Black Marks

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

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

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

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

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

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