Jason Arday: A Very British Tragedy

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a broke and broken country. England, which accounts for the bulk of the territory and five of every six inhabitants, is at the core of the crisis consuming the United Kingdom.

As part of that broader, pervasive, and multi-dimensional crisis, which is beyond the scope of this essay, the British higher education sector is perilously close to kaput (finished)—to use a term to convey finality about something that is prevalent in Bosnia-Herzegovina and its wider region, the former Yugoslavia, my second, adoptive home after India.

The Jason Arday controversy, and tragedy, has to be understood in the context of the crisis engulfing the British state centred on England, and its university sector in particular.

I must admit that I had never heard of Arday before July 2026, when various controversies about him escalated to international news and even headlines.

I entered the United Kingdom’s academic environment in autumn 1999. It was a time of optimism, with a promise of renewal that would see post-imperial Britain finally come to terms with its diminished stature in the world and enter the new century with an identity fit for the present, not trapped in the past.

In 1997, ‘New Labour’ had stormed to power, ending eighteen years of Conservative rule under governments headed by Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and John Major (1990-1997). They had a catchy slogan: ‘New Labour, New Britain.’ Indeed, it did seem like Great Britain would at last reconcile with the fall of its greatness that started with the loss of the ‘jewel in the crown’ in 1947 and join the 21st-century world sans baggage and nostalgia. The United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union looked a settled fact, notwithstanding the Europhobic rage of the Tory right that had bedevilled the middle-of-the road Major’s term. Under the young, fresh-looking Tony Blair, Britain looked poised for a left-liberal future that would be open to the European continent and the wider world.

Alas, that proved to be a fleeting phase, and an optical illusion conjured by spin doctors like Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson.

I had not anticipated an academic career in the United Kingdom. But shortly after finishing a PhD at Columbia University, I received an offer from the London School of Economics and Political Science that I eventually decided to accept. I thought then that I would return to the United States in a few years. But I ended up based in London for over two decades, for most of that time as chair of international and comparative politics at LSE. As a Londoner and LSE professor, I had a ringside view of the unravelling of the United Kingdom—and of British academia.

The ‘feel-good’ buzz of New Labour started dissipating from 2003, when Blair emerged as the principal cheerleader of the American invasion of Iraq. Increasingly unpopular, he clung to power until 2007. Gordon Brown’s truncated tenure was dominated by the impact of the 2008 financial meltdown. There followed the 2010-2015 coalition government of David Cameron’s Conservatives and Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, whose watchword was austerity as the fragile British economy struggled to cope with mounting challenges.

Those challenges multiplied after the Brexit vote of June 2016. Of the 72 percent of Britons who voted, 52 percent opted to quit the EU and set sail in uncharted waters under the banner of ‘Global Britain.’ The slim majority was enabled by a 53 percent ‘Leave’ vote in England, where turnout at 75 percent was higher than the UK-wide average (62 percent in Scotland and 56 percent in Northern Ireland voted to stay in the EU). Cameron had made a deal with his party’s right wing that he would conduct a Brexit referendum. The demagogue Boris Johnson handily won a midterm election in December 2019 on the slogan ‘Get Brexit Done!’—the Tories swept England including Labour-supporting electorates in the north.

He fulfilled the promise. From 2016 to 2019, the United Kingdom was in a sort of uneasy limbo. In this decade, Britain plunged into outright political chaos with seven prime ministers through the revolving door of 10 Downing Street since 2016. From 2022, a ‘cost-of-living’ crisis (i.e., inflation) has ravaged the country, and once-proud public services such as the National Health Service (NHS) have deteriorated further. The cushion the EU would have provided is no longer there, and ‘Global Britain’ turned out to be a delusion. It is difficult to overstate the sheer grimness of Britain’s present and its foreseeable future.

That grimness extends with a vengeance to the higher education sector. Like the broader crisis engulfing the United Kingdom, the malaise afflicting British universities has long-term, structural causes, including a precarious financial model reliant on extortionate fees extracted from international students. As that source has sharply diminished due to a combination of adverse factors, some second-tier and third-tier UK universities are now trying to set up overseas campuses in India under our government’s National Education Policy (NEP 2020) in a desperate bid to generate revenue. It’s unlikely to work. Most British universities, including many of the first-tier ones, can be put in two categories: ‘struggling’, or ‘failing’. Their condition mirrors that of the country as a whole.

But root causes aside, the crisis in British higher education has—just like the wider political and economic crisis in the country—been aggravated by university leaderships that have been incompetent at best and pernicious at worst. The Arday saga is an example of that.

The self-conscious diversification of faculty in the United States began in the 1980s and picked up in the 1990s. The University of Cambridge apparently decided to follow suit in the 2020s, with appointments that reek of a public-relations exercise rather than a serious, sincere shift. Arday’s 2023 appointment to a chair (full professorship, the highest academic rank) was trumpeted by the university authorities as a shining example of this belated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Shortly before Arday’s appointment, the selection of a relatively young Black woman as Master of Jesus College—where Arday became a Fellow—was also trumpeted. Arday became an instant celebrity, and in 2024 landed a deal with a major global publisher for his autobiographical story.

When the unravelling came, the child of parents from an erstwhile British colony—Ghana, formerly known as Gold Coast—was a sitting duck. Here’s why.

In 1977, the Scottish Marxist Tom Nairn published a collection of essays as a book titled The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. The first chapter was on ‘The Twilight of the British State.’ The most illuminating chapter, in my view, is Chapter 6: ‘English Nationalism: The Case of Enoch Powell.’

John Enoch Powell, born in 1912 to schoolteacher parents, studied in the early 1930s at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he excelled in classics (Greek and Latin). He set his heart on becoming Viceroy of India and learned Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies, London (later the School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS) as he felt it would help in the future viceregal role. He joined the British Army as soon as World War II began and from 1943 to 1945 worked out of New Delhi as a military intelligence officer. In February 1968, he told The Times newspaper: “I fell head over heels in love with India. Had I gone there a hundred years ago, I’d have left my bones there.”

Britain’s withdrawal from India left him heartbroken and he never reconciled to the loss of his dream of governing the subcontinent’s teeming multitudes. Although dispirited by the end of the Raj, Powell entered politics and was elected to the House of Commons in 1950; he would remain an MP without interruption until 1987. In the early 1960s, he became a minister in the Conservative government.

By the late 1960s, virtually all of Great Britain’s vast colonies were gone and there was no longer any prospect of ruling subjugated peoples in faraway lands. Powell, the author since his Cambridge years of copious romantic poetry extolling the virtues and glories of what he called “the old English”, turned his attention to the enemy within. In April 1968, Powell gave a speech in his native city, Birmingham, which propelled him to permanent fame. In the speech, he recounted an encounter with a working-class white man, who allegedly told Powell: ​“If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country. In this country, in 15 or 20 years the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding [about Britain],” Powell said. “Like the Roman [poet Virgil],” he continued, “I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. That tragic and intractable phenomenon that we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the [United] States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect…In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the 20th century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now.”

In 1971, the British census revealed that immigrants from the so-called Commonwealth—the entire assortment of ex-colonies—made up 2.1 percent of the population. But in the end-1960s and early 1970s, opinion polls consistently showed Enoch Powell to be Britain’s most admired and popular political figure. A Gallup survey in 1968 found that 74 percent of the British public agreed with his speech, 15 percent disagreed, and 11 percent were unsure. Other surveys in subsequent years reported similar findings.

By the time Nairn published his forensic critique of Powell in 1977, Powell was in the twilight of his political career, banished from the Conservative Party as a loose cannon (though Margaret Thatcher remained a lifelong admirer). Ironically, the huge publicity generated by the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech and the mass adulation that followed had been his undoing in establishment politics. Undaunted, Powell was elected three more times to the House of Commons—in 1974, 1979, and 1983—from Northern Ireland as a candidate of the Ulster Unionist Party. After the end of his 37-year parliamentary career in 1987, he spent the last years of his life—he died at 85 in 1998—railing against the European Union’s principles of porous borders and free movement of people and calling for British “self-determination.”

In 1977, Tom Nairn warned that while Powell himself may have been somewhat marginalised, “Powellism”—a powerful cocktail of imperial nostalgia, racism, and xenophobia—remained potent and “this fossil epitome of Old England looms on the national scene.” Powellism “can work on the submerged nationalism of the English,” he wrote, “to give a reactionary content to its uncertainty and appeal to its perfectly justified feelings of frustration and anger.” “The political establishment has begun to lose its old grip on the nation and the masses,” he noted, and “during this era of decline and attrition, the political consensus has lost much of its earlier vitality” for “it was not designed for conditions like these—the two-party system and the English constitutional machine assumed their contemporary form in far easier circumstances, the successful economic empire.”

The decline of Britain, Nairn observed back then, still had some way to run. The course of history might yet show, he reflected, that Powell “was merely ahead of his time. He produced the idea before the reality of England was ready, before the British ancien regime had sufficiently decayed.” Powellism, he noted, “can reverberate only within a peculiar environment of decay and isolation.” “In the later phases of the fall [of Britain],” Nairn predicted, Powellism’s “moment could still arrive.”

The moment has arrived as decline, decay, and isolation define Britain and its core, England. A far-right party, Reform UK, led by the foppish maverick and Trump favourite Nigel Farage and descended from the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) formed in the 1990s that Powell backed in his last years, has between a quarter and a third of the electorate in surveys (a militant splinter, Restore UK, also has some support). In September 2025, at least 150,000 demonstrators waving England’s St George’s Cross flag and the Union Jack flooded central London at the call of a man who goes by the name Tommy Robinson, who first came to public and media attention in the early 2010s as the organiser of an outfit called the English Defence League. Elon Musk remotely addressed the gathering. The visceral chant popularised by the EDL reverberated across central London: “Give us our country back!” The vast empire on which the sun didn’t set a hundred years ago has indeed come full circle.

In this broken 21​st century Britain, where the ghost of Enoch Powell stalks the land, Jason Arday simply didn’t stand a chance.