Oh, God of Earth and Altar/Bow down and hear our cry Our earthly rulers falter/Our people drift and die
Iron Maiden
Perhaps you are familiar with the Richard Scarry story called The Unlucky Day? In it, Mr Raccoon wakes up one morning, goes to wash his face and the tap breaks off in his hand. From there, matters only get worse, as Mr Raccoon variously breaks his front door off its hinges, rips the seat of his trousers, destroys the interior of a restaurant, loses his hat, floods the ground floor of his house and has to eat cold pickles for dinner.
Well, a person called Jason Arday has been experiencing something along those lines recently, although in his case to attribute the various calamities he has experienced to luck would be stretching things a little. Arday, you see, is a Professor at Cambridge University who has, over the past week or so, been exposed as a likely plagiarist, fantasist and – worst of all, really – a very bad scholar apparently incapable of producing anything that anybody in their right mind would want to publish or read. The result has been something of a pile-on – so much of a pile-on, indeed, that I have even found myself feeling a little sorry for the man. Yes, he appears to have milked his previous good fortune for all it was worth; yes, plagiarism is unforgivable; yes, much of his behaviour is suggestive of a worrying tendency towards narcissism. But it is not his fault that everybody who has made a decision to employ him has been either credulous or slovenly, and it is right to pity anybody who is being publicly humiliated even while recognising they at least partly deserve it.
More importantly, it is abundantly evident that Arday is being made a scapegoat, and that a lot of the opprobrium being visited on him is deflected guilt. The truth of the matter is that plagiarism, fantasising and bad scholarship are rife in the UK academy among staff and students, particularly since the advent of large language models, and that almost everybody is implicated in those problems to some extent or other. Arday is a great Guy Fawkes figure to hurl onto the metaphorical bonfire, not least because he also serves as an embodiment of many of the sins of EDI – a phenomenon which even many of its public adherents no doubt find privately disturbing. But he is not the real problem. The real problem is that for too long standards have been in decline, everybody knows it and everybody is complicit in it. Arday is just the vector through which collective frustration can be channelled away from a genuine confrontation with the bigger issue.
That issue has, I think, three facets. I am going to label these in accordance with the three features of a modern academic career, namely teaching, research and academic administration, but there is of course rather a lot of overlap between those things. The overarching connection between them, as you will see, is a relaxation of standards, and ultimately the desire to sacrifice them to make life easier. Overarching that is an uglier truth still – the oldest story in the book: pigs with their faces in the trough.
Teaching first, then. There is no doubt whatsoever that the nature of undergraduate students has changed, and that universities have not found a way collectively to cope with that change – roughly, I would say, beginning in 2016 or so. I want to make clear from the outset that I do not blame students themselves for this change, for one moment. It is attributable almost entirely to the effects of technology, most obviously the smartphone but also including the phenomenon of 24/7 screen-based streaming of entertainment, and – more recently – AI. And layered on top of that are the lingering consequences of Covid lockdowns, still being felt but little discussed.
Ask any university lecturer who still works at the coalface of undergraduate teaching and they will tell you the same story. Prior to the mid-2010s, teaching – if the material and tutor were engaging – was like traffic control. Students came to tutorials having done the required reading, sometimes more than the required reading, or were at least able to bluff having done it. They were happy to speak up and offer their views about the material. They may not have understood anything. But they were happy to talk, to look the tutor in the eye, to make notes and to demonstrate engagement. In lectures, they looked as though they were listening.
Something has changed – the devices, stupid – and with it engagement. Anybody with half a brain expected this, and behold, it has come to pass: it turns out that being raised on an attention-sucking, highly addictive, brain-rotting piece of technology destroys the capacity for concentrated thought. Who could have foreseen it? Yes, I know that there are still people around who insist on bleating things like, “Ah, but studies show…” or “Yes, but enhanced digital participation…”, but I for one have rather had enough of such people and am prepared to call a spade a spade – screens are bad for children and bad for teenagers and they are particularly bad in terms of preparedness for higher education.
Universities have collectively shown themselves to be entirely inadequate to the task of coping with this issue. Faced with cohort after cohort of students who lack the proper mindset – again, to be clear, I do not blame the students themselves at all for this – to do concentrated reading or thinking, they have taken the path of least resistance and simply expected less. Not wanting to fail people who cannot do what is required (and thereby miss out on future fees), and not wanting to slip down the league tables by failing to award sufficient numbers of good grades, university managers have placed pressure on staff to relax standards. And so standards have been relaxed. What is required to get a good degree at a good university – let alone a bad university – is just not the same as what it was 20 years ago, and everybody knows it.
But this problem hardly stops with undergraduates, and this is where research comes into the frame. The pressure on academics to publish and garner research income for their universities has become intense. This, in UK universities at least, is largely because of something called the Research Excellence Framework, or REF. This, to cut a long story short, is a periodic audit of the research output of all of the institutions who participate (i.e., essentially all of them), the results of which both decide how a big pot of public money is divided between them, and feed into important league table metrics. The more outputs per head of staff, and the ‘better’ the outputs, the more money the university is allocated – nobody ever asks the opportunity costs in terms of staff time spent on non-research activities – and the higher up the league tables the institution rises.
Prior to the existence of the REF, and its precursor, the RAE, academic research in the humanities and social sciences was performed chiefly only by scholars at the top universities and they did it fairly sporadically – i.e., when they had something useful to say. Writing a good textbook and keeping it up-to-date, certainly in law, the field with which I am most familiar, was at least as important for one’s reputation as producing peer-reviewed articles in journals or academic monographs. But since every institution more or less engages in the REF these days, and since this includes all of the institutions where previously no academic research would have been done at all, there are now simply many, many more things being published than would have been the case 30 or 40 years ago – all of the thousands upon thousands of academics who previously would not have been producing scholarship, have to.
Add this to the sheer increase in academic staff that has accompanied expanded student numbers in the last two decades, and the result is vast oceans of ink being spilled on work that is – may I speak frankly? – tripe. I once heard a helpful analogy to explain this, used in the US context but equally applicable here. It goes as follows:
In the National Hockey League roughly 1,000 players take part in at least one match each season. The quality of hockey is extremely high – these are, essentially, the best 1,000 hockey players in the world. Imagine, however, that the NHL decides to expand and increase the number of teams by a factor of 50, resulting in there being the need for 50,000 hockey players to participate in the league each year. Now, consider: would that result in better hockey being played on average, or worse? It would be worse, wouldn’t it? There is no way that the average quality among the best 50,000 hockey players in the world is higher than the best 1,000. It stands to reason that average quality would decline.
Well, the same holds true in academic research. The more people there are publishing, the lower the average quality of their publications. And since more people need to be publishing, there need to be more outlets for their publications – generally edited and overseen by precisely the same people who are writing the papers. The consequence of all of this is a huge expanse in the number of academic journals which exist to churn out terrible nonsense that only the truly demented would ever bother to read, let alone write – generally produced merely to satisfy internal departmental requirements. Average standards, as a result, have fallen off a cliff. There is still good material produced, but finding it is like using a garden fork to trawl through sewage – it is embarrassing how bad some stuff is in comparison to what was being done in previous decades. And since this all feeds into the REF, discernment at that level has markedly declined: it turns out that when you audit sewage you tend to find yourself discovering that there are gradients of it, and calibrating your measurements accordingly.
I could easily go on listing the problems afflicting academic research in the 2020s all day. The one I have mentioned is only the most obvious; there are hundreds more. But then there wouldn’t be enough space to dedicate to the subject of academic administration, or what is sometimes euphemistically referred to as ‘management’.
University departments can, to all intents and purposes, more or less run themselves, and this is how they indeed used to operate. Vice-Chancellorships and other major institutional posts were held on a rotating basis by senior professors, and departments largely made their own budgetary, staffing and timetabling decisions. University senates wielded decision-making power. Within departments the Chairs ran the show and Head of School positions were, again, usually on three-year rotations. A career in academic management did not really exist. This set-up no doubt had its problems – it was, by all accounts, pretty oligarchic, and gave too much power to professors to bestow patronage. But it was a system which emphasised autonomy and common sense, and crucially had low overheads.
Since the mid-1980s, however, management has ballooned. Vice-Chancellors are now akin to chief executives – they swap positions at different universities like football managers – and a vast number of permanent chief-cook-and-bottle-washer type positions have come into existence alongside them. (“Nice to meet you, my name is Steve Smith and I’m the Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Overseas Engagement Activities, Dog-Petting and Soft Play.”) Alongside this, external regulatory requirements, as well as massive pressure to improve ‘student satisfaction’, have resulted in a huge proliferation of compliance officers, careers advisers, widening participation experts, mental health support workers and so on.
And at the same time, perversely, the workload of academic staff has become increasingly dominated by desk-based busywork, as it presumably has in any field you would care to name – responding to emails, going to meetings, behaving as though it is terribly important that something-or-other has been ‘approved’ on ‘the system’ and so on. The ‘lived experience’ of being a mid-career academic in the UK is not all that different from being, say, manager of a call centre on an industrial estate just outside Darlington: a lot of grappling with bits of software that don’t talk to each other, a lot of deleting irrelevant emails, a lot of meetings scheduled by people who are compensating for nonexistent social lives.
This razzle-dazzle is nakedly a marketing ploy for the most part, of course, but it also reflects the character of the people in charge of these institutions. Gone are the days when universities were run by port-swilling dons in tweed jackets and corduroys. They are now run by people who imagine themselves to be terribly important, earn £350,000 a year and have ambitions to match. Who among them wants to be seen doing anything as humdrum and tawdry as providing students with a good education? What is that when set against ensuring that the whole world achieves “flourishing, sustainability and progress”? A curious mixture of hubris and dumbing-down follows: the laxer things become, the more grandiose becomes the ludicrous, overweening bluster.
In summary, then, while we can agree that Arday’s career has been founded on lax standards, the perpetuation of flagrant fantasies and simply bad work, much of that same thing could be said about a great deal of what has been going on across the sector in recent decades. We expect less and less of undergraduates; we delude ourselves into thinking that universities are of profound importance in the project of global improvement and progress; we waste time producing an awful lot of unreadable, unhelpful ‘research’ that almost nobody reads. No, few of us have done anything as bad as the things Arday has been accused of. But we – I speak to any fellow academics reading this – are all implicated in a collective failing; it has happened on our watch.
At its heart, the reason for the decline is simple enough to understand. Maintaining standards is hard. The path of least resistance is seductive. And it is especially seductive when set against a background of the rent-seeking behaviour of a group of institutions that increasingly resemble a cartel, whose chief priority is maximising the generation of income largely underwritten by the State. The incentives are not to educate, much less to advance knowledge, but to do a) what is necessary to satisfy regulators and b) what is necessary to keep the show on the road and the money rolling in.
These are the incentives that any private sector enterprise faces, of course, but the crucial distinction is that UK universities do not operate in anything like the ‘private sector’ properly understood. When most of your income comes from the State, your interests are brought into alignment with political decision-makers, rather than with what is best for the students or the long-term interests of the operation, and suckling at its teat rapidly becomes your be-all and end-all – horizons narrow accordingly. This was not a problem when a Vice-Chancellorship was a chore performed reluctantly by a crusty don for a three-year term and student numbers were capped – at that time, financial stakes were low. But it is a problem when an entire class of university managers relies for its very high salaries on the cash washing in from almost half of school leavers going on to higher education. In that context, it is easy to simply go along, doing what is necessary to carry on carrying on, and not rock the boat by insisting on standards being maintained. Why fight against the institutional tide when there is no incentive or reward to do so?
It probably goes without saying that the advent of AI has made everything described here worse, and will likely make it worse yet if universities are not willing to grapple with that problem seriously and take practical steps to eliminate its use – at least in assessments but preferably in general. I hold out little hope that this will happen, for reasons which are obvious enough. The person instrumental in exposing this recent plagiarism scandal, a retired professor at Plymouth Marjon University called Dave Harris, summarised the problem with Arday’s scholarship as follows: “Bloody awful work creeps in when standards are relaxed.” This seems set to be the leitmotif of UK universities in the 21st Century. And it is no good simply blaming the odd rogue scholar, for all that subjecting him to a two minutes’ hate is cathartic in some sense. The crisis is systemic, which means everybody is in some way to blame.
Dr David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
Recently, it has felt like we had reached a new dawn on energy and climate policy with energy Jedi winning the argument against the Net Zero by 2050 target. Reform fought the election on a policy of abandoning Net Zero. More recently, the Tories have followed suit by abandoning the 2050 target, setting out their own cheap power plan and beginning to purge the party of Net Zero zealots like Gavin Barwell.
But the green empire is striking back with a new article (no paywall version here) in the Telegraph from Tim Stanley and Greg Jackson has also weighed in, cheering on Stanley’s article. Even DV himself has weighed in to support Tim Stanley. The trouble with Tim Stanley’s argument, in common with many Net Zero supporters, is that it is based on vibes and emotion, not analysis of actual data.
Time to dive in to see what Tim Stanley and Greg Jackson got so wrong.
Tim Stanley’s claims
Stanley claimed the wildfires of Europe are “pitiless and persistent” and made “infinitely worse” by the long, hot summer. He also claimed the UK has endured the three worst harvests on record in the past six years and warned that one third of Bangladesh’s agricultural GDP is expected to disappear by 2050. He also stated Pakistan is enjoying a solar boom and said it was ridiculous that Britain was reluctant to follow suit. Stanley also claimed developing countries are more worried about climate change than we are. Finally, he characterised Net Zero sceptics of the online right as “talking itself into corners of angry irrelevance”, as having “misplaced sympathy for the devil” and lacking compassion or charm. However, he became incoherent by claiming he was not arguing for an ideological commitment to decarbonisation and said Kemi Badenoch is correct to abandon the dogma of targets.
Greg Jackson thought Tim Stanley’s article was “superbly written” and that renewables solutions are “increasingly economically better than the fossil fuel alternatives”. According to Jackson, solar is the cheapest power on the planet and onshore wind is “bonkers cheap”. He thinks a freer market in electricity could use renewables to drive down energy costs.
Stanley’s article was illustrated by an apocalyptic image of raging wildfires in Europe (see Figure 1). Whilst fires like these must be terrifying for those affected, policy should be set by reference to facts, not emotive images.
Figure 1 – Tim Stanley claims wildfires have become infinitely worse
This image was used to support Stanley’s claim that wildfires in Europe are pitiless and persistent and made infinitely worse by long hot summers. We can test this claim against data produced by Our World in Data (OWID) as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 – Cumulative area burnt by wildfires by week
This shows that far from becoming infinitely worse, wildfires in Europe are running at the lowest rate on record. We should note that OWID’s definition of Europe includes the whole of Russia. But even if the geographical scope of the chart is limited to the EU27, 2026 year-to-date is the sixth worst year on record, with area burned running at just 42% of the worst year in 2012. The data undermines the whole premise of Stanley’s article.
Tim Stanley might also note that many of these fires in France are manmade, just not in the way he thinks – because 162 people have been arrested in France on suspicion of wildfire arson.
Worst UK harvests?
Tim Stanley also claimed the UK has endured the three worst harvests on record in the past six years. Although data from OWID only goes to 2024, we can see the claim is false as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3 – UK Index of cereal production yield and land use
Recent levels of production and yield have not been unusual compared to the last 30 years. Peak production came in 1984, with cereal production around 174% higher than the 1961 baseline, but then there was nearly 32% more land dedicated to cereal production. In 2024, there was twice as much cereal production and 106% better yields than in 1961, despite using 3.1% less land. It certainly looks like those evil fossil-fuel derived fertilisers have helped us to feed ourselves. What is more worrying is the land dedicated to cereal crops looks to have begun a downtrend. Maybe carpeting prime farmland with solar panels is not such a good idea after all.
Bangladesh agriculture under threat?
Stanley’s claim that one third of agricultural GDP in Bangladesh is at risk appears to come from a 2022 report by the World Bank. Again, OWID has data to show that fear is at best misplaced, see Figure 4.
Figure 4 – Bangladesh agricultural output dollars
Agricultural GDP in Bangladesh is soaring and the 13.3 million climate migrants expected by the World Bank are probably not going to materialise, because deaths from natural disasters in that country have plummeted from a one-off peak of 1.9 million in 1943, due to drought, to just 28 in 2025 – with 10 of those from earthquakes, which are of course unrelated to climate.
Bangladesh also seems more concerned with economic development than climate change because energy consumption is soaring and almost all of it comes from hydrocarbons – coal, oil and gas – see Figure 5.
Figure 5 – Bangladesh energy consumption by source
This contradicts Stanley’s claim that developing countries are more concerned about climate change than we are.
Pakistan solar boom?
Tim Stanley’s article also claimed:
Contemporary Pakistan is enjoying a solar boom. How? Because millions of peasants, sick of high utility prices inflated by corruption, have bought cheap solar panels from the Chinese and hung them from their roofs and balconies.
He went on to chide Britain for not following suit. It is true that Pakistan now generates nearly 19% of its electricity from solar and the solar share has been growing rapidly. Britain’s solar share is 6.6% of electricity generation. Despite this disparity in solar penetration, the carbon intensity of Pakistan’s energy is higher than the UK’s, see Figure 6.
Figure 6 – UK and Pakistan CO2 per unit of energy
By international standards, Pakistan generates very little electricity, producing just 764kWh per person, compared to the world average of 3,860kWh, the UK’s 4,203kWh and China’s 7,474kWh per person. A big part of the reason remote regions of Pakistan are turning to solar power is because less than 55% of households are connected to the grid. For them, access to some solar is better than no power at all. Another reason Pakistan is more suited to solar power is latitude. Pakistan lies between 23 degrees and 37 degrees north, where it is sunnier than Britain, which is much further north. This is why the World Bank rated Pakistan in roughly the top quartile of countries for practical solar power potential and the UK second bottom, just above Ireland.
Poor countries worried?
As shown above, Bangladesh does not appear to be overly concerned about climate change, in contradiction to Tim Stanley’s claim that poor countries are more worried than we are. OWID also produces data to show carbon dioxide emissions by income group, see Figure 7.
Figure 7 – Annual CO2 emissions by income group
Even though emissions from high-income countries like Britain are falling, emissions from upper-middle and lower-middle income countries are rising sharply. Emissions from low-income countries are low and rising slowly. High-income countries will become poorer and be overtaken by upper-middle income countries who want to become more prosperous.
There is growing demand for oil and gas in Africa. For example, a farmer in Kenya, Jusper Machogu, campaigns for fossil fuels for Africa because he wants to Just Stop Toil. He is getting angry that Greenpeace is acting like a neo-colonialist, blocking a new oil refinery in his country. Another strike against Tim Stanley’s evidence-free tirade.
Renewables increasingly economically better?
Let us turn now to Greg Jackson’s claims that renewables are “increasingly economically better” and a freer market for renewables would bring down energy costs. As we have discussed before and as shown in Figure 8, the UK already has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world and domestic prices are also among the highest.
Figure 8 – International Industrial Electricity Prices (p per kWh)
The term of contracts for difference (CfDs) has been extended to 20 years and the prices awarded in AR7 for offshore wind and onshore wind rose in AR7. Prices for solar dipped slightly, but on a like-for-like 15-year contract basis prices rose. There is no evidence that the base cost of renewables is falling.
The news gets worse, because the cost of integrating intermittent renewables into the grid is soaring, with balancing, backup and grid expansion costs set to triple from 2024/25 levels by 2030/31, as shown in Figure 9.
Figure 9 – Forecast for grid integration costs (£bn)
Far from becoming “increasingly economically better”, intermittent renewables are getting increasingly expensive. If we were to make the electricity market freer – by, for instance, cutting carbon taxes on gas-fired electricity, eliminating renewables subsidies and making them pay for their grid integration costs – then most renewables projects would fail and there would be little new spending. Greg Jackson is wrong on both his main points.
Who Lacks Compassion?
Tim Stanley’s most emotive line was when he accused Net Zero sceptics of having misplaced sympathy for the devil and lacking compassion. We may ask what is compassionate about making electricity so expensive that families have to choose between heating and eating. Where is the compassion for oil and gas workers in Aberdeen losing 1,000 jobs per month? Is there an ounce of sympathy for Port Talbot steelworkers, Grangemouth refinery workers or the thousands more losing their jobs in other energy-intensive industries such as petrochemicals, chemicals, ceramics and glass? Isn’t it simply unconscionable to deprive the developing world of cheap, abundant hydrocarbons needed to support their economic and social development?
We know the energy Jedi are winning the argument when the green empire has to resort to emotive pictures and mendacious invective to make their point. None of Tim Stanley’s arguments stand up to close scrutiny, and the cheerleading Greg Jackson is reduced to making entirely false claims to stop his Octopus Energy business from collapsing into further losses.
The trouble is that lies travel halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on, so the green empire striking back can be temporarily effective. But be in no doubt: the energy Jedi will return, and economic and physical reality will prevail.
Compared to the late 1960s and early 1970s, over a typical January we now enjoy almost 50% more hours of sunshine. Over the whole year, we get about 13% additional hours of sunshine. That amounts to more than 30 extra minutes of sunshine per day.
Ironically, these changes appear to be rather more to do with the absence of pollution than because of it. And surprise, surprise, more sunshine equates to higher temperatures.
Climate change is not really my bailiwick, so apologies to our in-house boffins, Ben Pile, Tilak Doshi and Chris Morrison.
However, sunshine is an area where I have skin in the game. We’ve just spent our first summer in a house with three, metre square skylights in the kitchen roof. Unless you too have skylights in the ceiling you’d struggle to imagine how much heat they generate, by breakfast time the kitchen is effectively a no-go zone. We largely solved the problem by covering the skylights with car covers, creating shade. Instantly the temperature dropped from tropical to temperate. The difference is, literally, night and day, dark and light!
As a consequence of my ‘lived experience’ I was drawn to an article by Sarah Knapton, the Telegraph’s Science Editor, that looks at the contribution of increased sunshine to the observed rises in global temperatures.
The article followed on from a recent research paper looking at how cleaner skies lets more sunshine through the atmosphere, leading to higher ground temperatures. Indeed, the paper concludes that Europe’s temperature has increased at twice the rate of the rest of the world since the 1980s, but that nearly all of this additional rise can be attributed to cleaner skies and the absence of pollution.
Having stumbled on Met Office data on hours of sunshine a couple of years ago, I thought I’d go back and check the data for the UK. I thought my fellow Climate Skeptic readers might also be interested in my findings. I offer no interpretation of the data – make of it what you will.
It turns out that the hours of sunshine across the year stayed remarkably constant between 1910 and 1970, but have increased by about 13% since then. An average of about an extra 32 minutes of sunshine per day. We used to get about 1,400 hours of sunshine; now we appear to get over 1,600.
However, the increase in winter sunshine is even more dramatic. The increase observed throughout the 20th Century has largely plateaued since the turn of the century. We’re now getting about 30% more sunshine in the winter than they had in 1910, with the most rapid increase coming post 1970, since when we’ve seen nearly 20% more sunshine in winter than we used to have.
If we look at just a single month, things get even more intriguing. Let’s take January as an example. Would it surprise you to know that, according to the Met Office, we now get 50% more sunshine than our forebears had to put up with back in 1910? The trend line is up to a total of about 63 cumulative hours throughout January, whereas in the Edwardian period they had to make do with little more than 40 hours. Though, once again, most of the increase has come about since the early 1970s.
For good measure let’s also have a look at total sunshine in August. As you can see, it’s increased significantly, but far more modestly than in the winter months.
The study referenced by Knapton’s Telegraph article identified various pollutants, particularly sulphates from aerosols as having been responsible for suppressing sunlight until they were largely outlawed in the early 1970s. They argue that these sulphates had a cooling effect on the earth’s atmosphere as they reflected the sun’s rays back into space.
Of course, over the past century or so, we’ve seen huge reductions in smoke from open fires, particulates from vehicles and various industrial processes. No wonder the skies are clearer!
So, what to make of it all? I make no claims to be a climate scientist. I’m not qualified to comment on the role of increased sunshine on ground temperatures. But the absence of much research into this phenomenon suggests that it’s a much under-studied area.
Why haven’t we heard more about this? And while the re-emergence of clear skies seems to be contributing significantly to warmer temperatures, what impact did polluted skies have in suppressing temperatures as the Industrial Revolution took hold in the 19th and early 20th Century?
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be amused that it appears to be the very absence of pollution that’s contributed so much to the rise in temperatures.
West Midlands Police is inviting non-Muslim officers and staff to fast during Ramadan as a show of “solidarity” with their Muslim colleagues. The Telegraphhas more:
West Midlands Police said the practice helped officers understand the “significance of Ramadan” for Muslim residents.
But critics of the initiative have raised concerns about how effectively front-line officers are able to carry out their duties while voluntarily abstaining from food and water for extended periods.
Nick Timothy, the Shadow Justice Secretary, said encouraging non-Muslim staff to observe Ramadan was “wholly inappropriate” and urged officials to scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty, which obliges public services to think about equality and diversity in everything they do.
The Telegraph can also reveal that non-Muslim colleagues are fasting during Ramadan across other public services, such as councils.
Documents obtained by the Telegraph through freedom of information requests reveal that West Midlands Police was cited in New Forest council’s diversity training as an example of best practice when it comes to inclusivity. …
Corinne Brazier, the former Heritage Manager of the West Midlands Police Museum, also praised the initiative in a blog post published on March 28th, 2024.
Titled ‘Diary of a Heritage Manager’, it states: “Nowadays people belonging to all different religions are welcomed into policing, and efforts are made to ensure they feel supported.
“For example, during Ramadan, Muslim colleagues who are fasting are supported and accommodated when they need to break their fast.
“Information is shared with non-Muslim colleagues to help them to understand what Ramadan is all about, sometimes leading to non-Muslim officers and staff joining in to support their colleagues.” …
Major Andrew Fox, a Senior Associate Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, added: “West Midlands Police’s judgment is increasingly open to question.
“The force that excluded Israeli supporters using evidence later found to be false or exaggerated was also encouraging non-Muslim officers to fast during Ramadan as an act of religious solidarity.
“Supporting officers of every faith is entirely appropriate. Encouraging staff to participate in a religious observance is not.
“The police exist to enforce the law impartially, not to promote or facilitate religious practices.”
American heiress Jamey Carney was found suffocated in her Killarney home in July, her body discovered by her teenage daughter. All fingers point to her Jordanian asylum seeker boyfriend as the prime suspect. In the Mail, Andy Young reveals the grim details:
Jamey Carney never tired of saying how happy she was with her new life in Ireland, describing relocating there as “the best decision” she had ever made.
The American single mother, 43, had always been proud of her Irish roots and finally left the US five years ago to set up home with her young daughter in Killarney, which sits in the heart of a dramatic landscape of lakes, mountains, waterfalls and ancient woods.
She soon became a familiar figure in the famously pretty County Kerry town, settling into a new career, making new friends and getting a reputation for helping people in need while being vocal about her Left-wing views, which included advocating for Palestine.
And things would soon get even better for Ms Carney, the Mail has learned, when she inherited $1 million, which allowed her to move into a new luxury home.
That windfall was soon followed by her meeting a new, younger man connected to her favourite political cause, with whom she quickly fell in love.
But Ms Carney’s idyllic new life in Killarney came to an abrupt and brutal end when she was killed in that luxury home, a rented four-bedroom detached house worth €800,000 in an area packed with high-end holiday homes and upmarket hotels.
Her body was found by her 13 year-old daughter who began to look around closely after finding the house unusually – and suspiciously – quiet when she returned from a sleepover at just after 1pm on July 7th.
It was found hidden under a blanket in her bedroom.
A post-mortem quickly established that Ms Carney had died from suffocation, with a subsequent though still unconfirmed report suggesting that she had also been battered repeatedly with the heavy cover of a toilet cistern.
A murder inquiry was formally launched and Garda detectives did not take long to identify a “person of interest” for her killing: Ahmad Al-Saqar.
Al-Saqar was that new boyfriend, 15 years Jamey’s junior, a Jordanian asylum seeker who she is thought to have met on local pro-Palestinian protests.
And the 28 year-old is thought to have only been able to enter Ireland at all thanks to an ill-judged immigration loophole blunder by the UK Government – more on that later.
Detectives soon found evidence that he had fled Killarney in the early hours of July 7th, hours before the body was discovered.
CCTV footage is understood to have confirmed that he caught a Green Coach from Mission Road in Killarney at 4.30am to Bachelors Walk in Dublin and from there got a taxi to Dublin Airport.
There, he caught a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul at 10.40am, with a one-way ticket. …
He is thought to have taken advantage of a short-lived scheme which allowed Jordanians to travel to the UK after simply buying an online travel authorisation visa for £10.
This authorisation allowed him to go to Northern Ireland and from there it was an easy matter to slip across the border to Dublin where, in June 2024, he claimed asylum.
It was from there that he was transferred to a hostel in Killarney.
He initially had his asylum claim turned down, but appealed the decision and was instead granted subsidiary protection – a legal status given to those who do not qualify as refugees but who may still face potential serious harm if sent back to their home country.
That decision meant Al-Saqar had his passport returned, which would later enable him to abruptly fly out of Ireland back to the Middle East before the alert was issued to detain him. …
One person who knew her in Killarney told the Mail: “It might seem strange for a woman with an eight year-old child to start a new life in a different country – but Jamey felt it was the right thing to do. …
“I think part of her move was dissatisfaction with life in America. She was very political and opposed Donald Trump. She just wanted to create a home for her and her daughter in a peaceful and happy place.” …
Al-Saqar bragged to other migrants about his developing romance with Ms Carney and had even claimed that they had undergone an Islamic “marriage ceremony” at the town’s main mosque, run by the Islamic Cultural Centre of Killarney. …
Ms Carney’s Facebook profile picture, uploaded two days before her body was found, showed an image of her with Al-Saqar and her daughter, alongside her dog.
In another earlier social media post, she reportedly shared a video of them together and wrote: “He continues to show me what safe love is.”
Stop Press: A British “good Samaritan” who helped refugees has been found dead in a suitcase in Athens, with an Afghan national arrested over the grim discovery, according to the Sun.
The High Court has ruled that trans suspects may lawfully request a strip-search by an officer of their ‘lived-in gender’. The Telegraphhas the story:
The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) advice says that biological men who identify as women can request a female officer to strip-search them, adding that “efforts will be made” to find an officer of their “lived-in gender”.
Sex Matters, the women’s rights group, brought legal action against the NPCC, arguing that the law was clear that strip-searches must always be conducted by someone of the same sex, regardless of how they identify.
But on Friday, the High Court ruled that police officers can lawfully strip-search trans people of a different sex, as long as both sides consent.
The NPCC advice on strip-searches states that “all members of the public” be treated with “fairness, dignity and respect, including the trans community”.
It adds that, whenever “operationally viable”, if “an individual whose lived-in gender is not the same as their biological sex expresses a preference to be searched by an officer of their lived gender, efforts will be made to ensure an appropriate officer is identified to conduct the search”.
The policy continues: “In such circumstances, the search would require the written consent of the authorising officer, the person detained and the particular officer/s conducting the search.”
While the guidance does say that female officers can refuse to search a trans woman, Sex Matters argued that female officers would fear being labelled “transphobic” if they did, which could harm their careers. …
Maya Forstater, the Chief Executive of Sex Matters, said the charity was “extremely disappointed” by the ruling and would be trying to appeal it.
She said: “Our case seeks to protect the rule of law.
“If Parliament had wanted to allow people in custody to request to be strip-searched by an officer of the opposite sex, it would have written this into the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which governs the way searches are carried out.
“It didn’t, and it is not for the NPCC or individual police forces to seek to subvert the law by creating a shadow searching regime.”
Arts Council England has been accused of splashing taxpayers’ cash on ‘woke’ projects while museums across the UK are closing their doors. The Mailhas more:
Recent awards by the organisation – which dishes out more than £840 million a year in taxpayer cash and the National Lottery – included £100,000 for the Migration Matters Festival in Sheffield in June, which featured a flag-making workshop “exploring identity, protest and belonging”.
The organisers of the workshop said that its purpose was to push back against public displays of England’s national flag, which has been condemned by Left-wing groups as indicative of racism and xenophobia rather than patriotism. The organisers said: “Responding to the divisive use of the St George’s flag, this project reclaims public space with inclusive narratives.”
The festival also featured The Bull And The Moon, a dance show for children aged three and over about ‘Lolo’, a Spanish bull who dreams of becoming ‘Lola’, a flamenco-dancing cow, in a story its makers billed as a “celebration of gender diversity” and being oneself.
The Bull and the Moon
Other recipients of Arts Council England largesse included £29,950 to The Bitten Peach Ltd, which calls itself the UK’s only queer, pan-Asian cabaret collective: its shows have featured puppets, whips and a poppadom-eating contest.
Curl Girl Productions received £35,434 for Panjabi Princesses, about two Queer Panjabi princesses, while playwright Aisha Zia was awarded £32,547 for Refugee! – a theatre production in which characters uncover evidence of the Government’s “complicity” in war crimes.
A gay retelling of Romeo and Juliet in which Shakespeare’s hero falls for a Muslim man named Mohammed at a rave in Croydon has secured £30,807 in taxpayer funding after being deemed “culturally significant”. …
The Council says it is “the national development agency for museums in England… to help develop museums for as many people as possible across the country”.
But a total of 16 museums across the UK were forced to close in the same 12-month period that those grants were awarded.
These included the RAF Signals Museum, which told the history of RAF signals and communications equipment from the First World War to modern times.
Others which shut their doors included Durham Museum, which closed in 2024 after it could not meet the cost of repairs to the building, Llancaiach Fawr Living History Museum in South Wales, Westbury Manor Museum in Hampshire and Alyth Museum in Perthshire, which told the story of the town through local industries such as farming and weaving and celebrated its working-class culture.
“Migrants smuggled out of Britain to Spain” – Illegal migrants are being smuggled out of the UK across the Channel to cash in on Spain’s asylum amnesty, reveals a Telegraph investigation.
“Mahmood rejects calls to follow Spain’s migrant pushback” – Shabana Mahmood has dismissed suggestions that Britain should copy Spain’s approach to rapidly returning migrants who crossed into Ceuta, maintaining that the English Channel creates a fundamentally more complex challenge, according to GB News.
“Gaps in the armour” – Europe is facing a multi-pronged surge in migrants smashing through key weak spots in the continent’s border defences, reveals the Sun.
“Rupert Lowe says he can work with Nigel Farage” – Rupert Lowe has declared he is willing to work with Nigel Farage, but only if five conditions are met including refusing to let Tory defectors serve in a Reform-Restore coalition government, says the Express.
“Fewer police and more offenders on the streets under early release” – One of Britain’s most senior police officers has warned that cuts to neighbourhood policing are likely as the system seeks to manage 6,000 killers, sex offenders and drug dealers who are expected to be released from custody early, says the Telegraph.
“The middle classes have a radicalisation problem” – Why are educated, middle-class young people being pulled towards extremism? In the Spectator, Rory Hanrahan looks at how simple stories of oppression and injustice can offer purpose, belonging and, in some cases, a dangerous path towards political violence.
“Protests at Super-Valu to continue over Belong To sponsorship” – An Irish parents’ campaign says it will continue protesting outside SuperValu stores over its partnership with Belong To, which the group claims is exposing young people to trans propaganda, according to Gript.
“MAGA exiles plot launch of new political party” – Some of Donald Trump’s most prominent Right-wing critics, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson, are joining forces to launch a new political party, says the Mail.
“Don’t forget: there are two multi-trillion dollar pseudoscience scams” – On his Manhattan Contrarian blog, Francis Menton argues that alongside the COVID-19 fraud exposed in Anthony Fauci’s Senate hearings, a second multi-trillion-dollar pseudoscience scam is being quietly overlooked – the ‘Climate Emergency’.
“Disappearing villages leave Europe in era of fire” – A generational shift away from farming across parts of Western Europe has replaced pastures and ploughed fields with combustible scrubland, warns Cameron Henderson in the Telegraph.
“‘Driveway divide’ leaves EV owners £200 worse off under Burnham” – Drivers without a home charger are being forced to pay the full 20% VAT rate on public charging, leaving them hundreds of pounds worse off than those who can charge at home, reports the Telegraph.
“Read the small print” – A closer look at the fine print behind green energy commitments raises uncomfortable questions about the endless subsidies underpinning them, says Mark Hodgson in Climate Scepticism.
“The great unchecked fairy tale of Jason Arday” – On X, Donna-Louise takes a deep dive into the extraordinary claims behind Jason Arday’s rise to become the youngest black person ever appointed to a Cambridge chair.
