Mark Bussell

🚨 We've heard a lot about "DEI" over the last few weeks. Media including GB News, The Spectator, and UnHerd have massively amplified the acronym: the latter two are owned outright by billionaire Evangelical Christian hedge-funder Paul Marshall, and he's the biggest investor in GB News. The Telegraph appears to have kick-started mainstream coverage of the Jason Arday story: on 24 July 2026, Gordon Rayner and colleagues reported a fresh statistical analysis finding over 100 (later cited as 188) sentences in Jason Arday's PhD thesis identical or near-identical to another academic's earlier thesis. "Near identical" is doing a lot of work here. A typical humanities PhD thesis in the UK runs somewhere around 80,000–100,000 words. At an average of roughly 20–25 words/sentence for academic prose, that works out to something like 3,000–5,000 sentences in the whole thesis. That places the reported overlaps at roughly just 2–6% of the thesis. One independent Turnitin-style check later reported an overall similarity index around 4.2% for the thesis. Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded the doctorate, had already investigated similar concerns and found "honest and reasonable error," not misconduct. Neither Cambridge nor LJMU has directly addressed the Telegraph's specific statistical finding, and Cambridge's own investigation into Arday's qualifications was still ongoing, and not completed when he died. So while the allegations were real, contested, and unresolved, they were NOT settled fact, whatever the tone of the coverage that followed implied. Much of the coverage that followed, however, moved beyond the plagiarism allegations into something else: allegations that Arday was a fantasist, a serial liar, and his professorship simply the result of "DEI". The strong implicit and often explicit suggestion was that he was only appointed because he was black. In the UK, "DEI" (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) doesn't exist: it's "EDI" (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion), not "DEI." The distinction is more than cosmetic. "Equity" (US usage) implies differentiated treatment to achieve equal outcomes, while "equality" (UK usage) means something quite different: judging everyone by the same standard, not adjusting treatment to engineer equal results. "DEI" itself is rooted in a specific American policy tradition, affirmative action, disparate-impact remedies, and diversity as a "compelling interest" that US courts and institutions spent decades litigating, particularly in university admissions, before the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions in 2023. In the US context, "DEI" typically implies proactive intervention to correct group-level outcomes: demographic targets, representation goals, differentiated treatment aimed at equalising results. In contrast, UK "EDI" starts from a different legal premise entirely. It's tied to the 2010 Equality Act's nine protected characteristics, a framework built on individual rights against discrimination, not group-outcome targets. The Act simply says you should be judged on merit and conduct, not on immutable traits like your sex, race, or disability: a classical liberal principle predating any modern equality politics. Crucially, the protections cut both ways, so white, straight, Christian men like Paul Marshall and Dany Kruger have exactly the same legal standing against discrimination as anyone else. Universities, the #NHS, and most UK public sector bodies have used EDI as the standard term for years, predating the recent US culture-war salience of "DEI." So when commentators reached for "DEI" to explain Arday's career, they weren't just using the wrong acronym. They were importing an entire American framework, quotas, group-outcome engineering, race-conscious appointment, that has no equivalent basis in the UK legal or institutional system Cambridge actually operates under: it was a substitution of one country's contested policy debate for another's, without anyone writing about it actually checking whether the substitution held up. Kathleen Stock's 29 July UnHerd piece, which arguably originated the 'DEI' framing, was literally titled "Jason Arday: Cambridge's DEI darling." Not EDI. Richard Dawkins, Brendan O'Neill, Toby Young, David Starkey and numerous others all then ran with "DEI" over the following fortnight, across Marshall's own outlets: Dawkins mocking Arday's thesis prose in UnHerd on 8 August, Young declaring in The Spectator that "Professor Arday is the gift that keeps on giving." GB News has long-running opinion pieces on "toxic DEI policies infecting our institutions" and "anti-racism ideology... killing white Britons." Not one of them appears to have paused to check whether the acronym they were building an entire moral panic around actually matched the institutional language of the university they claimed to be scrutinising. People who spent weeks attacking the academic credentials of a Cambridge professor, several of them current or former high-profile academics themselves, couldn't even be bothered to get the acronym right for the thing they now claim explains his career, and, by implication, his death. None of this is to say EDI programmes are beyond fair criticism, they aren't. But criticising how a UK institution runs its own equality policy is a different exercise from importing an American acronym wholesale and using it to explain away a man's career. The gap between "DEI" and "EDI" matters more than it looks. The "DEI hire" framing wasn't describing Cambridge's actual equality and diversity policies at all. It was a ready-made American culture-war attack template, pasted onto a British academic because the shape happened to fit, by writers and outlets who never checked whether the label matched the institution and individual they were supposedly holding to account. By deploying "DEI" instead of "EDI," commentators effectively bypassed the actual statutory and institutional reality of UK higher education in favour of a pre-packaged, highly emotive American narrative template. There's a broader pattern at work here: over the last decade or more we've seen how localised institutional debates are frequently subsumed by broader ideological narratives. When imported culture-war talking points overwrite and overwhelm local legal and procedural contexts, the nuances of the actual story, and the humanity of the individuals involved, get lost in the noise.