On Friday evening the news came through that Professor Jason Arday had been found dead at his home in London. He was 41. A week earlier he had resigned his professorship at Cambridge, where he had been the youngest Black professor in the university’s 817-year history. His memoir was due out this week.

I spent Monday morning listening to James O’Brien’s LBC show, two hours from 11am given over to his memory, and I have not been able to stop thinking about it since. This post is my attempt to do something useful with that.

The man they hounded

Jason Arday was autistic. He did not speak until he was eleven, and did not learn to read and write until he was eighteen. He became a professor of sociology of education, first at Glasgow and then at Cambridge. In 2010 he ran marathons for charity; in 2012 he carried the Olympic torch. He was, by every account of people who actually met him, an extraordinary presence in a room.

For more than three years, from the day his Cambridge appointment was announced, he was pursued. It began with plagiarism allegations, and here is the part I need to say plainly, because it matters: some of what the scrutiny found required accounting for. There were embellishments. There were claims that did not hold up. The question was never whether questions could be asked. The question is why the machine needed him destroyed, why it accelerated after he had already resigned and lost everything, and why a white academic at the same university, actually found culpable of plagiarism, kept his chair with a fraction of the attention.

O’Brien spent two hours holding both of those truths at once, and he offered a one-word test for what was wrong with the pursuit: glee. You cannot feel glee at the downfall of a stranger unless something in you believed he had no business being in that space to begin with.

The callers made the show. A woman named Helen, phoning a radio station for the first time in her life, saying she now knows she will go to her grave still feeling racism in this country. A grandmother, Margaret, who once told her grandson that Arday’s story would be his one day, and who must now tell him a different story instead: the one every Black child in Britain already knows, that you must work twice as hard and still be doubted.

And then there was Dean, from Newcastle, who met Arday exactly once and read out a tribute he had written that left O’Brien lost for words. Listen to it. LBC clipped it here: an emotional tribute to Professor Jason Arday. It is the best four minutes of radio I have heard in years, and O’Brien’s reply is the truest thing said all week: “That’s a legacy, Dean.”

His family called what happened to him a campaign of sustained abuse. His colleague Simon Baron-Cohen, who spoke to him hours before his death, described relentless ridicule of every detail of his life, and a man who could not cope with losing his career and his reputation. We have been here before. Caroline Flack in 2020. Wayne Brown, the West Midlands fire chief, who died in 2024 while facing questions over a qualification on his CV. The pattern is not subtle.

Where I come in

I grew up in apartheid South Africa. I have written about that before, about watching a country choose reconciliation over vengeance when every incentive pointed the other way. I left one thing out of that post, and this is it.

I know what state-sanctioned, media-amplified racism smells like, because I was raised inside it. I watched it poison a country for decades and I have spent my adult life watching that country claw its way back out. And now I sit in Britain in 2026 and I watch the same rot running the other direction. The Overton window has not shifted here; it has jumped three frames. A billionaire uses his platform to pour petrol on British street riots. GB News broadcasts grievance around the clock. The tabloids do what the tabloids have always done, and the Leveson Inquiry that was supposed to rein them in was quietly half-abandoned: Part 2, the bit that would have examined press culture and conduct, was cancelled by the government in 2018 and never happened.

A good friend said to me in the pub last week: not all Brits are like this. He is right, and it is beside the point. Most white South Africans were not personally cruel either. The machinery does not need most people to be cruel. It needs most people to be quiet.

So what do we actually do

I do not accept that we are helpless. Successive governments have been limp on this, and waiting for politicians to fix it is a losing bet. Here is what ordinary people can do, and none of it requires heroism.

Write to your MP and demand Leveson Part 2. It was promised, it was cancelled, and Jason Arday’s death is precisely the case it existed to examine. Hacked Off is already calling for an inquiry into press culture. Add your voice. A letter takes ten minutes.

Complain when broadcasters cross the line. GB News and LBC are Ofcom-licensed broadcasters, and Ofcom complaints are free, public, and they count. Regulators respond to volume. Most people do not know the complaint form exists. Now you do.

Starve the machine, together. Individual virtue is not enough here, and I will not pretend it is. Telling people to quietly leave X is like telling people to diet: correct, and insufficient. What works is organised, collective withdrawal, and my city is the proof. After Hillsborough, Liverpool did not ask Westminster to ban The Sun. Newsagents refused to stock it, taxi drivers refused to carry it, families refused to buy it, and they kept it up for more than three decades until the paper functionally ceased to exist in one of England’s largest cities. That is the model. Do not feed X your attention or your outrage. Push the organisations you belong to, the clubs you support, and yes, the government departments that still treat it as an official noticeboard, to get off a platform where Britain’s race riots are incubated. Not a ban. An abandonment.

Join something organised. I am joining Hope Not Hate. They are not perfect and they have had their controversies, but they are a serious, well-run operation that has been mapping and countering the far right in Britain for twenty years, and organised beats outraged every time.

Get to know the people you are being taught to fear. This is the one that costs nothing and does the most. If you are in Liverpool, as I am, the doors are already open. Liverpool Community Spirit has been doing interfaith work here for years. The annual interfaith walk through Liverpool 8, run with local churches, Princes Road Synagogue and the Al Rahma Mosque, drew over two hundred people last time. The Abdullah Quilliam Mosque on Brougham Terrace, the first mosque in Britain, opened in 1889 and now welcomes visitors who want to understand the faith. British Islam was not imported to this city. It was born here. Wherever you live, an hour on a search engine will find you the equivalent.

Learn what this leads to. Read about South Africa. Read about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, what it got right and what it fudged. I am increasingly of the view that Britain will need something like it before too long, and it would be better to study the manual before the fire than after.

An aside about LBC

I want to be fair and awkward at the same time, because LBC is a complex beast. For weeks before Arday’s death, the station fed on this story like everyone else, and that includes James O’Brien. He had interviewed Arday at length, believed every syllable of his story, and days before the death told his listeners on air that he felt personally let down by the man. He was part of the coverage. He is not innocent here, and he would be the first to say so.

But when the news broke, most of the schedule dropped the story like a hot potato, and O’Brien did the one thing nobody else in British media managed: he put his hand up. He went on air, admitted he had believed unquestioningly, admitted he felt guilt, and gave two hours to the man’s memory. When LBC clipped Dean’s call and posted it, the comments had to be turned off, and much of the pile-on was people accusing O’Brien of complicity. He had already accused himself of exactly that, on air, which is rather the point. Abusing a presenter is not accountability. It is the same mob dynamic that killed Arday, pointed at a new target.

LBC gets it wrong, and when it does it should be called out. It also does an enormous amount of good; it is a comfort and a consolation to a lot of people, and O’Brien handles complex, painful subjects better than almost anyone on British radio. Both things are true. So when a broadcaster steps out of line, do the boring, effective thing: submit the Ofcom complaint, write to the station, write to their sponsors. Hold them to account. Do not scream at them on the platform we are trying to starve.

Broadcasters who profit from a story owe the public an account of how they covered it. I am currently working with Tech for Palestine on auditing bias in AI systems, and the main lesson of that work so far is this: accountability only happens when someone is systematically watching, and the watching only counts if it is methodical, reproducible, and open. Anecdotes get dismissed. Data does not. I am building something to point that same discipline at broadcast media. More on both another time.

The curry house up the road

Last week I had a curry at my favourite curry house, up the road in Lancashire. I was wearing my Palestinian-Lebanese t-shirt, the one with the cedar and the olive trees, and the young woman behind the bar smiled and said she loved it. We got chatting, and then the manager joined, and then the owner, and I ended up sitting there for hours.

They told me something that has stayed with me. Most nights, they said, four to six customers give the staff a hard time about their religion or their race. Most nights. In the town where many of them were born. And in the same breath they told me they love this country, they love its tolerance, they love that people queue up for their food. What they cannot tolerate is abuse from people who know nothing about them and have made no effort to find out.

When I left, the manager shook my hand and thanked me. For my t-shirt. For my words. I had done nothing. I had a meal and a conversation. And he said the thing that is the entire point of this post: it is good to know that not everybody thinks the same way.

I have been a shy, introverted man my whole life, and I will be honest, a fairly self-contained one. It is only in the last couple of years, through my activism, that I have learned to just talk to people, and I have been startled by what it gives back. I walked out of that curry house feeling ten feet tall, not because I did a good deed, because I did not, but because for a couple of hours two strangers and I understood each other a little better.

That is available to all of us, every day, for free. It will not fix the press, and it will not deplatform a billionaire. But every one of those conversations makes it a little harder for the machinery to convince your neighbours that some people do not belong here. Jason Arday should be alive, promoting his book this week. He is not, and the people who hounded him have moved on to the next target. We can be quiet, or we can be the reason somebody behind a bar in Lancashire goes home thinking that not everybody is like that.

It cost me nothing. Start there.

If you are struggling, the Samaritans are on 116 123, free, any time.