For the crowd, there was little doubt about who was culpable. One banner read: \u201cRacism in mainstream media responsible for Jason Arday\u2019s death.\u201d Another demanded that \u201cthe racist UK media must be dismantled.\u201d Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, speaking from the stage, called the press \u201cwicked\u201d, while her parliamentary colleague Diane Abbott said that \u201cthe vicious media campaign drove [Arday] to his death.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Arday scandal \u2014 which encompasses claims of academic fraud and biographical fabrication, legal threats and attempts on the professor\u2019s part to involve the police \u2014 is tangled and baroque. Yet the speakers and attendees at Monday\u2019s vigil saw it in far more Manichean terms. Another Labour MP, Dawn Butler, declared: \u201cThis isn\u2019t a battle of black versus white. This is a battle of right versus wrong. This is a battle of good versus evil.\u201d She added that \u201cnow is the time for unity. Now is the time to bring down the systems that don\u2019t protect us.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0508.jpg\")
Credit: Rob Lownie<\/p>\n
The audience was majority-black, but the white members of the crowd cheered on every use of the racialized \u201cwe\u201d and \u201cus\u201d, obligingly raising their fists in the Black Power salute when asked by another speaker. Jolyon Maugham, the director of the Good Law Project who has authored a petition<\/a> demanding a public inquiry into Arday\u2019s death, acknowledged that he was somewhat out of place, declaring that \u201ctoday of all days is a day for white people to listen, and not to speak.\u201d His speech, which touched on \u201cthe richness and inherent humanity of black people\u201d and the need to regulate \u201cour increasingly revolting press\u201d, lasted for several more minutes.<\/p>\n In among these diatribes against the media and references to \u201cblack excellence\u201d, Arday himself \u2014 who by the accounts<\/a> of several people who knew him was gentle and kind, but flawed \u2014 was obscured. Instead he was treated as a combination of W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King and George Floyd: a trailblazing scholar, a champion of civil rights, and a martyr. Simon Woolley, the principal of Cambridge\u2019s Homerton College, called Arday\u2019s death a \u201cpublic assassination\u201d and a \u201clynching\u201d. He lauded \u201cthis wonderful man\u201d who \u201cnever stole a pack of crisps\u201d. Arday, in this telling, \u201cwas exonerated of plagiarism, but the hounds of hell sought to pursue any inaccuracy that meant they could say \u2018Jason is a bad man.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n While his family\u2019s public statements<\/a> in recent days have stressed his roles as a \u201cfather, partner, brother, uncle and son\u201d, those present at the Monday vigil were eager to emphasize Arday\u2019s academic \u201cexcellence\u201d. Butler impelled the crowd: \u201cWhen we say his name, do not miss out the \u2018Professor\u2019, because that\u2019s exactly what they\u2019d want us to do.\u201d She and other speakers frequently corrected themselves whenever they missed out the title; a message read out on behalf of an unnamed colleague of Arday\u2019s stated that \u201chis scholarship was valued by many\u201d and spoke longingly of \u201cthe fairer society that Jason spent so much of his life trying to create\u201d.<\/p>\n What will this fairer society look like? Despite the appeals to unity, the Arday vigil seemed intent on casting his death as the sacrifice of one man at the hands of a racist mob, while reinforcing the very same racial divisions it claimed to oppose. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just a campaign against Jason. It was a campaign against all of us,\u201d Abbott insisted. Another speaker, the activist Patrick Vernon, drew comparisons with the murder of Stephen Lawrence, ticking off the slogans which are by now familiar to anyone who has followed America\u2019s racial politics in recent years: \u201cSay his name\u201d, \u201cRest in power\u201d, \u201cBlack lives matter.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBlack lives matter.\u201d Observers might have noted that Arday\u2019s tragic death has now come to symbolize the far wider issue of perceived systemic injustice and fraying race relations. The petition for an inquiry is, at the time of writing, approaching 100,000 signatures; Vernon\u2019s fundraiser<\/a> for his late friend has already brought in over \u00a3180,000 in donations. Maugham encouraged attendees to put Prime Minister Andy Burnham \u201cunder as much political pressure as we can\u201d. For those who watched the Arday affair unfold from the sidelines, the vigil offered a glimpse of just how profoundly his death has galvanized his supporters. \u201cThis is not the end,\u201d Weyman Bennett said ominously. \u201cThis is the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trafalgar Square, London \u201cThis is not a demonstration: it\u2019s a vigil. I understand we\u2019re angry, we\u2019re distraught, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":105724,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[3406,13,1794,7499,28017,41830,3647,474,2177],"class_list":["post-105723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-anti-racism","tag-britain","tag-cambridge","tag-diane-abbott","tag-george-floyd","tag-jason-arday","tag-racism","tag-uncategorized","tag-university-of-cambridge"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/117115158854618423","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0510-e1787004123822.jpg\")
Politicians present at the vigil included former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Credit: Rob Lownie<\/p>\n