Cofnas Denounced at Huge Hate Rally
"If I were in London there is a real possibility that I would be murdered." -- Dr. Nathan Cofnas, today
At a massive memorial rally today in London for the late Dr. Jason Arday, following his apparent suicide after his exposure as a fraud and plagiarist, Diane Abbott, M.P, the “Mother of the House of Commons” denounced Dr. Nathan Cofnas for his bravery in being the first to go public with the facts of the long-festering Arday scandal. (The politician phrased her condemnation of the honest scholar differently, of course.)
From The Times of London:
Georgia Lambert and Nicola Woolcock, Education Editor
Monday August 17 2026, 8.40pmBST, The Times
… At a vigil on Monday evening the MP Diane Abbott said that a “vicious campaign” had contributed to Arday’s death.
Labour MP Diane Abbott is a prominent figure in British politics who has spent 39 years in the House of Commons.
From Wikipedia:
Diane Julie Abbott (born 27 September 1953) is a British politician who has served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987. She was the first black woman elected to the UK Parliament, and in 2024 became its longest-serving female MP, earning the title Mother of the House. A former Shadow Home Secretary and Privy Counsellor, Abbott has been a prominent figure on the Labour left and a vocal campaigner on issues of race and inequality.
Back to The Times today:
Abbott, who returned to the Labour Party last month after a year-long suspension, told a crowd of thousands in Trafalgar Square that she was with Arday a week ago, adding: “He was always a lovely, kind and brilliant man. We have to remember that the campaign against him wasn’t just a matter of a few weeks.
“He was first appointed as a professor in Cambridge three years ago and for those three years, he has had a vicious campaign, a bitter campaign by anonymous people, by other professors who just didn’t believe a black man should be a Cambridge professor.”
Among those leading a campaign against him, Abbott said, was Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher. Cofnas was a research associate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, until the college ended his affiliation in 2024, saying a controversial blog in which he argued for a form of “race realism” that acknowledged differences between ethnic groups, amounted to “a rejection of diversity, equality, and inclusion”.
Abbott continued: “He claimed that Jason was not smart enough to be a Cambridge professor. He claimed that race is linked to intelligence and that without diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, there would be no black academics at top universities. He’s well-known for saying that, but stop and think: How many people at Cambridge and other top universities think exactly the same?”
Good question.
Unfortunately, we’ll probably never be able to get honest answers out of Cambridge dons, what with the firing of Nathan Cofnas for speaking frankly.
Abbott also said that she believed a “vicious media campaign drove him to his death”.
Not surprisingly, Dr. Cofnas didn’t respond appreciatively to Ms. Abbott et al’s rabble-rousing:
Interestingly, Abbott herself got in trouble on charges of racism. Back to Wikipedia:
She was suspended from the Labour Party in 2023 over comments about racism, later apologised, and had the whip restored ahead of the 2024 general election. In July 2025, she was suspended again after reiterating those remarks in a BBC interview, and sat as an independent MP until July 2026, when the whip was restored following the ascension of Andy Burnham as Labour leader.
She wrote to The Guardian in 2023:
Tomiwa Owolade claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from “racism” (“Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It’s far more complicated”, Comment). They undoubtedly experience prejudice. This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.
It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.
Diane Abbott
House of Commons, London SW1
Personally, I don’t see Abbott’s Whoopi Goldberg-like assertion that only anti-black racism is real racism worthy of suspension. (The previous year, Ms. Goldberg got suspended from The View for two weeks for saying the Holocaust wasn’t about race but was about man’s inhumanity to man as seen in one group of white people’s abuse of another group of white people.)
I’d mostly disagree with Abbott’s view, but I certainly wouldn’t be offended or aghast that she was allowed to write a letter to the editor expressing her belief.
But Jewish leaders were, and accused Abbott of anti-Semitism.
Note that both the Abbott and Goldberg brouhahas were before October 7, 2023.
What Abbott’s two suspensions by the Labour Party suggests is more evidence that the British establishment assumes that the multi-ethnic society they’ve constructed is a powderkeg that can only be kept from going off by junking England’s proud tradition of freedom of speech that inspired America’s First Amendment.
By the way, when a popular person is accused of fraud and then commits suicide, isn’t that usually considered an …
Paywall here.
