Kmflett's Blog

Hard right blame the left for solidarity with Professor Jason Arday

Whatever happened to the ‘not speaking ill of the dead’ mantra that made an appearance after the murder of Anne Widdecombe?

In respect of the late Professor Jason Arday it has disappeared and it is the hard right defenders of Widdecombe’s memory who are laying into Arday again.

The usual suspects in the usual places, Kathleen Stock, Sarah Ditum and others, have posted that while Nathan Kofnas might not be the ideal critic and they are sorry that Arday is dead, meanwhile there is a repetition of all the things they said while he was still alive.

The blaming of the left for defending Arday is a subset of the genre. I’ve picked out two examples.

Brendan O’Neil, hard right provocateur, formerly a ‘living Marxist’ writes in the Spectator

This is the bleak irony of the Jason Arday tragedy: his self-styled defenders decry the media mob while forging their own frothing mob. They accuse journalists of destroying a man’s life even as they hound those journalists, and libel them as ‘lynchers’, and demand that they face the kangaroo justice of a public shaming.

Meanwhile in UnHerd Jonny Ball, who perhaps come from a Blue Labour perspective notes

But the Arday affair has shown that none of the Left’s neuroses have really gone away, and that there would, in the end, be no compromise. The graduate, activist radicals will not return to some prelapsarian past with a grounding in universalism, empiricism, or the practical representation of the labour interest. Instead, they will wallow and descend into a kind of collective madness, defined by petty internecine feud and driven by culture war ephemera.

The Spectator and UnHerd are owned by Paul Marshall who also owns GB News. Is this perhaps no coincidence as old Marxists with beards are sometimes found to be muttering.