Ex-Cambridge professor at the centre of a plagiarism row found dead

0:00Hello, I'm Julian Warwicker. Thank you for downloading the BBC World Tonight podcast for Friday the 14th of August. Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor who resigned last week amid accusations of plagiarism, has been found dead at an address in London. You'll hear reaction. The Prime Minister is warning that Britain is like a tinderbox, a reference to the continuing hot, dry weather in parts of England and Wales and the fires of recent days. You'll hear from an expert in wildland fire and from those planning to hold outdoor events this weekend. What might have to change? And five years since the Taliban took back power in Afghanistan, you hear from an Afghan woman who fled here to continue her work as a journalist and about changing UK attitudes to those coming here.

0:47Well, the controversy of recent days about the former University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday took a tragic turn this evening. The 41-year-old was found dead at an address in Battersea in South London. The Metropolitan Police said in an initial statement,

1:10Jason Arday resigned as a Cambridge professor of sociology of education last week after allegations of plagiarism and questions about some of his achievements. He had denied the claims but had admitted errors in his work. Professor Arday made many appearances on the BBC, including one stint as a guest editor on the Today programme in 2023. My strongest belief in life is that everything is possible. And I think with humility, love, faith and a prayer, if it reaches the right person, you never know how things may turn out. Well, the BBC's Helena Wilkinson is with me. Remind people first, Helena, who Jason Arde was and why he found himself in the spotlight in recent weeks.

2:00Yes, it was three years ago when Jason Arde made history. He became Cambridge University's youngest ever black professor. But earlier this month, as you've mentioned, he was at the centre of a plagiarism row. And it was last week when he quit his role with immediate effect. He was a professor of sociology of education at Cambridge University. He got that role in 2023. As you mentioned, he regularly appeared in the media talking about a variety of subjects from his personal journey into academia, academia to societal debates. There were recent allegations of plagiarism, questions about some of his achievements.

2:45He denied the claims, but he did admit errors in his work. But he said he had faced an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack and also said in a statement previously that he was not a liar. And as I say, he then quit his role at the University of Cambridge as a professor. Now, some critics have said that the treatment of him has been motivated by racism. Racism. Others, though, said the claims of plagiarism were legitimate. In terms of a statement from Cambridge University tonight, they said they were deep, desperately saddened to hear the tragic news that Jason Arday had died.

3:28What have the police at this stage, what have they had to say? Well, we had that statement from the Metropolitan Police in London earlier on this evening. They say they were called by the London Ambulance Service this afternoon to a property in London. It followed a report that a man had been found unresponsive inside a property. Their statement went on to say that sadly a 41-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene. His next of kin, they say, have been informed and are being supported by officers. and they also say that his death was being treated as unexpected but is not believed to be suspicious.

4:10Helena, thank you very much for that. Well, there has been anger in some quarters at news of Jason Ardeh's death. A short while ago, Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, a leading expert on autism who knew Jason Ardeh, spoke to the BBC. He was being subjected by both social media and traditional media over the last few weeks since the plagiarism allegations came to sort of national news and then international news, he was being subjected on an hourly basis to ridicule, humiliation. He told me this morning that he couldn't leave his home because his face was now so well known, his name was so well known, that he was a figure of shame.

5:00Well, Branwyn Jeffries, our education editor, is with me here in the studio. Other reaction that you've been hearing, Branwyn? Well, we have this evening a statement from the family issued via his publisher saying that they are in shock to have lost this amazing father, partner, brother, uncle and son. The family goes on to say the campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and always wanted to see the best in everyone. The Education Secretary for England, Lucy Powell, has also commented she said she was deeply shocked and saddened to hear about the death of Jason Arday as she urged people to remember there are real people with loved ones involved while we consider the far bigger questions around the university sector and the implications for Cambridge.

5:53Because his career went back further than Cambridge and we've heard from them and from other universities that he was associated with. That's right. He did his PhD at Liverpool, John Moores. He did his first professor jobs at then Durham and Glasgow. Glasgow has said this evening, we are deeply shocked and saddened by the death of our former colleague. Our thoughts and deepest sympathies are with his friends and family at this desperately sad time. and the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Deborah Prentice, said, We are desperately saddened to hear this tragic news. Our heartfelt sympathies go to Jason Arde's family and friends at this incredibly difficult time.

6:35Bramwin, thank you very much indeed for coming in. Coming up a little later on the programme, five years after the fall of Kabul, have British attitudes to Afghan refugees changed? Initially, Britain moved fairly quickly and was generous in its response. It created a humanitarian resettlement programme. Then you get a surge in the numbers of people trying to get here, mostly on the small boats. That starts to create a different image of the people coming. That's coming up a little later. First, though, for millions of people in England and Wales, their evening was briefly interrupted earlier on by a loud alert on their mobile phones.

7:17It even sounded live in the BBC One Show studio. We've got an incredible update on one of her very first One Show stories. You couldn't make that up, could you? I think it's a fire alarm. We've got some form of fire alarm going on. It's fine. We'll continue for now. But we'll continue! Well, it was a wildfire emergency alert warning against any activity that could start a fire. And the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has urged people to take it seriously. A further indication of the seriousness that the government is applying to the situation is the appointment of Baroness Blake of Leeds as Fire Minister.

7:50The alert comes after 19 houses have been, quote, fully destroyed in Stourbridge as fire crews continue to tackle multiple blazes in the West Midlands. Mr Burnham, when visiting the area, warned the country is like a tinderbox. Fires have also been tackled in other parts of England, in Stoke-on-Trent, in a suburb of Birmingham, in Hampshire, Norfolk and London. In Wales, the situation has reached a point where the Chief Fire Officer of South Wales, Finn Monaghan, put in a request to the Westminster government for support from the military. I asked him why. We have 14 wildfires burning across Wales.

8:27We've been doing this for a month now. We needed to have a lot of support on the ground. and we put a military aid to the civil authority request in last night at around about 8, 9 o 'clock and they showed up 12 hours later. So I'm very, very impressed with the speed of action. And their role is to provide us with logistical support, do trench digging and also they've come with some high volume water carriers. Right, so they're not fighting fires, that's left to the experts. Correct. In South Wales, we've actually got one of the biggest wildfire teams in South Wales because this has been a significant problem over many years due to the terrain and various other aspects of life in Wales.

9:11We've got burn teams and we've also got some helicopter support as well. And we've also got seven other fire and rescue services from around the country who've joined us because we've declared a major incident because of the scale of this. And is that the first time you've done that in this context, the major incident? Well, we declared a major incident about 10 days ago, and that was for one single incident in which we managed to control a fire which was 400 hectares large. And that threatened 50 houses, but we managed to beat that off. So that was just one single incident. But then as this situation has grown, we declared a major incident this week because of the scale and because of all of the assets that we had committed.

9:54A lot of these are caused by arson. And when we have people who are dealing with wirefires, of course, they're not in the fire stations that they should be in. And that, of course, starts to expose people to the daily risks. And we haven't got people in the right place for that, which is why we've bolstered everything. Just to pick up on that point, you just made a lot of these, you said, are caused by arson. Yes. Whenever we have a fire, we do fire investigations. Some of them are inconclusive, but some of them are very clearly arson. And it is a significant problem. So we don't just fight the fires.

10:25We have an education programme. We have an arson reduction programme. We even have a mobile theatre that goes into schools to try and educate people to make sure they understand the risks of sparks and also understand some of the consequences if you are caught setting fire to things. But it's still a major societal problem. That's something we really need to get at. You talked about the scale of this and you talked about the fact that it's not an entirely new thing and that takes you back over a few years but compared with previous years how does this one look this is climate change in action isn't it i'm anybody who doesn't think that climate change is happening needs to come up on the hillside and come and join us because these fires have gone very very rapidly and the ferocity has been phenomenal we had one fire the other day that just ripped through a field very sadly affected six houses you know it is a major problem for not just us but of course the whole nation.

11:16The Chief Fire Officer of South Wales, Finn Monaghan. Well the drought and extreme heat are testing organisers of a number of big outdoor events this weekend. Ben Dias is the organiser of the Jurassic Fields Festival held over three days at Bridport in Dorset. It's a music festival expected to attract crowds of up to 12 ,000 people and a lot of them will camp at the site. He told me about the challenges they're facing? The ground conditions are very different to what we're normally used to working with. And then there's been several other incidents at festivals around the UK. In Dorset, we had a festival fire about five weeks ago.

11:54So after that event, we immediately emailed all our ticket buyers and did social media posts saying that we were banning all charcoal barbecues. That was in In addition to our strict campsite and event, in terms of conditions, disposable barbecues and open fires are always banned. But we've just been a lot stricter and said that you can't have any barbecues of any sort on our site. And that's not really faced any pushback on that because everybody understands it's for a serious reason. Sure. I mean, I was about to ask you, are you able to enforce all of that? Yes. So we have teams regularly patrolling the campsites.

12:33We've got big containers of water with buckets as well as the usual fire extinguishers. And also this year we've got an on-site fire crew who are in a Land Rover response vehicle, so they're able to access any part of the site within 90 seconds so that we can prevent a small incident from becoming a big one. Well, Professor Stefan Dewar is a director of the Centre for Wildfire Research at Swansea University. Professor, good evening. Good evening. Are we entering uncharted territory here in terms of the scale of all of this? Well, up to a point we are. If we look at simply the weather conditions, how persistent this extremely dry period has been, we are in a sense in uncharted territory.

13:16I'm just looking at the vapour pressure deficit here near Karmaden. And the consistently high values, which means the landscape becomes very flammable, is essentially unprecedented. certainly since we have records from 2016. And parts of the landscape are now much more vulnerable than they were, aren't they? Absolutely. That prolonged dry period has made the vegetation, especially the dead vegetation, so the dead grasses we see, the litter that's in the forest floor, some of the dead gorse that's underneath the green material, even the dead bracken that's underneath the green bracken, is so dry when there is an ignition source it can very rapidly lead to a fire that's very difficult to put out.

14:02And it could spread very, very rapidly, as we just heard earlier in the programme. How then do we compare with others when it comes to tackling this? That's a good question. I mean, our fire and rescue services, especially in South Wales, they are fantastic. They're really well trained, especially if you compare that with, say, 10 years ago or so. But of course, we're not really having that exposure that countries than the Mediterranean had for decades because they have a summer drought every year that is part of the climate. And for us, this is relatively new. So there's certainly things we can still do in terms of preparedness, simply in terms of resources, how many people are available to fight fires, how many vehicles are available to actually go up on the hill and also the aerial support by helicopters, for example.

14:47We are certainly lagging behind, but of course we hadn't had the need, at least such extreme need as we have now in these months now. Well, I mean, you mentioned what we've just heard from South Wales, asking for military support, not to tackle the fires, because they're not experts in that area. No, that's right. But they are there to back those who are tackling the fires. Yeah, exactly. The resources are completely overstretched at the moment. So it's not just the fact that we have extreme fire season as such, it's how many fires are occurring at the same time. And this is a similar problem we're actually seeing in other parts of Europe.

15:23In France, for example, the French have very good capability to fight those fires. But if there's so many simultaneous events, it's simply overwhelming the resources. And so therefore bringing in the army at least to support logistics is certainly sensible, absolutely. You mentioned aerial backup as well. I mean, do you see the role for that in terms of tackling these fires more effectively? Absolutely, especially here in Wales, because the fires have a behaviour that actually is conducive to aerial firefighting. If you have fires that we see in California or in Canada, We have flame length of 30, 40 metres and huge areas.

15:59The aerial support does relatively little, but here access to aerial support certainly helps, especially because our terrain is so difficult. There's clearly anxiety among ordinary people, particularly if they're living near a field and they suddenly sense that something is going on nearby. What can we do to make our homes, our gardens safer at this time? Well, there's a lot we can do, actually, because one of the main drivers of fire risk is dry grasses. sort of brown the brown landscape and we see a lot of this brown landscape right adjacent to gardens to homes to infrastructures and every homeowner can actually do quite a lot by simply removing that dry dead vegetation from near their home you know make sure that at least a few meters ideally more maybe five to ten meters depending on on the wind of course and to remove these grasses to make sure they're cut down as far down as possible okay thank you very much for coming on the program and Professor Stefan Doerr of Swansea University.

16:56Now, five years ago this week, the Taliban swept back into Kabul. By the end of August 2021, all foreign forces had left Afghanistan and that ended 20 years of international engagement. Five years on, the Taliban are now firmly in charge, led by an ultra-conservative supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundaza. He's issued hundreds of edicts, most of them focused on restricting the lives of women and girls. Afghan girls can only attend school until grade six, women can't go to university, and many jobs are now barred to them. There are even rules which restrict women from going to public parks and women's gyms.

17:36Well, the Taliban takeover prompted a mass evacuation of Afghans, among them interpreters who'd worked for international forces in the country, journalists, and of course, prominent women. Zahra Joyer, who founded the country's first feminist news platform, knew she was on a Taliban list. She managed to get out of the country, came here to Britain and has continued her journalistic career. Her memoir, The Vanishing Girl of Kabul, was published last month. When I spoke to her earlier, I began by asking her about her memories of five years ago. It was a terrifying moment. moment. It was a very difficult time when we realized that everything, every single of our right as a human being were taken away.

18:22And I found myself imprisoned in my house. I couldn't walk around the city anymore. I was not a free woman that I was a day before. One day before, I had lunch with my friend in a restaurant in Kabul and then the next day I went to a beauty salon. And all of this vanished overnight when the Taliban returned to power. How did you end up coming to the UK? In Kabul, at least my life is in danger because we received a message from our neighbours about the Taliban searching house to house when one of our neighbours told my dad to be aware of this. You know, it was a conversation that's what should we do?

19:13Kabul airport was so chaotic. We literally had no way outside of the country. I was not in touch with any of these embassies in Kabul. But a friend of mine, Amy Fristretman, the co-author of my book, and the group of journalists in The Guardian, They helped me to put in contact with the British embassy in Kabul. They asked me to come to Kabul airport. And that opportunity gave me the chance to be here in this country. And since arriving here, you've continued your journalism. You have written extensively. You've published a memoir. How does it now feel to be here? and how much are you still able to keep across what's happening in Afghanistan?

20:05Well, first of all, I'm very thankful for the British ambassador, Sir Laurie Bristow at that time, and his colleague in Kabul, that they gave us the chance, I mean, myself and my siblings, gave this chance to be in a safe place, first thing. They guarantee our safety. And the second thing, I am very happy now. Now, obviously, the news and everything happening in Afghanistan is very sad and dark. But for me, at least I can work and I can amplify the voice of those that they forced to be silenced. But obviously, I was not prepared for this immigration. I was not prepared for, you know, starting a new life from scratch.

20:50It was really, really difficult when I came to the UK. So we lived in the hotel for one year. And of course, starting from scratch was so difficult. Which takes me to the present day. And you talked about having to live in a hotel for a significant period. Obviously, that's now long in the past. And there's so much political debate in this country now about refugees, about immigration. Indeed, one of those debates is about whether people should still live in hotels when they first arrive. How much, if at all, has that impacted you in recent times? To be honest, UK is one of the best countries in the world that they have this hospitality with people and this kindness with refugees.

21:40Living in the hotel is absolutely not easy. There is an uncertain situation, but at least it is a safe place. there is of course you're right there is a lot of debate and conversation about refugees but I'm sorry about this because I really I mean we don't want to put pressure on the shoulder of UK government or UK people I mean for me if if there was a space in Afghanistan I had my life I had my career I had my hope for the future of this country and I really didn't want to be a refugee to come here and put another pressure. Zahra Joyer. Well, Rachel Reid is a human rights researcher specialising in Afghanistan.

22:26She lived in the country between 2006 and 2009 and returned often up until 2019. She now conducts research on Afghanistan, including on the lives of those who've been forced to flee the country. I asked her how the UK has been handling the Afghan refugees who fled after the fall of the Taliban. Initially, Britain moved fairly quickly and was generous in its response. It created a humanitarian resettlement programme, which is where people who had either got a connection to the British government in Afghanistan, whether it was through the military or through some of the civilian work that was happening, or people who were particularly vulnerable, like Zahra, were offered a chance to resettle in the UK.

23:11So about 38 ,000 people were given that humanitarian resettlement path. So that was a time when I think communities were welcoming Afghans with quite a lot of generosity. There were positive stories in the media about some of these amazing people like Zahra and others who came here to resettle. And then you quite soon saw the mood start to shift. Well, the schemes closed, didn't they? But still, obviously, people were trying to come to the UK, but they were using unofficial routes to do that. So then you get a surge in the numbers of people trying to get here, mostly on the small boats and mostly young men as well, which, you know, for sort of understandable cultural reasons, were making that very perilous journey and then would often try to bring their wife or their daughter or, you know, a close family to join them.

23:59But that starts to create a different image of the people coming. And that's when we start to see, combined with the fact that the UK government then changes its guidance on who can be recognised as a refugee, the mood starts to shift. And we go from a situation where almost 100 % of Afghans were being recognized as refugees. And then by 2025, only about a third of them are being recognized as refugees. And this then creates a terrible bottleneck because the UK government doesn't recognize the Taliban. So if somebody was a failed asylum seeker, they don't deport them. They then just leave them in these hotels.

24:37So then, you know, you've got thousands of young Afghan men who are basically trapped in these hotels and can't go anywhere else, creating, feeding this kind of media storm around young men in hotels, particularly... Well, the hotels became such a focal point, didn't they? And still are to an extent. Is there a realisation and understanding as to why, in some places where these hotels have become a focal point, why there is a wariness in the minds of some local people as to what might change as a result of this influx of people suddenly appearing there? Yeah, definitely. I did some research and talked to a lot of people who'd been through this process.

25:17And there's definitely an awareness that there are problems involved and that some of the young men have been involved in criminal behaviour. And that's really problematic and has done everyone else a disservice. But there's also a real awareness that the young men are being demonised and it's very dehumanising and that in this kind of media storm, we've forgotten the reasons why people come. What about the future with changes to settled status being talked of now in government circles as well? How do they see that future in the coming months? that's very very painful because you know some of the people who came and were told that within five years they'd have settled status really set about building a life bringing their families here retraining we spoke to somebody for this research who was a medical doctor in afghanistan he was working in a warehouse now but he was planning to retrain to be a doctor here he's now suddenly had everything thrown up in the air and it may be another 15 years before he knows whether he can stay here and every two and a half years his situation gets reviewed.

26:21It's a situation of great uncertainty. Rachel Reid. Now the fact that Israel has governed the West Bank through the military rather than via civilian authorities is something officials use as an argument to say that Israel has not annexed the Palestinian territory despite occupying it for 59 years. But that situation is about to change, confirmed in a statement by Israel's defence minister, Israel Katz. He's ordered the army to prepare to transfer law enforcement powers to the police, which some analysts are saying would be a significant step towards annexation. And it comes at a time when illegal settlements are expanding and when attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians are at record levels.

27:08Earlier I spoke to Sari Bashir, a human rights lawyer, who's executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture. That's an Israeli NGO that monitors the Israeli security services. I asked her how law and order was currently maintained there. In 1967, the Israeli military captured and occupied the West Bank. And in that time, the authorities have transferred illegally more than 700 ,000 Israeli civilians into the occupied territory. So the Israeli military is now governing the 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, but is not enforcing the law against these settlers who've been unlawfully transferred.

27:49And that takes us to what Israel Katz, the defence minister, has said by way of a change. What's he advocating and what difference would it make? It's strange to talk about how you would police Israeli civilians in the West Bank because they're not supposed to be there. What happens in practice is that settlers have become so integrated into the West Bank. And so when settlers need law enforcement, they go to the Israeli police, who enforce a much better Israeli law on Israeli Jews, Israeli Jewish settlers, whereas Palestinians are subject to a very onerous military law that's enforced by the army.

28:28The police have no business enforcing the law on the West Bank. It's an occupied territory. It is not part of Israel. But increasing the authorities of the civilian Israeli police is another element of de facto annexation, making the occupied West Bank more and more like Israel. I wanted to get on to that because there are analysts who've talked about this being a step towards annexation. And they're saying that because while it remains a military rather than a civilian authority, one of the arguments from Israel is that they haven't annexed the territory. Those who suspect that that is the ultimate aim point to this, do they, and say, well, actually, it's heading in that direction.