Jason Arday, the Cambridge DEI poster boy embroiled in a plagiarism row, boasts a back story so implausible it raises the question: is he, in fact, the latest comedy creation of Sacha Baron Cohen? His extraordinary claims – from running 600 miles in six days to raising £5.5 million for charity – have been accepted without question by universities, the BBC and fellow academics alike. Read my piece about what may be Baron Cohen’s most spectacular stunt yet in the Spectator:
Are congratulations in order for Sacha Baron Cohen? The more I read about Jason Arday, the Cambridge sociology professor and DEI poster boy caught up in a plagiarism row, the more convinced I am he’s the comedian’s greatest creation.
Arday’s academic career, like his athletic achievements, reads like a fairy tale
First, there’s the over-the-top back story. He claimed to have been totally mute until the age of 11 – having been diagnosed with autism – and unable to read or write until he was 18. Yet in spite of these disadvantages, he earned a PhD by the time he was 30 – which he managed to complete while suffering from a brain tumour!
On the face of it, utterly incredible. But it begins to make sense if you think of Arday as an Ali G-like character designed to test the limits of how unwilling white do-gooders are to challenge the claims of black people suffering from ‘intersectional oppression’, however implausible.
And test the limits he has. He chalked up some truly extraordinary achievements in ultra-endurance running, or so he says, completing the 600 miles from Edinburgh to London in just six days – 50 miles short of the world record for ultra-distance running over six days – and 30 marathons in 35 days. During this latter feat, he suffered a hairline fracture on day 21 and, according to him, his leg swelled to twice its normal size. Yet, remarkably, he went on to complete another nine marathons. In all, he maintains, he raised £5.5 million for charity.
All of these claims have been accepted at face value by the four universities who’ve awarded Arday honorary degrees, as well as the BBC, which published a laudatory profile when he became a Cambridge professor. How Baron Cohen must have laughed – assuming I’m right about Arday being a satirical creation. A stunt designed to expose the wilful blindness of hand-wringing liberals has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Arday’s academic career, like his athletic achievements, reads like a fairy tale. After getting a degree in education studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, he went on to do a PhD at Liverpool John Moores University, before becoming a professor of sociology at Glasgow in 2021, then a sociology professor at Cambridge in 2023. At the age of 37, he was the youngest black person ever to be given a Cambridge chair.
Baron Cohen, who’s apparently been developing this character as a long-term sleeper project, must have been cock-a-hoop. But could he push the joke even further? Doubts about Arday’s academic integrity began to surface in 2023 when two sociology professors started asking awkward questions about his doctoral thesis and some of his journal papers. Not so fast, thought Baron Cohen, who must have anticipated that his hastily-cobbled together ‘thesis’, masquerading as original research, would one day be rumbled – the title of Arday’s PhD even includes a rogue apostrophe.
To deflect these allegations, the comedian appears to have come up with the genius idea of enlisting his cousin, Sir Simon Baron Cohen, as a co-conspirator. In 2025, the director of Cambridge’s autism research centre co-authored an open letter furiously accusing Arday’s detractors of being racists. This was the academic equivalent of Ali G’s famous catchphrase whenever anyone challenged him: ‘Is it because I is black?’
Saturday to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey at Picturehouse. Picturehouse now send me customer surveys which, from habit, I discard. Nevertheless, let me assure them that their seats are large and comfortable, their urinals clean and their air-conditioning efficient.
I especially appreciated the air-con.
Nolan’s film is a stinker, though.
To explain why, you need to know the poem. And, perhaps, like Lupita Nyong’o – ‘educated’ at Yale and playing Helen of Troy – you haven’t read it? In that case, please do. But let me give you a synopsis; it’ll help with the rest of this article. If you know your Homer, skip the next paragraph.
It begins with the gods in council, then flips to Ithaca, Odysseus’s island kingdom. Odysseus sailed to Troy 20 years ago and, through his stratagem of a Wooden Horse, the city fell 10 years later. But Odysseus has failed to return. His wife Penelope is beset by arrogant suitors, seeking marriage and the kingdom. They bully and threaten his son, Telemachus, who is approaching adulthood. The goddess Athena – Odysseus’s protector – appears to Telemachus in disguise and urges him to visit the mainland, seeking news of his father. This he does, meeting Helen and Menelaus, learning a little but growing much. We now flip to Odysseus, stranded on the island of Calypso, a half-divine nymph. Daytimes he wanders the beach lamenting his lost home; night-times she beds him. The gods order his release. Calypso offers immortality and eternal youth, but Odysseus declines, departing on a raft to another shipwreck. Washed up on the island of the Phaeacians and found by the princess Nausicaa, he is directed to the palace, where the king and queen receive him generously. After a banquet a bard sings of the Trojan War. At this Odysseus breaks down, confesses his identity, then tells of his wanderings after leaving Troy. They begin with a pillaging raid gone wrong, then a visit to the drugged-up Lotus Eaters. Next to the island of the Cyclops – one-eyed giants. One of these, Polyphemus, finds Odysseus and his men in its cave and imprisons them, eating two for breakfast and two for dinner. Odysseus convinces the Cyclops that his name is ‘Nobody’ then gives him strong wine. Once Polyphemus is in a stupor, Odysseus blinds him. The Cyclops howls for help but, when his fellow Cyclops ask who is hurting him, he responds: “Nobody is hurting me.” So they tell him to go back to bed. Odysseus escapes, reaching the island of Aeolus, God of the Winds. The God confines the unhelpful winds in a sack, giving this to Odysseus and the fleet almost reaches Ithaca. Then the crew, eager for booty, open the sack while Odysseus sleeps, releasing a tempest, which blows them to the land of the Laestrygonian giants, who shatter 11 of Odysseus’s 12 ships. On he sails to the island of the enchantress Circe, who turns his landing party into pigs. Aided by Apollo he forces her to transform them back again, remaining a year as her lover. To find a route to Ithaca, Circe tells him that he must consult the dead seer Tiresias. So Odysseus sails to the Underworld, where Tiresias outlines a course past the Sirens, who lure men onto the rocks with sweet songs, past the whirlpool Charybdis and the monster Scylla, warning him to avoid the island of the Sun God. They pass the first three perils but, with the crew starving, land on the Sun God’s island and eat his cattle. The angered god then wrecks the ship. Odysseus alone survives, washed to Calypso’s embrace. The Phaeacians listen spellbound then provide a fast ship to Ithaca. Warned by Athena, Odysseus proceeds carefully, gradually revealing himself to Telemachus and two trusted herdsmen. He returns to his palace disguised as a beggar and is abused by the suitors. His ancient hound recognises him, then dies. His old nurse recognises him too, but he forcefully tells her to keep quiet. Penelope, out of time and guided by Athena, announces that she’ll marry whichever suitor can string Odysseus’s great bow and shoot an arrow through a row of axe heads. All try and fail. The beggar then asks for a go. He is mocked and abused. But, given the bow by Telemachus, he strings it easily and shoots through the axe heads. After which he picks off the suitors one by one, helped by Telemachus and the two herdsmen. Once the bloodbath is over, and a dozen disloyal maidservants hanged, Odysseus reveals himself to Penelope, who disbelieves him. She casually suggests, however, that their marital bed be carried into the hall so he can rest. That is the test. He responds that he carved the bed from a living olive tree. It is part of the house structure and cannot be moved. That is their secret. So Odysseus and Penelope are reunited, and Athena holds back the dawn – nudge, nudge. After which, there is one final battle with the dead suitors’ aggrieved relatives, quickly stopped by Athena, who forces everyone to make peace.
It is a tale of resilience, endurance and guile, both by Odysseus and Penelope. It celebrates a stoical heroism, unlike that of Achilles and Hector of the Iliad. Brain beats brawn. To win you must survive and, to survive, you need cunning as well as valour. Sometimes you must debase and disguise yourself, but you must honour the gods, keep your nerve and temper and never lose sight of your main goal.
Homer underscores these points. At the start, Zeus tells Athena: “How could I ever forget Odysseus, that hero who, more than any other mortal, has subtle wit…” Recurring epithets call him polú-tropos (‘resourceful’ or ‘of many [twists and] turns’); polú-tlās (‘much-enduring’ or ‘long suffering’); megal-ḗtōr (‘great hearted’) and ptoli-pórthios (‘sacker of cities’). ‘Sacker of cities’ is an accolade, not a condemnation. Penelope, meanwhile, is a byword for loyalty.
Nothing suggests a man tortured by guilt and PTSD.
Yet that is what Nolan presents. When we first meet Odysseus, on Calypso’s island, she is feeding him the lotus to make him forget the horrors he experienced. Matt Damon, playing the role, is haunted not only by the attrition of his ships and men but, more deeply, by the devastation he precipitated at Troy. The temple of Athena was desecrated. This is symbolised by the head of the goddess’s statue being lopped off. Nolan may allude here to another account of Troy’s fall, from a source that remains only in fragments. It describes how the Princess Cassandra seeks sanctuary in Athena’s temple but is dragged away and raped by Aias the Lesser. The Greek princes, led by Odysseus, consider stoning him for this sacrilege but relent, offending Athena, who drowns Aias and complicates their returns.
The pre-Christian Greeks understood guilt and conscience, at least when the legends were written down. Orestes kills his mother, who had murdered his father. He is then pursued by the Furies. Oedipus unknowingly kills his father then marries his mother. When he realises his crimes, he blinds himself. There is none of this in Homer’s Odysseus. If Odysseus is so traumatised, why is his first stop after Troy – in both the poem and the film – an unprovoked Viking-style raid on the Cicones? It makes no sense. Nor does the premise that Athena is angered with him. She is Odysseus’s patron and guide throughout Homer’s poem. It begins with her pleading his case to Zeus; it ends with her bringing peace to Ithaca. She appears repeatedly as an adviser in human guises, sometimes flirtatiously. She arranges his return to Ithaca. She gives him courage for a hugely outnumbered fight with the suitors. Nolan’s Athena (Zendaya) instead appears scowlingly from time to time, apparently as part of Odysseus’s bad conscience.
Odysseus’s travel issues have nothing to do with Athena. They are because the Cyclops, whom he blinded, was the son of Poseidon the Sea God. As he leaves the Cyclops’ island, Odysseus abandons his pseudonym of ‘Nobody’ and boastfully yells his true name. Polyphemus then begs his father for revenge…
Next – and this becomes a central theme – Nolan twists the trick of the Wooden Horse into a breach of Zeus’s Law of Hospitality (Xenia), which demands that a host treats a stranger as an honoured guest, lest he be a god in disguise. In turn, the guest should behave well. The Greeks hiding inside the Wooden Horse become the Trojans’ guests because the Trojans dragged it and them inside the city. Ergo, they should not burn the place down. By doing so, they violate Zeus’s Law. This is convoluted logic on three grounds. First, the Greeks were not guests. Had the Trojans known they were inside the Horse, they would have burnt it, or pushed it off a cliff. Second, the Trojans broke the Law 10 years earlier when Paris visited Sparta as Menelaus’s guest and stole his wife, Helen. All that follows is retribution. Third, Xenia no longer applies once you are at war, except under a flag of truce.
Above all, Nolan’s Odysseus is not Homer’s man of guile and wit; not polú-tropos. The trick of telling the Cyclops that his name is Nobody is omitted, as is his cleverly flirtatious conversation seeking help from Nausicaa on the beach of Phaeacia. Likewise for wise Penelope. Her trick suggestion of moving the bed is omitted. Instead, Odysseus identifies himself with a cloak pin.
The film has numerous other, lesser, flaws.
There has been ample press criticism of having a black actress (Lupita Nyong’o) play Homer’s “White-armed Helen” and a transgender one (Elliot Page) play Sinon, who doesn’t appear in Homer’s legend but who becomes a linchpin in Nolan’s telling. There is DEI box-ticking here. I gather it is vital for Oscar eligibility. But far more jarring is the casual dialogue, as with Telemachus referring to Odysseus as “Dad”. There were moments when I felt they should go the whole hog, as in: “Ah, Penny, there you are. I’ve done for those bad guys who were dissing you. Sorry about the mess. The slaves can clean it up. Oh, and sorry I didn’t get back sooner. My head was f****d by the war. Bad things. Did… No…. Still can’t talk about it. Then, tons of shit with monsters and witches on the way back. Druggies kept me on an island. Effing lotus… screwed my brains. But I’m clean now. The crew didn’t make it. The ship’s a write-off too, and so’s the Bronze Age. What’s that!? No!! Never!!! I was not shacked up with some nymph. They’re lying to you. It wasn’t like that…”
At least that would be funny.
As it is, the wretched dialogue dooms any attempt to immerse the viewer in Bronze Age Greece. Not that the film tries. Instead, it imposes post-Judeo-Christian ethics onto the Bronze Age, transmuting Zeus’s Law of Hospitality into something like “Do unto others as you’d be done unto.” Maybe we are expected to draw a message about ‘refugees’ welcome, or perhaps that’s a paranoid jump too far? In any event, Nolan fails where, say, the Northman (2022) or Beowulf (2007) succeed. They plunge you into Viking and Saxon worlds, whose morality isn’t your morality, let alone that of progressive Hollywood. To make legends seem real it’s first necessary to swallow L.P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
This doesn’t trouble Nolan, who instead incorporates modern feminist tropes. Circe (Samantha Morton), the beautiful enchantress of the poem, appears to be auditioning for the title role in Viz magazine’s forthcoming biopic, ‘The Life and Times of Millie Tant’. She tells Odysseus that she turned his men into swine to demonstrate their true natures. Homer ascribes Circe no motive. She turns men into animals because she can. Later, Penelope (Anne Hathaway) laments that she cannot reign in her own right – to which the immediate response is: “If you could, your palace wouldn’t be full of these bloody suitors, would it?” Contemporaneously, the Amazons are ruled by women. Their queen, Penthesilea, allies with Troy. This point evades Nolan.
Last, there is an embarrassing lack of chemistry between Damon and Hathaway. They can’t fake it. This contrasts with another recent film of the same events – the Return (2024). That too had Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) as a war-wearied veteran, sick of bloodshed, though ready for one last round. It too plays with Homer’s plot – for example, by having Telemachus execute Antinous, the most pestilential suitor, last of all and in front of Penelope (Juliette Binoche). Homer has Odysseus kill him first. That is wiser: he is a ringleader and most likely to rally the others. But the Return is forgivable and credible. Its Odysseus is Homer’s ‘man of many wiles’. It builds tension before the trial of the bow, however well you know the story. What’s more, Fiennes and Binoche have chemistry. You feel that they’d appreciate Athena holding back the dawn. As drama, the Return beats Nolan by a country mile.
Nolan ends with our modernised Odds and Penny – as I’ll re-dub them – preparing to sail into the sunset, as heroes and heroines so often do when the Hollywood credits roll. But this is imbecilic, even by the film’s own terms, let alone Homer’s. They must make the still-callow Telemachus king, ruling an island where not everyone is likely chuffed by the suitors’ demise. Moreover, as the film repeatedly hints, the Greek states are threatened by the Sea Peoples, who ultimately brought their civilisation to an end. Nolan suggests that the Sea Peoples are the Greeks themselves, endlessly raiding one another. Maybe so, maybe not. But either way, is it wise to leave, depriving Telemachus of your warrior skills and the fighting-age men you need to crew your ship?
Penny recognises this, shrugs and says “Civilisation will rise again” – which is like our leaders surveying the mess they’ve created before saying “Oh dear, but it’ll sort itself out,” then chartering a large yacht to the Caribbean. You expect this from Harry and Megs, but not from Odysseus and Penelope. Yes, Tiresias does tell Odysseus that he must make one last journey, trekking inland until he finds men who mistake an oar for a winnowing shovel, then make sacrifice to Poseidon, begging forgiveness. But that is for the future. Tennyson plays with this story and does it far better. It is not a cruise with his wife.
It is not for me to see into Nolan’s mind, but it is pretty clear that he has written an ‘Odyssey’ for Hollywood’s prejudices, or his own. He dramatises adventures with monsters and perils well enough, and some will relish that. But he fails – deliberately, I’m sure – to render the man of whom Homer sings. Nor does he do Penelope justice.
Had he done this to Pooh Bear, Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, I’d have had a laugh and thought: “More fool me, wasting £20 – still, three hours of air-con was nice.” But the Odyssey is more important. It is a foundation of western culture, defining a type of resilient heroism as well as the enduring importance of home and family. Homer stresses these aspects, and the quest for them, as virtues. Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ retains the monsters but subverts these core elements, inserting modern prejudices and sensibilities in their place. That is why, unlike the Return, it is a stinker.
And in an era when many more people will see the film than read the poem, that matters.
David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at theUniversity of East Anglia.
Angela Rayner is facing questions over whether she misled the public about her career history, after appearing to blur the lines between her work as a home help and her role as a union rep. The Telegraphhas the story:
The newly reinstated Housing Secretary has said in the past that she spent 14 years as a council-employed “home care worker”, even though she spent 10 years working either full time or part time as a shop steward.
The Conservatives suggested Ms Rayner was contributing to a “credibility crisis” for Labour that began under Sir Keir Starmer.
Ms Rayner is the latest in a line of Labour Cabinet ministers to face scrutiny over their CVs, including Rachel Reeves, the former chancellor, and Jonathan Reynolds, the Business Secretary.
Earlier this week, Ms Rayner posted a picture of herself on social media, taken in 2003 when she was “working as a home carer for Stockport council”.
This photo takes me right back. Working as a home carer for Stockport Council.
It was my first proper job. A special job. But one of the toughest I've ever done.
I know what it’s like to wash someone, cook for them, and make time to actually listen to them before rushing off to… pic.twitter.com/06yAOZOdi0
In a previous social media post she had said she left the council after “14 years service in local government as a home care worker”.
It prompted the BBC to challenge her on Radio 4’s PM programme about her true career history. In response she said her roles “kind of get blurred” by journalists because for some of the time she was “given paid time off to do trade union duties… then other times I was fully seconded” to union work.
She was employed by Stockport council from 2000 to 2015, yet when she was running for Parliament in 2014 she described herself as a “trade union official with Unison”.
The facts about Ms Rayner’s employment history are that she worked in the private sector as a home help from 1998 to 2000, then, according to freedom of information responses published by Stockport council, she worked full-time as a home help for them from August 2000 until April 2005.
She then worked part time as a home help until April 2011, spending some of her time on union work as an assistant branch secretary. Then until 2015, when she became an MP, she was on full-time secondment to union duties as branch secretary.
Ms Rayner was the Unison rep at the council but was not employed by Unison, meaning her official job title remained “home help”.
It means that she spent two years as a home help in the private sector, almost five years as a full-time home help for the council, then six years combining home help work with union work and four years on full-time union work, rather than the claimed “14 years’ service in local government as a home care worker”.
The history of the transatlantic slave trade refuses to settle into a single, agreed-upon narrative. Each generation of scholars returns to the archive and finds something the last generation missed, and the argument over who profited, who suffered, and who held the reins of the trade continues without resolution. David Eltis and Stanley Engerman have long pushed back against the claim that the profits of the slave trade financed England’s industrial takeoff, arguing that the sums involved were too modest to have driven a transformation of that scale. Their intervention reoriented much of the debate toward Europe’s balance sheet. Yet in redirecting attention to whether Britain grew rich from slavery, the literature has left curiously underexplored a parallel and equally important question: how African rulers, merchants and chiefs profited from the trade, and how thoroughly they controlled its terms. That question deserves equal weight, and the evidence emphatically dismantles the old image of Africans as passive suppliers caught in a system designed and run from Europe.
Africans, not Europeans, determined the conditions under which the trade operated. Slavery and the long-distance trade in captives were nothing new to the continent. Trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean networks in human beings had moved people for centuries before a single European ship appeared off the coast. European buyers wanted slaves badly, but wanting was not the same as getting. Early attempts by Europeans to seize captives by force were consistently repelled, which meant that for the entire duration of the trade, Europeans were reduced to purchasing from African suppliers on terms those suppliers established, since no European power possessed the military strength to compel African participation in any transaction its rulers did not sanction. The economics of the 18th Century sharpen this point considerably. As demand for slaves surged with the spread of New World plantation agriculture, prices paid to African suppliers climbed accordingly and by 1700 the value of the slave trade in Atlantic Africa had come to outweigh the trade in all other commodities combined, with the price of slaves tripling over the course of the 18th Century.
Rather than being squeezed by this surge in European demand, African kings and merchants didn’t just absorb the Atlantic trade’s expansion; they tightened their grip on it and claimed a growing share of its profits. This dynamic held even once the volume of European manufactured imports rose substantially, since Western goods did not attain sufficient presence to disrupt local African production before the 19th Century. Indigenous textile production continued to thrive well into the 19th Century notwithstanding the rising inflows of Indian and later Manchester cloths. Furthermore, African smelters produced iron of such quality that it gave them a keen advantage over imports in West Africa even during the 20th Century. None of this fits comfortably with a picture of African societies as economically subordinate. It fits far better with a picture of shrewd, adaptive elites steering a lucrative trade to their own advantage across four centuries, absorbing and redirecting European commercial pressure rather than buckling under it.
Interestingly, documentary evidence from company ledgers turns this general argument into hard, quantifiable numbers. A meticulous reconstruction of the Royal African Company’s payments to Gold Coast chiefs between 1679 and 1704, drawn from more than 20,000 individual entries in the Company’s own journals, shows that African elites did not merely tolerate European traders on the coast – they extracted enormous and steadily growing wealth from them as the price of doing business in their territory.
The scale of these payments is difficult to overstate. The total value of payments made to African elites was 17 times as much as a typical Company agent’s salary, and taking into account that the Company employed between six and 10 agents across its African forts and factories during this period, the total value of payments was still about twice as much as the combined salary of 10 agents serving the Company on the Gold Coast. Measured against African incomes rather than European ones, the disparity is just as striking: the total value of payments was 201 times as much as the yearly allowance of an African labourer, and 50 times as much as that of a skilled craftsman on the Gold Coast.
This wealth did not spread evenly among African recipients. Head chiefs – meaning kings, queens and princes – absorbed the largest share of it, receiving 62% of the total value of all recorded payments, while chieftains and officeholders divided most of the remainder between them. Once the Royal African Company’s monopoly weakened after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and rival English merchants began contesting the same trade routes, the position of these head chiefs improved further still, their share of total payments climbing from 33% before 1688 to 67% afterwards.
What stands out just as strongly is the degree to which European suppliers tailored their offerings to African preference rather than the reverse. Chiefs received finer imported cloth specifically because they used it to signal authority and prestige, while firearms and alcohol were supplied in quantities and combinations that shifted according to the personal tastes and ceremonial needs of individual rulers – from the brandy favoured over rum at planting festivals to the particular grades of cloth requested for a queen’s court and her attendants. European cloth alone accounted for 46% of the total value of everything paid to African chiefs across the entire period studied, a figure that reflects not European imposition but African demand dictating the assortment.
Nowhere is the asymmetry of bargaining power stated more bluntly than in the moments when chiefs threatened to withhold their cooperation altogether. Company correspondence preserves a case in which a prince, dissatisfied with the monthly sum offered him, warned that he would stop all merchants from coming to the coast and redirect commerce to a rival town unless his demands were met – a threat serious enough that the Company hastily agreed to supply him with scarlet broadcloth and iron on a fixed yearly schedule to keep him satisfied. A separate letter shows a queen making an almost identical demand, insisting on a raised monthly ground rent in exchange for her promise to bar local canoes from carrying goods off to interloping traders who competed with the Company.
These were not isolated incidents but part of a consistent pattern. Payments spiked specifically at settlements positioned along the sub-coast caravan routes – the geographic chokepoints where chiefs held literal power to redirect trade before it ever reached the coast – and these same chiefs saw their share of the Company’s gross income rise from a negligible 0.6% before 1688 to more than 12% afterwards, a jump far steeper than that experienced by chiefs situated elsewhere.
Even the physical infrastructure of the trade underscores African primacy rather than European domination. Every fort a European company built on the coast stood on land an African kingdom had agreed, through negotiated treaty, to lease and sovereignty over that ground never passed into European hands. Permission for construction had to be sought, granted or refused according to local political calculation, and could be reversed entirely at African discretion. The Hueda kingdom governing the port of Ouidah initially refused Europeans any fortified presence whatsoever, confining them instead to unfortified lodges built to local designs and positioned deliberately beside the royal palace itself – an arrangement that let the king observe every European movement directly and impress upon them the extent of his own authority.
Only later did the same kingdom permit fortification, and even then it did so on terms of its own choosing, at one point supplying over 400 labourers to help construct a French fort it had agreed to allow, effectively making the crown a co-investor in the very structure meant to house its European trading partners. African rulers also exercised direct judicial and political authority over Europeans operating within their territory. In certain coastal towns, European governors were granted the right to preside over judicial proceedings only because local elites permitted it, treating them as arbiters rather than sovereigns.
Local kings intervened personally in European affairs as they saw fit – in one instance selecting which official would govern a rival nation’s fort after an uprising, and in another dispatching messengers to accompany English traders seeking permission to settle in a neighbouring kingdom’s territory, effectively vouching for one set of Europeans to another African power. This authority extended to matters of alliance and betrayal as well. When one ruler found himself unable to pay what he owed to English traders, he simply switched his allegiance to the Dutch – an option available to him precisely because no single European power held enough leverage on the coast to prevent it. African kingdoms understood perfectly well that competition among European powers redounded to their own advantage, and they exploited it methodically and by design.
The Hueda permitted English, French and Portuguese forts to be built within roughly 500 metres of one another specifically to guarantee that no single European power could gain enough dominance to dictate terms – a strategy that kept every European tenant dependent on African goodwill and none of them secure enough to act unilaterally. The kingdom went further still, forbidding the Europeans within its borders from fighting one another at all, since any such conflict threatened to disrupt the very trade on which the kingdom’s wealth depended. European companies, meanwhile, found themselves locked into a costly rivalry against each other rather than against Africa, building forts within sight of a competitor’s cannon not because doing so served any independent commercial logic but because failing to match a rival’s presence risked ceding an entire stretch of coastline to it – a pattern of construction that spread steadily along the Gold Coast throughout the early 18th Century without any African kingdom ever losing its underlying authority to grant or withdraw the land itself. African rulers, for their part, simply watched this European rivalry play out and collected the rents, presents and improved terms of trade that came from playing one anxious buyer against another.
What emerges is not a story of Africa acted upon, but of Africa acting. Chiefs and kings did not merely endure four centuries of contact with European traders; they priced it, shaped it and profited from it on their own terms. They dictated the mix and quality of goods they would accept, threatened to redirect trade whenever their demands went unmet, controlled the very ground on which every European fort was permitted to stand, and turned rival European companies against one another to their own advantage. The debate over whether the profits of slavery built the factories of Manchester and Liverpool may never be settled. But there is far less room for doubt about the other side of the Atlantic: African elites did not simply survive the slave trade. They ran a great deal of it, and they were paid accordingly.
Lipton Matthews is a researcher and podcaster. He has worked in the heritage, cultural and sales sectors. His work has been featured in CapX, the Critic, the Federalist, Epoch Times and other publications. He is the author of the book Busting African Delusions.
So we have a story saying that an academic at the University of Derby was fired for some careless comments, and has had this verdict compounded by legal decision, not once but twice: first at an Employment Tribunal, and then at the Employment Appeal Tribunal.
The story is, as usual, a bit mixed, but some morals can be drawn.
Mixed? Aye, the academic was a “film-maker,” and there is a photograph of him looking suitably bohemian: so it all sounds a bit vocational, and Derby is… well, let me quote Wikipedia:
The University of Derby, formerly known as Derby College, is a public university in the city of Derby, England. It traces its history back to the establishment of the Derby Diocesan Institution for the training of schoolmistress in 1851. It gained university status in 1992.
So, Oxford or Cambridge, it ain’t. Nothing wrong with that, of course. (Except that sometimes I worry that Blair’s aspiration to educate, educate, educate half the nation was, in fact, nothing other than a conspiracy to manufacture a vast electorate of mechanical ticker-tape Whigs: and thus to kill off Toryism i.e., England and Christianity, once and for all.) One sometimes wishes these “universities” were made into honest technical schools.
Oddly enough, news comes on July 29th 2026 – i.e., the date of writing – that Derby is one of only two universities “licensed to operate in Greece”. So perhaps I underestimate Derby. It is going back to the land that invented history, geography, meteorology, zoology, philosophy, etc. – the civilisation of Aristotle, Herodotus and Archimedes – in order to teach the old Greek grandmother how to suck eggs. That’s bold from Derby. They are going back to the classical world to, er, modernise it: teach it about HR, new hairdressing techniques and the usual sub-Gramscian-Benjaminian maunder, plus a bit of sustainability and Net Zero?
Now, what is our “academic” from Derby guilty of?
The employment tribunal heard the lecturer told one student: “If you had worn that nail polish back in the day, you would have been called a p**f.”
Students said Mr Cherrington almost exclusively referred to women in the class as “females” and used “misogynistic” language, describing the main actress in a music video as “not attractive enough for the role”.
They said he had also used “transphobic” language when referring to a student who was transitioning as a “troublesome trans kid.”
He was also accused of ableist language, including an instance when he claimed universities “were becoming a care home for people with disabilities.
Some of the above is amusing (I had a history teacher in Hustler School in the 1980s who said to a boy with an earring, “In the old days, any man with an earring was called either a gypsy, a pirate or a poof” and everyone thought it was amusing, even the boy in question), and some of it silly and some of it, to say the least, a bit risky. (I really don’t understand the “females” bit. If he called men “males” in the same context then there couldn’t possibly be a problem. If he called men “men” and women “females” then he is a bit odd, but he wouldn’t be the first oddbod in a university.)
The point is that everything depends on audience; and if one’s audience is a group of 20 year-olds among whom there is likely to be one or two easily-triggered and also administratively-aggressive youths, then one should probably place one’s bar-room banter in the lockers at the local railway station before coming in for work.
Though I have written the word “poof” without asterisks in this very journal, I have never been so bold as to use it in class: indeed, I would say that it would be out of place to use it in class unless one was engaging in a philological explanation of such language.
Now, I am aware to say that sounds precious and pedantic. But academics are supposed to be precious and pedantic. And it is in preciosity and pedantry that the academic can find all the “academic freedom” he or she wants. Draw a line around one’s utterance, a thick black border, and you’ll have all the ‘safe space’ you need.
And this is my point. Our beleaguered academic Russell Cherrington should have chosen his words more wisely.
In the old academic world, of, say, Oxford and Cambridge before, say, 2000, there was a double culture. By day, formal lectures, supervisions, tutorials, seminars, all conducted in a becoming unpolitical, neutral, objective manner. This was, admittedly, shot through with fakery and fraudulence, but the apparent shedding of personality and partiality meant that good high conversations could be had, in stripped-down, earnest manner. But by night, there was dinner: which was conversation conducted in more personal and partial manner, with mockery, irony, belligerence all allowed, within certain civilisational limits, which meant, obviously, limited by who was present. If women were present one could switch the misogyny off. If women were not present, one could risk switching it on a bit, etc. This is no more and no less than the logic of all conversation. If I am alone in conversation with a friend, then we create a world in which certain sorts of prejudice are allowable and expressible. The same for small gatherings. But the larger the gathering, the more formal the gathering, the less one knows who is present at the gathering – then the more one should speak like a politician.
The modern university is nowadays almost all daylight conversation. Lecture, clap, clap, insincere praise, deflection to one’s own subject, mutual incomprehension, abort for drinks. Irony out. Solemnity, seriousness, earnestness in. Well, alas. But that is the way it is. So academics have to speak like politicians.
No, Gove, by “speak like a politician” I don’t mean lying. I don’t mean “speak exactly like a politician” or even with a political logic or relevance. I mean speaking politely, civilly, as if for a broadcast: as if addressing a public of many colours. In fact, the politics of the academic is not politics at all, since it is not partial. It is impartial: it has the impartiality of philosophy. One should be philosophical at all times. One should tell the truth.
(I am not saying this is how things should be. It is my advice. Old writers used to call this a counsel of prudence.)
There is something else. If I were to give exact advice to academics with controversial opinions, it is this. You can say whatever you want, as long as you do one of the following things:
Bracket it. Say, “Some people say x.” i.e., “I am not saying it.”
Equal-and-opposite-it. Say, “On the one hand, x, but on the other y.” Offer counter-arguments.
Paint the antagonists on either side of an argument with the same brush. Say, “For instance, one could say that Polanski is x. But in fact the same thing is true of Farage, Badenoch and Burnham.” I do this all the time. Students immediately understand that you are not going after one political side, though undoubtedly there is a bit of a frisson at first when the name of one particular political leader is mentioned.
Avoid all controversial language and never use it, though if necessary one is allowed to explain it.
Contextualise everything. Objectify everything.
All the defence the academic needs from making an error is in Plato’s distinction between knowledge and opinion.
Never admit to an opinion.
(A qualification. One can express opinions, and one does, no doubt, but the point is to express them humorously, generously and with self-awareness, also other-awareness: all of this diffuses and defuses the opinion. Humour and respect for others goes a long way. Of course, if the British, or those studying in Britain, have lost, or never had, a sense of humour then of course even this is difficult.)
I have always thought that what makes the academy “academic” is higher function. The higher function is to rise above party. Party and partiality is for politics. If one is a politician, one can be partial. But if one is academic, one is, at least in principle, a philosopher. Perhaps not all the time. Perhaps not at dinner. But certainly in a formal setting. One is speaking as a representative. One is as grand as an MP, though a different sort of representative. One is speaking for knowledge, wisdom, truth. One is speaking on behalf of Plato, Aquinas and Kant. (I said, at least in principle.) One is, oddly enough, speaking for England. (Believe it or not, Edmund Burke thought the universities were just as representative of England as its MPs.)
Now, if one disavows this higher function, as many persistent dreary partial politicised academics do, then we lose what makes the university academic. We become a service institution for the regime. This is corruption. Now, I know what I am saying is ideal, impossibly so. No institution is so high or pure. But it doesn’t matter. For this is the academic ideal, like it or not. And it is also practical. Because it guides us on how to behave in the classroom.
Of course, what I am saying does not apply when undergraduates or even graduates and fellow academics start to object to one’s written work. That’s a different problem. But whenever I read one of these cases where an admittedly unfairly harassed and abused academic has got in trouble in a class (and then, perhaps even more significantly, got in trouble with a nag-ridden bureaucracy), I think, “Well, they should not have said those things” or “If they insisted on saying them, they should have done it in another way,” that is, in the way I suggest above.
I don’t want a Nobel Prize for these suggestions, and I don’t imagine that I might not fall foul of something at some point (even if I am in a different system): but I do think that many of the cases we hear about do involve academics making the mistake of betraying academic function. If they had not betrayed it, they would not have got in so much trouble.
James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
When one is faced with a close loved one hovering between this world and the next, survival on this plane still moot, much time is spent waiting in hospitals and in self-reflection between the prayers and the managing of anxious friends and relatives.
A reply to my article about the Brothers Tate yesterday got me thinking. The discussion was about how we have got to a state where society is in so much moral conflict about basic principles that used to be universal across the West: in particular the sanctity of life and the divinity in all human beings, even those who carry out the most heinous of evil.
As a keen student of the utopianism of the 20th Century, it has appalled me how the evil of Marx has risen again to a point where it is now the basic worldview of a majority of young educated people, either in its lite form or the inevitable consequences of communism. On reflection there should be no surprise that our Western societies have been incapable of countering its resurgence. After all, we have utterly abandoned any pretence of an overarching moral and spiritual authority in place of ‘western values’ – the vapid platitudes spouted by grey men selling themselves as Prime Ministers. It is no surprise that when confronted with the spiritual conviction of the Marxist or the Islamist, it crumbles.
I used to place great store in the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. I no longer do. Not because the material gains it unlocked were illusory – they were real and immense – but because I have come to see it as the kindling that eventually produced Marx, the utopian experiments of the 20th Century, and much of the spiritual desolation we inhabit today.
There is no serious argument against the material leaps. The rapid refocus on the material, on rationality and measurable cause-and-effect, grew most vigorously out of the culture of no-nonsense Anglo-Scots Protestantism. It first drove the agricultural revolution in Britain, then the Industrial Revolution. The same energy spread quickly through the daughter nations of the Anglosphere and the Protestant states of Germany. The Catholic world was slower. In places it imploded: revolutionary France, later Russia. By the 19th Century the focus on materialism had become near-total among those who held power. Spirituality was relegated to a private hobby. The Protestant world, and the secular culture that emerged from it, wrote off the pre-Enlightenment centuries as backward, superstitious, contemptible. A thousand years of human Christian civilisation, history, philosophy, art, architecture and spiritual insight were dismissed as primitive barbarism.
The Newtonian engine and its limits
The primary engine of the Age of Reason was Newtonian conservatism in its most basic form: put in x energy, get out x energy. Balance. Determinism. Reversibility. A clockwork universe in which, if you knew the positions and momenta of every particle, you could in principle predict the future and reconstruct the past with equal certainty.
Since the mid-20th Century that picture has been steadily undermined. Thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, the discovery of dark matter and dark energy, the irreducible role of irreversibility – all suggest a universe far stranger than the Enlightenment imagined. Other dimensions are no longer the exclusive province of mystics. On our physical plane, x still roughly equals x most of the time, but that local regularity does not equip us with the tools to understand the deeper reality. Homines sapientes have walked the planet for roughly 250,000 years. Written history covers perhaps the last 4,000. Archaeological evidence of organised, non-subsistence activity – civilisation in any meaningful sense – appears around 15,000 years ago. The great ice sheets of the last glacial maximum scoured much of the northern hemisphere clean. We simply do not know what was lost.
Jordan Peterson, in his earlier work on myth, suggested that the great stories we still tell are often allegorical records of events that occurred long before writing – warnings of events or societal models that need to be avoided. I am not endorsing the more extreme of the ancient wisdom proponents – Graham Hancock’s more extravagant conclusions, for example; I have a degree in archaeology and find many of those leaps of imagination unpersuasive. But the questions themselves are legitimate. Time and again we assume that the fundamental problems of the human condition are being encountered for the first time. History suggests otherwise. We have faced them before.
Material triumph, spiritual bankruptcy
Look at where the Age of Reason has actually delivered us. The gains are staggering: penicillin, modern agriculture and food preservation, machines, the harnessing of electricity, a degree of mastery over nature that previous ages could only dream of. Yet the same rationalist temper produced a lethal arrogance. Marx, Lenin, Mao, Hitler and their lesser imitators all built on the premise – refined in the French Revolution and codified in 19th Century materialism – that man is wholly material and can therefore be treated as a material unit, to be planned, improved, liquidated or redesigned according to the latest rational scheme.
Experience keeps teaching the opposite lesson. Humans are not material units. Christ’s reply to Satan remains one of the most precise diagnoses available: “Man shall not live by bread alone.” The rationalists killed God, or at least declared Him surplus to requirements, and in doing so denied the spiritual hunger that is demonstrably part of our nature. People will, and do, sacrifice comfort, status, even life itself for causes they believe in. The current spectacle of activists risking long prison sentences for performative political gestures is only the latest illustration. When a culture systematically starves the spiritual dimension, people do not become calm rationalists. They seek meaning in political fanaticism, in crank ideologies, in the endless chase of vapid stimulation. Philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre have spent decades examining the wreckage. In After Virtue and later work he argued that the Enlightenment project of grounding morality in pure reason – severed from any shared teleology or tradition of the virtues – left us with emotivism: moral language as disguised preference. We retained the fragments of an older moral vocabulary while losing the framework that once made the words coherent. The result is a society rich in technique and poor in purpose.
What the monks would have understood
Consider thermodynamics and the deeper implications drawn out by Ilya Prigogine in his later work. Present the second law, entropy, irreversible processes, and the spontaneous emergence of order in far-from-equilibrium systems to a gentleman scientist of Franklin’s or Banks’s generation and he would struggle. The Newtonian framework he inhabited treated time as reversible and systems as tending toward equilibrium. Dissipation was an inconvenience to be minimised, not a creative force. Take the same ideas to a learned monk at one of the great medieval universities and the reception would likely have been more open. The ‘God particle’ of the Higgs boson would not have struck them as absurd; the notion that the deepest levels of reality involve something closer to participation, relation, and creative emergence than to billiard-ball mechanics would have felt continuous with their metaphysics. Prigogine’s central insight, developed across Order Out of Chaos (with Isabelle Stengers) and the End of Certainty, was that classical science had privileged the reversible, deterministic description of nature while treating irreversibility and complexity as secondary or illusory. In non-equilibrium conditions, however, systems can generate order out of chaos through dissipative structures. Time’s arrow is not a statistical artefact of our ignorance; it is fundamental. The universe is not a closed, predictable machine but an open, creative process in which novelty and organisation continually arise.
That is a universe in which purpose, meaning, and the spiritual are not embarrassing add-ons. It is closer, in temperament if not in technical detail, to the world of Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante than to the closed system of high Enlightenment rationalism.
I have been reading those older writers again. Augustine and Aquinas lived 1,600 and 800 years ago. Give an undergraduate a substantial passage from either, stripped of identifying marks, and ask them to date it. The guesses routinely fall somewhere between last month and three centuries ago. The same experiment works with Marcus Aurelius or Aristotle. The shock when the true dates are revealed is instructive. These minds were not primitive. They were operating with different assumptions about the nature of reality – assumptions that modern physics, in its more adventurous reaches, has begun to make newly plausible.
Not a call to smash the machines
None of this is an argument for discarding technology, abandoning Newton where he still works, or romanticising the pre-modern past. The material achievements of the last three centuries have saved and improved countless lives. The problem is imbalance. We built a civilisation that is extraordinarily powerful at manipulating matter and extraordinarily inept at nourishing the non-material needs of the creatures who inhabit it. In striving to become as gods through pure reason and technique, we have constructed something that increasingly resembles a Tower of Babel: impressive, unstable, and generating its own confusions of language and purpose.
The path forward is not regression. It is rebalancing. We need, deliberately and without embarrassment, to restore the spiritual dimension that human beings demonstrably require. Without it, societies either decay into hedonism and meaninglessness or devour themselves in ideological fever. The old books – the ones the Age of Reason taught us to despise – still contain resources for that work. So does the science that has moved beyond the closed, reversible universe of the 18th Century. Prigogine’s later thought is one bridge between them: a rigorous recognition that the world is not a finished mechanism but an unfinished, creative, irreversible process.
From the early 1800s there was a growing concern that the headlong dash to industrialisation, the prioritising of materialism above all else, was a path with a cost for both individuals and humanity. The Methodist movement, Anglican and Catholic Christianity of the period, and the huge growth in working-class church attendance across the Anglosphere in the 19th and early 20th centuries reversed a decline that had seen church attendance collapse to almost modern numbers in the later 1700s. Others found their hope and spiritual succour in the inevitable destination of materialism – that man can become a god, that utopia could be reached if only we did this, that, and the other, ignoring human nature utterly.
In Britain, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien both saw the danger and shaped their writings to counter it. In Russia, Dostoevsky saw it too – the Brothers Karamazov is a treatise on precisely this subject. In Rome, Pope Leo XIII saw it and cautioned against losing our spirituality and therefore our humanity. Now Leo XIV is issuing the same warning, having chosen his name precisely to reflect Leo XIII’s concerns.
Western values without the moral core of faith that once underpinned them are hopelessly unable to resist the spiritual ‘kool-aid’ of the Marxist utopian. Passive and paralysed when faced with a resurgent Islam, and despite our formidable power and weaponry, these two movements will destroy the West unless we recognise that Western culture cannot be sustained on materialism alone – that we must recapture and cherish spirituality, and specifically that spirituality which underpins our society and its values. I have seen people I know begin attending church again, not through conviction of faith but as an acknowledgement that this is what we need to do. These are the gestures we need as a society to preserve our civilisation.
The increasingly wayward Richard Dawkins said recently in an interview that he would “rather live in a Christian culture” and that he would choose Bach’s Mass in B minor for his funeral. He has a great love of the fruits of Christian culture – fruits of a faith he has personally spent the last 30 years trying to destroy. Just as Western values cannot stand without their founding moral core, Christian culture and civilisation needs Christianity in order to exist.
We have progressed. The question is to what end. Bread alone has never been enough. It is time we remembered that.
C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the UK’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack page.
Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is being spent every year paying convicted criminals to leave the UK. The Mailhas the story:
Some £6.5 million has been handed out to foreign criminals between July 2024, when Labour came to power, and October 2025.
The grants, awarded under the Facilitated Return Scheme (FRS), were given to 4,625 people at an average of £1,405 each, data exclusively obtained by the the Mail shows.
The money is paid to “encourage” foreign nationals who have been convicted of a criminal offence while in the UK to leave the country “at the earliest possible opportunity” – some a whole four years before the end of their jail sentence. …
Data obtained by the the Mail shows that between the day after Sir Keir Starmer’s election win and the end of October 2025, the Government paid out £6,500,626 to foreign nationals convicted of criminal offences in Britain.
October 2025 saw the largest payout at £590,913 to 410 people, compared to the lowest in January of that year at £291,277 to 211 people. …
The FRS has been in place since 2006 and, according to the Government, offers “resettlement grants” in the form of “financial support for reintegration to encourage FNOs [foreign national offenders] to cooperate with their early removal from the UK”.
The Home Office defines an FNO as someone who is not British and has been convicted of any crime in the UK.
Criminals must apply for the grant, and are eligible to receive up to £1,500 if they make their application while serving a custodial sentence.
This drops to £750 for those who apply after finishing their prison sentence or who were not sentenced to prison time.
Children of those awarded grants under the scheme are also eligible for an additional grant of up to £1,500 each if they are also returning to their home country.
The Mail understands only two FNOs deported in the time period covered by the £6.5 million took any dependents with them.
A “discretionary” extra payment of £500 can also be paid to “vulnerable” migrants who have committed offences, such as those with mental health problems, physical disabilities, pregnant women and those who are elderly, sick or homeless.
“People smugglers cut prices to cash in on migrant crisis” – Traffickers are slashing their fees and taking on new operatives to meet surging demand in the wake of the chaotic mass storming of the Spanish border at Ceuta, reports the Telegraph.
“‘Selfish’ EU in row over migrant chaos” – Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez has criticised “selfish” EU leaders after 22 European prime ministers and presidents attacked him for the sudden migrant surge in Ceuta, reports the Telegraph.
“New Manchester Mayor is Corbyn fan who wants to introduce a wealth tax” – Elected on a turnout of under 25% and without securing a majority of first-preference votes, Manchester’s new mayor Bev Craig is a Corbyn supporter who backs a wealth tax, reveals Elizabeth Ivens in the Mail.
“Labour accused of killing jobs for students” – Labour is facing accusations of making it harder for students to find part-time work, with the number of affected roles leaping by 40% over the past two years, says the Telegraph.
“Badenoch security officer was knife-wielding fantasist” – A Telegraph investigation into security arrangements for MPs and ministers has uncovered serious concerns about a protection officer assigned to Kemi Badenoch.
“Man who raped women to ‘teach them a lesson’ could be freed from jail” – Sunny Islam, who told the jury he was a practising Muslim and was handed an indefinite prison sentence for attacking four women in a three-month reign of terror in 2010, may walk free, reports the Mail.
“Non-Muslim police staff invited to fast during Ramadan” – Non-Muslim officers and staff working at West Midlands Police have been invited to fast during Ramadan in an “act of solidarity” with their Muslim co-workers, says the Telegraph.
“Boy George’s unabashed support for Jews makes him man of the decade” – Boy George’s new song, inspired by the Nova Festival massacre of October 7th, is being hailed as a beacon of hope amid a cultural climate of relentless antisemitism, says Zoe Strimpel in the Telegraph.
“Train operators spend £13 million on hiring taxis for staff” – Freedom of information requests have uncovered that train operators have made over 395,000 taxi bookings for their own staff since January 2025, at a total cost of £13 million to the taxpayer, reports the Mail.
“Mother loses seven teeth after tripping over pothole” – A three-inch-deep pothole left business owner Alison Smith with life-changing injuries after she fell while walking to meet her daughter in an unlit area, with the council refusing to pay compensation, says the Mail.
“Kamala Harris drops her clearest hint yet at a 2028 run” – Speaking at a conference in Nashville, Kamala Harris gave another hint that she may be eyeing a 2028 White House run, as she continues to lead most Democrat primary polls, says the Mail.
“BP selling up in the North Sea is a bleak verdict on Britain” – In the Mail, Alex Brummer writes that the UK’s mad dash for ‘green’ energy and the Treasury’s constant changes to taxes are behind both Shell and BP quitting the North Sea in the past two years.
“The climate food crisis which keeps refusing to show up in the statistics” – The Guardian is sounding the climate alarm over a few withered grape vines and a struggling organic farm, while the wider statistics stubbornly refuse to show any sign of a crisis, according to Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That?
“What if Project Spire’s £100 million went on parish ministry?” – Should the Church of England spend £100 million on slavery reparations or struggling parishes? In Anglican Mainstream, Julian Mann argues the cash could fund 100 vicars for a decade and revive frontline ministry.
“Christianity can fill the void of failed multiculturalism” – The Church of England holds the key to both integrating immigrant communities and renewing national identity in an era of failing multiculturalism, says Bijan Omrani in the Telegraph.
“Arts Council is criticised for funding woke projects” – The Arts Council has been accused of “an appalling waste of taxpayers’ money” for funding “woke” projects such as tackling the “divisive” use of the St George’s flag – at a time when traditional museums are being forced to close due to lack of funds, says the Mail.
“Red Cross ‘shoots self in the foot’ with woke ban at Tower charity do” – In the Mail, Richard Eden reports on how a charity event the Tower of London has hosted for years – raising thousands of pounds for the Red Cross in the process – has fallen victim to political correctness.
“The perfect solution to this is if everyone stays six-feet separated” – On X, a damning six-minute video takes a hard look at Anthony Fauci’s Covid-era statements on masks, social distancing and clinical trials – and calls out the contradictions running through his public health advice.
I don’t know who put this together but it’s one of the most amazing compilations put together. Actually perfect. pic.twitter.com/PwDN0TDIZG
