Kmflett's Blog

A media pile on may well have been consequential in the tragic death of Professor Jason Arday.

The pile on came from the right, The Times, Telegraph and Spectator. By contrast the Daily Mirror and indeed the BBC News website refrained from anything more than factual reporting.

The Guardian fell somewhere in between. It didn’t have anything near as much coverage as the right-wing media, but it did have both reporting and some commentary. Its coverage after Professor Arday’s death, for example of the 17th August Trafalgar Square rally, can’t be faulted. Before then there are certainly questions to be asked and the paper carried readers responses

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/21/the-many-tragedies-of-the-jason-arday-case?CMP=share_btn_url

It also carried a piece by Hugh Muir which I think rightly sought to underline that if there were issues it was not with individual journalists but with the Editorial policy. He didn’t find issue with the latter.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/19/rightwing-witch-hunt-jason-arday-legitimate-journalism?CMP=share_btn_url

I did and below is an unpublished Fletter. No complaints about it not being published but while you would not expect The Guardian to be Socialist Worker or the Morning Star I do think the paper’s coverage was not where most of its readers were. Many no doubt were in Trafalgar Square last Monday or supportive of those who were.

Hugh Muir (19.8)suggests that there was both a right-wing backlash and legitimate journalism at play in the Guardian’s coverage of the late Professor Jason Arday. His idiosyncrasies no doubt warranted investigation. However reviewing the Guardian’s coverage I find only passing mention that the recent furore was promoted by self styled race realist Nathan Cofnas. There does not seem to have been sustained consideration of what Cofnas was up to and why, or why the right-wing media were so keen to publicise his allegations. This should not have been a on the one hand and on the other hand matter. The Guardian should have taken a side, albeit of course critically so.

In August 1879 Marx spent some time in St Helier, Jersey, with one of his daughters, Eleanor (Tussy).

On 14^th August he wrote to Engels that ‘we are leaving our present lodgings in St Aubin because Tussy and I cannot stand the monotonous  daily fare of lamb or MUTTON in consequence of which I have become in the last few days an involuntary VEGETARIAN

Marx and Eleanor promptly moved to the Hotel de l’Europe where they stayed until 20^th August without further complaint about the food. Indeed he remarked that the hotel was ‘excellent’. The building survives and according to the last reference I can find is a restaurant.

By August 25^th Marx was staying in Ramsgate at 62 Plains of Waterloo

Marx returned to a favourite subject the weather,

I have not taken and am not taking sea baths, but only warm sea baths; for in consequence of the frightful weather when we arrived in Jersey, my throat trouble got worse and was com-pounded by a sudden toothache, neither being quite gone yet, although much alleviated, and only reminding me by an occasional twinge that they are still lurking in the background.

The Ambridge Socialist

23^rd August

Going to the dogs

Its August in Ambridge as elsewhere. Issues around the now detained Monty continue. Khalil is traumatised by the pictures of dead sheep that Rooth showed him. Azra has rightly taken her to task for this but it was an adult conversation. Later Rooth apologised directly to Khalil.

Meanwhile the Snells, it being August, have a full guest house including someone who will not shut up about Monty. Apparently everyone is talking about it in The Bull. Robert determines to expel the inconvenient guests from Ambridge. Social media has various conspiracy theories…

Eddie Grundy reads Thomas Hardy

bad things happen and you just have to get on with it until the next bad thing. To George, while covering milking for him 18^th August. Clearly Eddie has been reading Thomas Hardy

Flower and Produce Show

One of the highlights of the Ambridge calendar, it never goes well….

Lily & Sgt Burns

Caveat Emptor. At least there was no shower scene. Yet.

In Other News

Keira is still speaking out. Good

A new tracker has been launched to capture the number of Reform Councillors who resign, defect or are suspended. On average one departs every three days.

Of course all parties lose Councillors but the rate of Reform departures highlights not a professional but a shambolic party.

ByLine Times and the Mirror have reported new Reform advice to its members noting that the biggest threat to the Party is the enemy within, its own members

It comes after a training video leaked to the Byline Times told activists: “The fact is, the biggest threat to Reform is people in it and itself. It’s not the Tories, it’s not Labour, the establishment is going to throw everything at us.

“The biggest chance of things going wrong is stuff like infighting, stuff like people just saying and doing stupid stuff. That’s our biggest risk.” It went on to tell them: “Don’t drink and tweet. If there is any doubt, just don’t post it.”

Reform UK Defections & Resignations Tracker – Best for Britain

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.

2027 is an Ashes year for England and Welsh cricket- England play Australia in five Test Matches.

The ECB who run cricket have determined five venues including the Rose Bowl near Southampton but no ground further north than Trent Bridge (Nottingham). Old Trafford (Manchester) and Headingly (Leeds) miss out.

Andy Burnham has said that there should always be a Test played in the North. Given the current poor state of pitches at Lords this seems reasonable and of course in a BBC poll, Headingly was the favourite location. How many times Geoffrey Boycott voted is not known.

Various considerations are in play when choosing Test grounds and knowing the record of the ECB not all will probably stand up to public scrutiny. Even so England clearly do better when they play in the north of England and indeed in Cardiff.

As The New York Times recently put it, fear of AI is the “most bipartisan issue since beer”.

Edward Luce Financial Times

There is a well known list of what the first Labour MPs in 1906 were reading. There is of course no Marx but Charles Dickens, William Morris and Henry George featured

There is now a list of books donated to the Downing St library by MPs who have stood down from the Cabinet following the departure of Keir Starmer.

Starmer himself donated a copy of Tom Baldwin’s biography of Starmer…The former PM was clearly not well red.

Other books on the list are more interesting and perhaps particularly Jo Stevens donation of the Fed, an important labour history book.

• Former Chancellor Rachel Reeves added her own book, Alice in Westminster: The political life of Alice Bacon
• Darren Jones, who served as a senior minister between 2024 and 2026, gave Laudato Si: On Care for our Common Home – a book by Pope Francis which calls for greater protection of the environment
• Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy offered her book All In: How we build a country that works
• Nick Thomas-Symonds, a Cabinet Office minister in the last government, also chose his own book – a biography of former Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson
• Women and Equalities minister Bridget Phillipson picked Choose Freedom: The Future for Democratic Socialism by former Labour deputy leader Roy Hattersley
• Former Wales Secretary Jo Stevens gave The Fed: a history of the South Wales miners in the twentieth century by Hywel Francis and Davis Smith
• Treasury minister James Murray donated Instruction to Deliver – a book by Sir Michael Barber about his experience being a civil servant in Tony Blair’s government

The Times (21st August) which played a key role in the media pile on in the tragic case of the late Professor Jason Arday has reported that the US Ambassador to Belgium, the appropriately named Bill White, has demanded that the University of Ghent lift the suspension of Nathan Cofnas, the racist whose allegations started the furore, be lifted. Cofnas is a US citizen.

Its no great surprise because Cofnas was part of a Cambridge University network of ‘race realists’ which includes Professor James Orr, who is also Reform’s Head of Policy and who JD Vance seems to regard as some sort of philosophical guru.