 August, just over a week after the riot. After receiving his sentence from prison 20 days later, he was moved to HMP Moorland on 2 September and found dead in his cell in the early hours of 19 October. In total, the period from the hotel riot to his death was just 76 days.

Throughout the inquest, the court hears how Lynch was repeatedly offered or told how to access support for his mental health and insisted that he didn’t need it. Indeed, during one of the only times he was seen by a mental health professional — when Siobhan Riordan, a registered mental health nurse at HMP Moorland, pulled him for a private chat — it quickly emerged she was there by mistake. She’d been instructed to check on Lynch’s son, Lewis, and had grabbed the wrong Mr Lynch. Since she was there anyway, she offered her time if Lynch did want to talk.

Riordan recalls that, at times during their conversation, he became “quite tearful,” although this seemed a proportional response to the “very strong sense of injustice” he was feeling. When asked why she chose not to flag that Lynch might be struggling — something the court heard any member of prison staff could do at any point by “opening an ACT document” — she again suggests his responses were typical. “Other people I have cared for have had the same sense of injustice and reacted in the same way,” she says, adding: “He was not extremely distressed, he was not hysterical, and the episode was quite short-lived.” 

However, while listening to two weeks of people recounting their interactions with Lynch, it seems clear he was the kind of person who would be reluctant to accept help, especially from anyone working for the justice system that had robbed him of his freedom. A member of prison staff at HMP Doncaster, for example, recalls Lynch saying he was receiving support from other prisoners but that this “made him uncomfortable”. The court also hears from Adam Harper, the prison offender manager Lynch was assigned at HMP Moorland, who recalls Lynch “broke down crying” during their first interaction.

“He was very frustrated with the turnover from being sentenced to being in prison, he didn’t understand the system,” Harper recalls.“He said he didn’t trust me, although he was very polite, but he didn’t trust justice system staff.” Given that Lynch was, at one point, hiding his face in his hands, Harper chose not to push him to open up in this first meeting, in the hopes they could slowly build a rapport. This conversation took place on 10 October. The two men never met again.

During the inquest, the jury hears written statements from two witnesses describing events at HMP Doncaster that, if they occurred as depicted, clearly demonstrated Lynch was a danger to himself. (The jury is reminded that, because the lawyers available are unable to question these witnesses, the evidence must be taken with a grain of salt.) Lynch’s former cellmate Leonard Tyler wrote that he was “a really nice, genuine guy” but “struggling with prison life,” adding that “feared for his family and what police might do while he was in prison” and “worried how his wife would cope financially with the bills”. When Lynch’s son Lewis later arrived at the prison, he assumed the two men would want to share a cell. “But Peter wasn’t keen on that idea,” Leonard wrote. “I think he must have been planning suicide and that’s why he didn’t want to be with his son.” 

Prison records show that Tyler and Lynch shared a cell for just six days — from 13 to 19 August — and, in this short period, Lynch attempted suicide twice, according to Tyler’s statement. Tyler “didn’t think it was [his] place” to inform staff, but he told Lewis after they met in the exercise yard. 

Lewis’ own statement alleged that, following this conversation, he spoke to a custodial manager at the prison and suggested an ACT should be opened. “But I know nothing happened after reporting this,” he wrote. Staff from HMP Doncaster tell the court they have no record of either these incidents or Lewis raising concerns, although a custodial manager who fits the description he gave is off sick and currently uncontactable. However, the prison’s head of safer custody, Neil Godfrey White, told the inquest he was confident the conversation cannot have occurred as described. “I have been in the prison service nearly 20 years now and I have never seen a situation where an individual attempted suicide but no action has been taken by anyone.” 

The court hears that, because a note was added to Lynch’s prison record at HMP Doncaster describing him as racist, neither prison would let him share a cell with non-white inmates. “It’s not to pick on people,” an officer from HMP Moorland explains. “It protects the racist too, because others might not agree with their views.” When questioned by Copnall, Godfrey White admits he cannot find a basis for this note in Lynch’s record and agrees that, “in the absence of any such material,” it should not have been made. The court also hears from HMP Moorland governor Rozlyn Rose that staff were keen to ensure inmates from the riot did not share cells, fearing this could “tip the balance from a safety point of view,” especially as the prison had a large population of foreign nationals. Following his transfer to HMP Moorland, Lynch was placed in a cell on his own, which the court hears may have been because the available shared cells were not suitable for him. It was in this single cell that Lynch was able to end his life. 

The court also hears evidence about an incident at HMP Moorland two days before Lynch’s death, which led prison staff to initiate a disciplinary process called adjudication. “It’s clear from his letters that this episode was playing on his mind and he felt he had been stitched up and his words had been twisted,” Copnall tells the court. Two prison officers, Michael Bycroft and Paul Friend, had taken Lynch for random drug testing and, while they were waiting for him to produce a urine sample, allege he began speaking about his views on immigration. 

“He spoke about how immigrants are all rapists, murderers and paedophiles and shouldn’t be allowed in the country,” Bycroft says, adding that he and Friend repeatedly asked him to stop making what they deemed racist remarks. When Lynch refused to stop expressing his opinion, after a clear warning that he would be disciplined if he continued, Friend told him he would begin the adjudication process. Bycroft recalls that Lynch “seemed confused” as to why he was in trouble. 

Copnall directed both men to the adjudication papers found in Lynch’s cell — where it states Lynch described all immigrants as criminals, he had added a note saying “to check they are not”. “Can I put to you that your recollection is flawed and Mr Lynch was not saying all immigrants are rapists and murderers, but was saying that those who come into this country should be checked to make sure they are not?” Copnall asks Bycroft. “I don’t recall him using the words ‘vetted’ or ‘checked’,” the office responds. When a similar question was put to Friend, he insists that the written account is accurate. When they spoke in the testing suite, he tells the court, Lynch did not argue Friend had misheard him, he only objected to whether what he had said was racist. 

The final note Lynch left for his family seems to reference this incident, again maintaining he was misquoted. It suggests that, in his mind at least, he has been plunged into a Kafkaesque nightmare he could not escape. “It’s getting harder as I’m on my own, defending myself with words that can be changed,” he wrote. “I can’t defend myself if people slightly misheard or change what I have said, I’m basically defenceless.” In the last phone call Lynch had with any of his family members — a chat with his son Keiran, which is played to the court in full — he mentioned he has been “stitched up big time”.

From his other letters, it seems he felt this was just the latest example of him being backed into a corner. Even his decision to plead guilty, he wrote, was only because his solicitor told him he should, meaning he felt he had no choice. In his earliest note, Lynch alleged that the officers who interviewed him at the police station introduced him to his Asian duty solicitor with the words: “This is Mr Lynch and he has been shouting that Muslim grooming gangs should be brought to justice.” Lynch suggested the officers made this remark to prejudice his solicitor against him, adding: “I didn’t have a problem with him until they did that. I requested a new solicitor, in case he may have taken a bad view of me after what they said.” 

DC Yates, giving evidence at court, categorically denies that any remark along these lines was made. She points out that she and her colleague DC Gilbert, who did not appear in court, had already spoken with the solicitor in private, meaning there was no reason to make such a comment in front of Lynch. “It would not make sense. That was not said as an introduction.” As she escorted the solicitor out of the station, he reportedly remarked that he had been “very close” to refusing the job. 

Lynch’s letter also alleged that his interviewers spoke to him on the way back to his cell. “They told me they are after me big time as some video of me went viral,” he wrote. In a later letter, he said he was told that this instruction had come “from the top,” adding: “So I think they are not over with me yet.” Again, the court hears this interaction did not take place. 

After two weeks of intense cross-examination and occasional arguments, the jury’s conclusion inevitably feels like an anti-climax. Peter Lynch’s death is ruled as suicide by hanging, and no criticism of either prison is included in the report. The jury’s foreperson reads: “Mr Lynch’s own beliefs that he was defenceless and couldn’t protect his family, the children or the people led him to take the action he did.” 

It’s not surprising that those on the far-right wanted to make Lynch into a symbol for their movement. A sentence of two years and eight months for holding a sign and shouting at police would seem harsh to many people. (Similarly severe sentences were handed down after the London riots in 2011, which many criticised at the time.) However, Lynch’s family — I would argue to their credit — seem uninterested in allowing his memory to be used this way. When Urban Scoop, a site owned by a close associate of Tommy Robinson, offered the family part of £4,000 donated by its supporters, they were rebuffed. The family “did not want donations from Tommy Robinson or Urban Scoop,” the organisation wrote last year. “We respect that they have their reasons.” 

When it comes to the question of why Peter died in prison, my personal view is that DC Yates’ suggestion that he believed in “sovereign citizenship” may hold the key. Peter considered the state rotten to the core — since his family refused my request for an interview, I will never learn exactly how he came by his beliefs, although the grooming gang scandal was likely a factor. As a result, he chose to introduce himself by his biological lineage, as a gesture of his refusal of any form of government rule. When he abruptly ended up in prison, after more than 60 years as a free man, he was forced to confront the fact that this refusal ultimately mattered very little. He didn’t need to accept the government’s power over him; they had it regardless. 

Four days ago marked the second anniversary of the riot and, as is so often the case with horrific events in deprived northern towns, it seems many would simply like to leave it in the past. While on the phone with Carole Bradley from ASSIST Rotherham, she admits that her charity seems to have much less work than it once did, adding that she’s heard the same from a local GP practice that treats the local asylum seeker community. “I think they are not putting many of them in Rotherham now,” she says of the Home Office. “They are just dispersing them to different places.” It seems to her like a remarkable short-sighted solution. “I think it’s going to be kicking off all over the place.”

Paint Balls

On 4 September at Preston Crown Court, the next five Palestine Action convicts will be sentenced as terrorists, a possibility of which neither they nor the jury had been informed, for criminal damage by throwing paint at a building, even though they had acted 11 months before Palestine Action was proscribed. So this could happen to any dissidents, including traditional conservatives and the populist Right.

Yvette Cooper imposed the mass homicidal Work Capability Assessment. She has announced new mental health hubs "to get people back to work", as if the mentally ill never worked, or as if a job were a cure for mental illness. And having been Home Secretary when Palestine Action was proscribed, she is threatening to resign if that proscription were lifted. Wes Streeting's funny money is the chance to exorcise Blairism, while this is the chance to exorcise Brownism.

For Public Protection

They are going to find a way to keep the killers of PC Andrew Harper in prison. I do not know how they are going to do it. But they are.

So they can also find a way to rectify the injustices arising out of the abolished sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection.

More Than They Can Chew?

It is not surprising that two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper will be released early when, in a doomed attempt to placate the people who had taken to biting the Police, it was proposed to evict foreign nationals from social housing. That would not expand or improve the stock, which is the problem with what is most certainly not "a safety net for the poor", any more than is the National Health Service, or state education, or public transport, or municipal leisure facilities, or the state pension, all of which would be redefined as such if this were.

"It is entirely undesirable," wrote Aneurin Bevan, "that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live. If we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should all be drawn from different sectors of the community. We should try to introduce what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street."

In 1979, two fifths of people lived in council housing, an impossible figure for a mere safety net. As recently as 1980, what is now a breathtaking 20 per cent of the richest tenth of the population lived in social housing. Now, after four decades of selling off the stock and of not building any more, the stringent criteria for new tenants effectively guarantee a large number of single mothers of dependent children who are thus unable to work full-time, if at all, and of people newly released from prison or newly discharged from psychiatric institutions.

Margaret Thatcher's assault on council housing is the one thing that her supporters still feel able to defend unconditionally. But it created the Housing Benefit racket, and it used the gigantic gifting of capital assets by the State to enable the beneficiaries to enter the property market ahead people who had saved for their deposits. What, exactly, was or is conservative or Tory about that? Or about moving in the characters from Shameless either alongside, or even in place of, the respectable working class? Shameless began under Tony Blair's model for the last Labour Government. But supposedly not for this one, so the fight goes on, and it is a fight on many fronts.

Today, we learned that the third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in primary schools were to identify potential future NEETs so that the third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in secondary schools could funnel them into a curriculum determined by "local employers" such as vape shops, phone shops, nail bars, carwashes, Turkish barbers, and American candy shops. Or pack them off to be sexually assaulted from the age of 16 in the tender care of the sacrosanct Ministry of Defence. In the financial year 2024-25, the Government wrote off £6.6 billion of public money, with £1.6 billion of that being mismanagement and cancelled projects at the MoD for which every other Department of State has been ordered to make yet further cuts. And now, did critics of the early release scheme say something about grooming gangs?

A Meter On The Common Wealth

Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a sentence buried in the schedule of an obscure 1971 statute that deserves to be read aloud in every school in England. It repealed the Charter of the Forest of 1217, the document that had told the Crown, in plain and binding terms, that the forests, the rivers and the common land of this island belonged to the people who lived on it. The charter had survived on the statute book for seven hundred and fifty four years, longer than any other law in English history. It survived the Tudors. It survived the Civil War. It survived two world wars. It did not survive Edward Heath’s government, which struck it down in the summer of 1971, eighteen years before Margaret Thatcher put England’s water up for sale.

That is not a coincidence worth glossing over. It is the hinge on which this whole story turns. The Charter of the Forest was sealed alongside Magna Carta in the reign of a child king, and where Magna Carta protected the barons, the Forest Charter protected everyone else: the freeman’s right to graze his animals on common land, to gather fuel from the woods, to draw his subsistence from ground that answered to no lord. It even reached, in its modest way, toward women’s rights: its provisions coincided with a widow’s recognised right to a means of subsistence and to refuse a forced remarriage, a small but real advance in an age when a woman’s person was routinely treated as property to be disposed of.

Parliament’s own historians note that the deep green of the Commons benches, the colour the Chamber has kept since at least the seventeenth century, echoes the colour of pasture and village green: the colour, in other words, of the common man, set against the red of the Lords and the Crown. The building itself still carries the memory of what was won in 1217, even after the law that won it was quietly buried.

Because buried it was. When Heath’s government abolished what remained of the charter, it did so as a piece of statute law tidying, a Law Commission recommendation to strip out defunct royal prerogatives over wild creatures and forest law. Nobody stood at the despatch box and announced the end of the commoner’s right to the land. But intent is not the same as consequence, and the consequence is there in the historical record for anyone to read: the last legal echo of the idea that England’s natural wealth belonged collectively to its people was struck from the statute book in the same decade that a different idea, that everything held in common was really just an asset waiting to be sold, began its long march through British politics.

The economist Guy Standing, in the lecture that gives this argument its clearest modern shape, counts five kinds of common wealth: the natural commons of land, air and water, the social commons of housing and health, the civil commons of courts and rights, the cultural commons of art and memory, and the knowledge commons of science and ideas. Since 1980, he argues, all five have been enclosed, sold off, or simply starved by neglect. The rain that once fell on land held in trust for everyone now falls on assets held in trust for shareholders. His book, Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth, is more than worth the read.

This is not new. It is the oldest fight in English history, and it follows a shape the economic historian Karl Polanyi described eighty years ago in his book The Great Transformation. Polanyi watched market logic tear land, labour and money out of the social relationships that had once bound them and turn each into a commodity to be bought, sold and speculated upon: a process he called disembedding. He also noticed something else, that disembedding never goes unanswered forever. Sooner or later, society pushes back and tries to reclaim what was taken. Every generation refights the same battle because every generation’s elites try the same trick again, dressed in the fashion of their age. In the thirteenth century, it was royal forests. In the twentieth it was the assets of the welfare state. Today, it is the water in your taps and the rain falling on a Highland mountainside, and the question is whether this generation intends to push back or simply watch.

Here is what the taking looks like when you put a number on it. Since Thatcher’s government privatised the water industry in 1989, the population of England and Wales has grown by more than ten million people, and not one major reservoir has been completed in England since Carsington opened in Derbyshire in 1992. The companies that inherited a debt-free public asset have since loaded it with roughly £60 billion of borrowing while paying out some £78 billion in dividends, much of it to owners who have never set foot in the towns whose water they now own.

A Thirst for Profit: How Monopoly Water Companies Drain Consumers’ Wallets

They did not simply fail to build. They sold what previous generations had already built for them. A GMB union investigation published in 2022 found that water companies in England and Wales had sold off at least 35 former reservoirs since 2017, pocketing at least £26 million between them, while opening exactly two new facilities in the same period: a storm tank in Preston and a contact tank in Oswestry. Andy Prendergast, the union’s national officer, made the point that matters most to anyone who has watched a river turn brown after heavy rain: these reservoirs were built with public money, and losing their spare capacity means less room to store sewage before it is dumped.

Now watch the same trick being played again, dressed up this time as the solution. Thames Water, which has not completed a reservoir since the 1970s, is nominally the company behind the largest reservoir scheme proposed in Britain in half a century: a site near Abingdon in Oxfordshire, rebranded this year from the clinical acronym SESRO to the more marketable White Horse Reservoir. But Thames Water is not actually building it. Under the regulator’s own framework, a separate Infrastructure Provider will be brought in to finance and construct the scheme, while Thames Water keeps only the day-to-day running of it once it opens.

The estimated cost has already trebled during design, from an initial £2.2 billion to a range of £5.5 to £7.5 billion, and in January this year the company issued a £5.7 billion tender for a main works contractor, close to the top of that revised range. Running costs on top of the build, Thames Water’s own figures show, will add a further £1.9 billion over the reservoir’s first sixty five years, all of it recovered from customers of Thames Water, Affinity Water and Southern Water through their bills, with completion not expected before 2040. A failed company hands the job to a fresh financier, and the public pays the debt for a reservoir it will never own, for the better part of a lifetime, before a single fresh idea has been proven to work any better than the one it replaced.

To their credit, the defenders of this arrangement do not rely on nonsense. They will tell you, correctly, that environmental and planning law has tightened enormously since the great reservoir building era of the 1960s and 70s, and that any builder, public or private, now faces years of habitats scrutiny that simply did not exist then. They will point to schemes like Coire Glas in Scotland, which come with a cap and floor mechanism limiting the return investors can earn, so that excess profit flows back to consumers rather than into private pockets indefinitely.

Both points are true, and neither survives contact with what is actually happening on the ground. Planning law binds a public builder exactly as it binds a private one; it is an argument about how long permission takes, not about who should own the asset once permission is granted. And the claim that private capital spares the public purse collapses the moment you look at how these projects are financed. White Horse Reservoir is being paid for through customer bills, whichever company’s name sits on the paperwork. The cap and floor mechanism underwriting Coire Glas guarantees its private developer a minimum revenue at public expense before a single turbine turns. The public is already carrying the financing risk in full. The only thing we are not doing is owning what that risk buys.

Britain does not need to imagine the alternative, because it built one once, within living memory, in the harshest conditions the state has ever faced. In 1943, in the middle of a world war, Tom Johnston, the Labour Secretary of State for Scotland in Churchill’s wartime coalition, forced through the creation of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board over the objections of landowners, sporting estates and coal interests who had blocked every private hydro scheme proposed in the Highlands for a decade. Johnston wrote into the founding Act that ordinary consumers came first, and that profits from power sold south would fund the economic and social improvement of the Highlands themselves. When the Board began, fewer than one in a hundred Highland homes outside the main settlements had mains electricity. By 1963, nine in ten did. It is remembered as power from the glens, and it was public, and for the length of a working life, it worked.

Then, in 1990, it was sold. Its assets floated on the stock exchange the following year, merged with an English utility in 1998, and exist today as SSE plc. And here the story closes its loop in a way that ought to make every reader’s stomach turn. SSE is the developer behind Coire Glas, a scheme to pump water five hundred metres up a Highland mountainside and store enough energy to power close to five million homes for a day and a half. A second scheme nearby, Earba, will store even more, and it is being built by Gilkes Energy on the land of the Ardverikie Estate, a private Highland sporting estate. The rain that falls freely on common mountains will be captured behind privately financed dams on private land and sold back to the rest of us at a price the government itself has agreed to guarantee.

The frustrating truth is that the tool to do this differently already exists. Great British Energy was established by Act of Parliament with the explicit legal power to develop, invest in, own, build and operate clean energy projects, in exactly those words. Nothing in law stops it becoming the Hydro Board of this century. One year into its life, its proudest achievements are solar panels fitted to schools and hospitals: worthwhile, and nowhere near the scale its founding legislation allows. Of its £8.3 billion budget, £2.5 billion has already been diverted to a separate nuclear programme with Rolls-Royce, money that will not now be spent building or owning a single reservoir or storage scheme of its own. Set that figure beside the £5.5 to £7.5 billion now earmarked for White Horse Reservoir alone, a single privately financed scheme, and the scale of what has been signed away comes into focus.

There is a straightforward test for whether any politician promising public control of water or energy actually means it, and this publication applied it to Andy Burnham’s devolution proposals not long ago. Does the plan involve the state owning the finished asset, the way Johnston’s Board owned its dams, or does it involve the state guaranteeing someone else’s return while that someone else keeps the deed. The water and energy sector is where the answer is easiest to check, because the guarantees are written into public documents for anyone to read.

There is a case for public investment that goes beyond fairness, and it is worth making plainly, because it happens to be true. A country that builds its own water security and generates its own power, rather than begging a foreign market for both, is a country that can plan with confidence instead of nursing a permanent overdraft. Britain spent the middle of the twentieth century proving that a state which builds for its own people, rather than merely for the shareholders passing through, ends up with both the infrastructure and the self belief that draws in everything else. We chose to stop proving it in 1989. Nothing about geography or economics forces us to keep making that choice now.

The Charter of 1217 said the common wealth of this land belonged to the people who lived on it. In 1826, a young and then unknown Benjamin Disraeli put words in the mouth of a character in his first novel that he would spend the rest of his career trying to live up to: that all power is a trust, that we are accountable for its exercise, that from the people, and for the people, all springs, and all must exist.

It is a promise that government draws its authority from the people and must exercise it for their benefit. Every generation since the moot beneath the oak tree has had to relearn that lesson against people who profit from us forgetting it. This generation’s lesson is written in rainfall over Highland glens and in reservoir basins across the English lowlands, in a feasibility report that proves the ground is ready and a Parliament that has not yet found the will to use it.

A phrase has been circulating since 2016, when the World Economic Forum published an essay by the Danish MP Ida Auken, imagining a city in 2030 where nobody owns a house, a car or an appliance, and calls itself happy about it. Auken has since said it was only a thought experiment, not a prediction and certainly not a plan. But nobody at Davos needed to issue instructions. The work was already underway: the steady transfer of what people once owned together into assets they must rent, finance or buy back from private interests. One reservoir, one hydro dam, one water bill at a time, Britain is being dispossessed without debate and without consent. You will own nothing. They will own what you cannot live without. Try to be happy.

The rain will keep falling whether we act or not. The question is who will own it when it reaches the ground: the people whose country it sustains, or the interests that have learned to put a meter on the common wealth and sell it back to us.