The pair backed by Delo, who is now Reform UK's second largest donor, contributed anonymously to a blog run by the man behind a neo-Nazi social media account whose posts celebrated the Holocaust and promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories - a man they knew personally. Their private exchanges included discussions of such theories.

The claim was run by Mark Lewis of Patron Law, an honorary patron of the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA).

Nina Power and Daniel Miller told each other they each kept a copy of Hitler’s manifesto. “I keep a copy in my study of course,” Miller wrote. “Well I have one too,” Power replied. “I think maybe it is necessary.” Minutes earlier she had been reading a conspiracy tract alleging a “Judeo-Masonic Plan to Conquer the World”; minutes later she asked what “the real deal” was with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - a notorious antisemitic forgery and hoax first published in Russia in 1903 that falsely claims to reveal a secret Jewish plan for global domination.

The Financial Times reported this week that cryptobillionaire Ben Delo, Reform UK’s second-largest donor, lent Power more than £300,000, secured against her London home, to help pay for the case. Byline Times can now reveal what that case involved.

The findings are based on court documents, WhatsApp messages disclosed in evidence, legal correspondence and Land Registry records seen by Byline Times, including an official decision of the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

The allegations, and the messages underlying them, were set out in public court documents in June 2023. Delo registered his charge over Power’s flat on 20 September 2023 - 13 days before the trial opened.

In a statement to the legal newsletter Per Incuriam, Delo's solicitors acknowledged the loan and confirmed that he knew of Turner's allegations against Power and Miller, but said the cryptobillionaire gave them "no credence whatsoever". A person close to him told the Financial Times he does not believe either Power or Miller is antisemitic.

In a judgment handed down in November 2023, Mrs Justice Collins Rice dismissed their libel claim and found their conduct towards Turner “could, on an objective basis, fairly be described as bullying” and “certainly aggressive, in register, language and imagery”. They were ordered to pay 80% of his costs and were declared bankrupt.

Turner has still not been paid. Despite his court victory, Delo’s loan gives him a prior claim on money recovered from Power’s flat, ahead of Turner’s claim for legal costs. The Financial Times reported that Delo enforced his security shortly before Power’s bankruptcy and now receives monthly rent from her as a means of recovering the debt.

The Campaign

Turner’s ordeal began before he had any direct dealings with Daniel Miller or Nina Power. A high-profile art project he was involved with alongside Hollywood actor Shia LaBeouf and artist Nastja Säde Rönkkö, launched on 20 January 2017 (Inauguration Day for President Donald Trump), invited passers-by in New York to say “He Will Not Divide Us” into a camera.

Far-right activists targeted the project. By the judge’s account, this earlier harassment left Turner feeling terrified and drove him into hiding for weeks. He was monitored and stalked; a swastika marked 88, code for “heil Hitler”, was posted through his door. Police told him there was little they could do, leaving him, in the judge’s words, “little choice but to change his identity and move house”.

On 27 July 2018, Turner tweeted – then quickly deleted – a description of the London gallery LD50 as “alt-right (aka alt-Nazi)”. Miller, who had exhibited there, publicly called him a “dishonest propaganda hack”. Court records show Power flagged the tweet to Miller within minutes; he thanked her, and the two described themselves as being “on a mission from God” against Turner.

The private “mission” escalated fast. Within days, Miller was sending Turner messages – “You’re on the list too now…”, then simply “BLOOD” – before publicly challenging him to “a physical fight”.

Turner reported Miller’s messages to the Metropolitan Police on 7 August 2018. Police opened an investigation into potential antisemitic hate crime. The case was passed to the Met’s counter-terrorism division for monitoring, though no charges followed.

According to Turner’s pleadings, material that particularly alarmed police included an anonymous account that had posted a quotation from the surrealist poet André Breton about “dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly… into the crowd”. Power admitted at the trial that the account, @dcgroyper, was hers. She and Miller had previously denied under a statement of truth that it belonged to either of them.

Power told Byline Times the groyper accounts have been misunderstood: they were “little cartoon frogs” called Nina Groyper and DC Groyper, used to talk to one another, “not intended to be secret or sinister”, and in 2018 were “Theory-Groypers” with nothing to do with the American Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who she says hijacked the term much later.

Fuentes did adopt the name later. But in December 2017, eight months before their own accounts were running, Slate had described the groyper as “a plumper and more racist toad counterpart” to Pepe the Frog, circulating on 4chan, Gab and the extreme right of Twitter, whose most extreme variants depicted “groypers outfitted as Hitler”.

Pro-Hitler in Private?

WhatsApp messages between Miller and Power, disclosed as evidence in the case, show that they were privately discussing race, conspiracy and Nazism even before their involvement in the feud with Turner became public.

On 5 August 2018, Power told Miller that a man running a pub quiz had “started going on about ‘the Jews’ running the world”, which had “soured things” because a Jewish friend was present. Miller replied: “The Jews, yes… What do they run? They run some things…” He recommended the American white nationalist Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique. Turner’s court pleading alleged that Miller had called MacDonald’s work “the most sophisticated anti-Semitic theory”.

Eleven days later, Miller sent Power a blog post about “ethno-suicide”, which it described as “a wish for self-replacement by alien ethnic groups”. He added: “thinking of fleeing to argentina like mengele” – a reference to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Power replied that she had been reading about “HBD” – human biodiversity, a term designed to sanitise the idea that humanity is made up of a hierarchy of genetically superior and inferior biological races – saying she had “read [Nicholas] Wade’s book and much of [Nick] Land’s stuff on HBD”. Both Wade and Land have been widely criticised for promoting pseudoscientific concepts of racial determinism and biological hierarchy.

She then wrote: “I think will be orgy of blood soon.” Miller replied: “It’s going to be very very hard to remove all these people.”

Later that month, Miller urged Power to read Ron Unz’s essay ‘American Pravda: Holocaust Denial’, which concludes it is “far more likely than not that the standard Holocaust narrative is at least substantially false”. In his pleadings, Miller said he recommended it “as an account of the history of holocaust denial”. At trial, he acknowledged: “Unz is a Holocaust denier, that is without doubt.”

Asked whether the Holocaust’s status as a subject beyond question was healthy, Miller told the court: “I don’t know whether it is healthy for the Holocaust to have this kind of forbidden status in our culture or not.”

By September 2018, the two were discussing how to keep their anonymous online activity hidden from each other’s followers. “Don’t follow me yet with your secret account,” Miller wrote, “it might reveal your power level” – a reference to the far-right practice of concealing the extent of one’s views. They discussed anonymous accounts they said they operated in each other’s personas, with Miller referring to “the plausible deniability of the ninagroyper”.

The most striking exchange came on 7 October 2018. Waiting for a flight, Power wrote that she was “reading The Occult War and drinking coffee”. The 1936 conspiracy tract, translated into Italian by the fascist philosopher Julius Evola, alleges a “Judeo-Masonic Plan to Conquer the World”.

“I think… at some point… we need to read Mein Kampf properly,” Power wrote. “I want to understand it.”

“I keep a copy in my study of course,” Miller replied. “Well I have one too,” said Power. “I think maybe it is necessary.”

“What if we find ourselves agreeing with it though?” Miller asked. Ten seconds later, still discussing Mein Kampf, he wrote: “oh my god, he’s right about everything!!”

Power went on to ask: “Wonder what the real deal is with the Protocols lol” – a reference to the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which alleges a Jewish conspiracy to control the world.

Related reading: Reform’s Matt Goodwin Advises Conservative Peer Linked to Relaunched Nazi Race Science Platform

It was by late 2018 through to early 2019 that Turner began publicly alleging that Miller and Power were harassing him online due to his Jewishness. The two writers responded by launching a claim for libel against him. Turner counterclaimed for harassment.

Although that counterclaim was ultimately dismissed, the High Court found that there was “at least some evidence of what might fairly be called a casualness, or perhaps… a knowingness or artfulness, around antisemitic tropes”.

Nina Power did not wish to provide a statement for publication, but set out her position in correspondence with Byline Times. She says it would be wrong and unfair to describe her as a neo-Nazi conspiracy theorist, and that publications by Turner and others using that language do not make the allegation true.

She described the 2018 messages as humorous exchanges between two friends who were already being falsely accused of being Nazis, that they are not evidence of serious opinions, and that her remarks about Mein Kampf should not be taken to suggest she admires or endorses Hitler’s views - adding that people should seek to understand extreme literature of the past in order to understand how people are seduced by it.

The dates contradict that account. Miller and Power’s own Particulars of Claim set out every publication by Turner they sued over. The earliest, naming Miller, was published on 18 October 2018 - eleven days after the Mein Kampf exchange, and more than two months after the messages about Kevin MacDonald, Josef Mengele and the coming “orgy of blood”. The first to name Power was published on 10 March 2019, five months after she and Miller discussed Mein Kampf and the Protocols.

Daniel Miller could not be reached for comment.

The Neo-Nazi Blog

In August 2023, weeks before trial, Patron Law wrote to Turner’s lawyers about a text published on the blog associated with @ParallaxOptics - a neo-Nazi account on X which was notorious for promoting Adolf Hitler. Turner had accused the account of publishing antisemitic material and Miller of amplifying it to smear him. The firm insisted the text “was not prepared by our clients”.

Shown the letter in the witness box, Miller said: “I think this statement is not accurate.” He added: “I composed the text, actually, myself…” The next day, Power also acknowledged contributing to the text: “I wrote a couple of paragraphs.”

The man behind the account and blog was Jack Stokoe, whom both claimants knew personally and referred to between themselves as “Heathcliffe”. In a joint response to Turner’s lawyers, Miller and Power said Miller had met him on about four occasions between February 2017 and September 2018. Their messages record an evening out with Stokoe and his partner that July, a Sunday roast that September, and Power suggesting Miller “summon Heathcliffe for the evening”. In October 2018 Miller told her: “heathcliffe and I are wrangling nrx material into some kind of a book format.” Power told the court she had met Stokoe “like two times… maybe three, but always in company”, and that “we never discussed Jewishness”.

Evidence disclosed for trial showed that Miller had interacted with @ParallaxOptics 113 times between October 2017 and September 2018, and Power 137 times between July 2018 and April 2020.

In July 2018, days after Power first made contact, the account told her it had “read it already via @dcxtv” - Miller’s handle - and offered her a “crash course” in “bioleninism”, a neoreactionary theory holding that liberal democracies buy loyalty by elevating the biologically inferior. Days later, when the account posted that homosexuality was “dysgenic, feminising, maladaptive, vectors of disease… produces nothing of value”, Power did not object. “Sapphism subtly different,” she replied, “it might be suggested.”

Turner’s barrister asked Miller about a tweet from the account reading “The solution is bigger oven”, suggesting it referred to concentration camp crematoria. Miller agreed: “I think so, yes”. He accepted that it was abhorrently antisemitic, but likened material from the account to graffiti “on a men’s room wall”.

The account’s output also included the assertion that “the classification of Jews as ‘people’ is also obviously highly questionable”; a post stating that “if I was a concentration camp guard at Auschwitz there’s no way that I wouldn’t have committed absolutely horrific atrocities”; and, in reply to a user who wrote that “there’s only one species on this planet” to which the word “vermin” could apply, the single word: “Jews?” Shown that exchange in the witness box, Miller said: “It is abhorrently antisemitic, yes.”

Both Power and Miller denied antisemitism during the proceedings.

Related reading: How Nazi Race Science Conquered the White House, and is Coming for Your Democracy

Mrs Justice Collins Rice made clear that she was not deciding Turner’s wider allegations about their views, saying “it is neither necessary nor appropriate for me to reach any final conclusions”.

Nevertheless, in her judgement she found that: “… it is hard not to conclude that the risk of creating an experience of antisemitism was one which they were especially well placed to understand and which they were not equivalently scrupulous to avoid. This was not a thought experiment. It was a ‘dabbling in the soul’ of a real-life Jewish man.” She held that the “whiff of threat and antisemitism which they themselves can fairly be held to have created” was nonetheless “too occasional, intangible, diffuse and unconsolidated” to meet the criminal threshold.

The Lawyer and the Warning

Ben Delo lent Nina Power money to pursue her and Miller’s case against Turner, her solicitors acknowledged to the Solicitors Regulation Authority in a decision seen by Byline Times.

Patron Law told the regulator that, after Power’s no-win-no-fee agreement ended, she used borrowing secured against her flat to pay her legal fees. The loan was repayable regardless of the case’s outcome. The firm maintained that Delo was a private lender rather than a litigation funder.

Power told Byline Times that her no-win-no-fee agreement was terminated in 2023, that she needed funds to continue the case, and that Delo - someone she already knew socially - agreed to lend her money on commercial terms and was entitled to take security for it.

A Land Registry record separately seen by Byline Times names Delo as the holder of that charge.

Four months before Delo registered his charge, Turner’s solicitors Mishcon de Reya had told Patron Law the case was hopeless. In a letter dated 26 May 2023, seen by Byline Times, they said the material Power and Miller had belatedly disclosed was “exceptionally disturbing” and that “the experienced lawyers reviewing this material have been genuinely horrified by its content”. It described the messages as “unequivocal evidence” of the pair’s “explicit endorsement and support of antisemitic ideas and other racist and fascist positions”, and said their Statements of Truth “must have been knowingly false”. Power and Miller were invited to discontinue within seven days. They did not.

Mark Lewis of Patron Law, who is an honorary patron of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, told Byline Times: “We had no involvement with Mr Delo at all. We have never spoken or communicated with him.”

Ben Delo did not respond to Byline Times’ request for comment.

The Sanctuary

Ben Delo is not merely Reform UK’s second largest donor - having given a total of £44 million to the party - but a major supporter of a range of extreme right-wing groups in Britain. He also quietly funds a Westminster clubhouse, “the Sanctuary”, used rent-free by dozens of organisations on the right.

Delo, co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, gave Reform £36 million on 11 September 2026 – the largest single donation any British political party has ever received.

The race science magazine Aporia - which was set-up to rehabilitate a 1930s Nazi eugenics foundation - has standing access to its exclusive booking system. Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, whose senior officials support ‘remigration’ - the far-right call for non-white citizens to be removed from the country - launched its mass-deportation campaign from one of its rooms.

At the time of Delo’s support to the Miller and Power defamation claim, the cryptobillionaire was still in Hong Kong. Writing in The Telegraph in April, he said he planned to return from Hong Kong to give further to Reform UK: “I will move back to Britain early so I can contribute more to Reform’s budget… Let’s build a war chest and win back our country.”

The day after Delo’s £36 million donation in September, Christopher Harborne, the Thailand-based investor who is Reform’s other major backer, matched it with £36 million of his own.

Reform UK did not respond to request for comment.

The Reform leader was handed the unparalleled platform to spin his side of the story about the £36 million each that the crypto billionaires Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo’s gave Reform over the weekend – where it comes from, and whether it is legal.

There was no independent presenter or proper cross-examination on the show. It was Farage acting as defendant, prosecution and judge all at once, with long stretches of contestable monologue exonerating his donors and attacking Labour.

He told viewers on his primetime terrestrial show: “I've been away for a bit, but I'm back. And today we talk about, you’ll never guess it, there's a row over party political donations. But where does it all lead? Does it lead in the end to state funding? And would that be any better than what we currently have?”

He added of the “row going on over party funding”: “I seem to find myself somewhere in the middle of it.”

Farage mocked Labour ministers’ claims that donations via trade unions were different to those from crypto billionaires – since most donations from unions come from thousands of members who have actively opted in to contribute to a ‘political fund’, established precisely to shift the balance of power away from oligarchs.

Farage said: “Big donations are fine if they come to the Labour Party. But big donations are not fine, even though they're legal in every way, if they come to Reform.”

He thereby skirted over the fact that on March 25 – months before the two £36 million donations to Reform were made – Labour said it would ban donations over £100,000 made from overseas donors, which at the time included Harborne and Delo, then based in Thailand and Hong Kong respectively. Labour said it would apply from that date, implemented through the Representation of the People Bill currently going through Parliament.

Farage also issued a threat to Labour and the unions: “Labour want to attack us. We, in turn, might lash out back at the unions. This actually is a very, very bad place. If this continues…If you end private donations from individuals and companies, you finish up with state funding.”

He also claimed that this would “preserve in aspic the big parties as they are today.” This does not appear to have been the case in Canada or the many European countries which have systems of public funding. In fact, the UK already has public funding for political parties, known as Short money.

He told viewers "these donations are completely legal" and "this is very clean money"; stated flatly as fact by someone who benefits from them.

The Reform leader called the Rycroft Review, the official assessment of foreign interference in UK politics which has bolstered the Government's proposed electoral reforms, "a total stitch-up by one of the Prime Minister's mates." He offered no evidence for the claim about the respected former senior civil servant.

And when a Labour panellist pointed out the legislation actually predates the review, Farage didn't engage with the correction, he just repeated the "inventing law" framing seconds later.

Farage never actually directly disclosed that he is, as party leader, a direct beneficiary of the donations he was defending, in that it could help him become Prime Minister.

And he used his airtime to present a bar chart comparing "total party donations since 2021" that shows Reform at £110m against Labour's £128m and the Conservatives' £150m, presented by Farage as proof Reform is "just catching up."

But 78% of that £110m, £86m, arrived in 2026 alone, largely from the two donors he was defending, and within a two-day window. Reform’s donations are far out of proportion with their number of MPs.

Labour and the Conservatives' totals are the product of five years of broad-based fundraising – Reform's immense haul is largely one weekend and two people.

The Panel Discussion

There was some disagreement in the segment. Former Labour Chair John Cryer and commentator Jo Phillips both challenged Farage (to differing extents) on donations, and his Conservative guest didn't fully back him on everything.

However, nobody in the room was there to grill him. Farage opened the panel by telling Cryer the Government was “literally putting in legislation just to stop two individual people. This is not fair and reasonable. This is like an old communist country.”

Jo Phillips did ask Farage directly whether the donations were legal – but his answer was a bare assertion that went unchallenged.

The panel disagreed with Farage, but nobody was able to cross-examine him.

Farage also appeared to (again) credit the Labour Government with inventing a time machine.

Related reading: Reform UK Could Pocket Nearly £500,000 in Interest if They Are Forced to Return £72 Million Crypto Billionaire Donations

He said: “The Rycroft report was a total stitch-up by one of the Prime Minister's mates to stop these two people donating. That's what it was for…If we hadn't declared huge donations to these individuals, it would never have happened.”

The Rycroft review was commissioned by Keir Starmer’s Government in December 2025. The two £36 million Reform donations came in September 2026.

As Phillips noted: “It was going on before this.” She added: “I think a lot of it is about perception, Nigel. And if the perception is that you are taking money from dodgy donors...” The Reform leader then told her to "be very careful what you say about two very successful entrepreneurs."

Farage had, of course, the last word on his show, telling viewers: “Well, we cannot, if we finish up with [donation] caps, have the unions giving millions and other parties being restricted, that won't work. So, this row is going to go a long way.”

Former Ofcom Figure Speaks Out

Chris Banatvala, Ofcom's founding director of standards – who drafted the regulator's broadcasting code – is astonished by what he sees as an absence of enforcement of impartiality rules.

The former Ofcom official told Byline Times: “Whether or not Ofcom sees this as a breach of its rules, we are now in the extraordinary position where the leader of a political party at the centre of a major controversy over its funding is presenting and moderating a news and current affairs programme discussing that very controversy.

“He is not simply being interviewed about it; as the presenter, he is controlling and determining how the issue is framed, discussed and challenged. If that is not a conflict of interest, I don’t know what is.”

Farage’s show exposed the surreal nature of the channel – giving the Reform leader a party political broadcast about his own party's funding, on his own show.

Should it not be treated as a donation in kind to Reform?

Farage also sought to reassure viewers: “Neither of these men will ever go to the House of Lords, ever get a knighthood, or ever receive state funding of any kind.”

Bookmark that quote if the GB News presenter and part-time politician forms the next Government.

Update: This piece has been amended to properly attribute the "communist country" quote to Nigel Farage, where it previously said Phillips.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

This announcement was groundbreaking. 

The EU does have many close relationships with countries outside the EU – such as Iceland, Norway and Switzerland – including strong economic alignment and access to the single market, as well as slightly looser free trade arrangements with countries such as the UK. It also has association agreements enabling political and economic cooperation with countries which aspire one day to become full EU members, such as several Balkan and Eastern European countries. However, there has never been a category of associate membership, where a country potentially is allowed to enjoy many of the benefits of membership, without ever becoming, or being on the path towards, full membership. 

Related reading: ‘Europe and Canada Must Forget Trump and Form a Coalition of the Willing to Defend Ukraine’

What Might Associate Membership Entail?

It remains to be seen what such an associate membership with the EU might entail, or whether it will ever come to fruition. It seems that von der Leyen made her announcement before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, without seeking prior agreement or even properly consulting the existing EU members first. 

Some member states were quick to express caution – with a German Government spokesman quoted as saying that his country was open to discussing new models of partnership, but that more thought needed to be given to the label of “associate member.”  

Other commentators have noted that ten EU countries have not yet ratified the bloc's free trade agreement with Canada, CETA, which was signed almost a decade ago, suggesting that it might be even harder to get a significantly more ambitious pact with Canada over the line. Since Associate Membership would be an entirely new category of partnership with the EU, it would also be likely to necessitate an amendment to the EU’s treaties, requiring unanimous agreement. 

Many are likely to worry that the new concept of associate membership could open up a Pandora’s Box of wider troubles for the EU. For example, some Eurosceptic existing members might be tempted to see if they could obtain a looser arrangement with the EU. From the other direction, more committed EU members will fear that it will lead to further attempts to unravel the core commitments and obligations of membership, including the ever sensitive obligation of freedom of movement.  

Furthermore, any attempt to open up the EU treaties to amendment always runs the risk of member states using the opportunity to pursue completely unrelated treaty changes, based on other pet peeves about the existing arrangements. This could lead the whole process to become bogged down in interminable negotiations. 

The Canadian Response

Perhaps recognising these dangers, and to avoid being branded a Trojan horse, the Canadian Government itself has shied away from endorsing the concept of associate membership per se. Instead, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office has confined itself to reaffirming Canada’s desire to move relations with the EU towards a  “far stronger, more ambitious alliance.” He also has to be mindful of domestic businesses which might resist being required to open up their markets in return for greater access to the EU market. Many Canadians might also chafe at the prospect of having to abide by burdensome EU regulations, over which they would not have much say. Preserving sovereignty could be an issue for Canadians. 

Nevertheless, there are strong motives and incentives on both sides to develop a closer relationship. Following US President Donald Trump’s trade war on Canada, and demeaning remarks about making Canada the 51st state, Carney has made it clear that he views the US-Canada relationship as irreversibly damaged, and that Canada needs to look for new partners. 

For its part, the EU has also taken a series of beatings from the Trump administration, including hefty tariffs, repeated political interference in its domestic politics, particularly in support of far-right movements, and hostility regarding its attitude towards matters such as climate change, AI, tech companies, and immigration. Being courted by a country like Canada is probably also a welcome boost to EU morale, after the disaster of Brexit and recent rebuff by Iceland. 

From a strategic perspective, Trump’s ambivalence towards NATO and the war in Ukraine, his affinity for dictators such as Putin, his outlandish claims on territories such as Greenland, and his disregard for the international rules-based order, have also eroded Canadian and European trust in the US as an ideologically-aligned, democratic, security partner. In today’s challenging geopolitical environment, it makes sense for medium powers to club closer together. 

Seeing the World 'With the Same Eyes'

So, it is not surprising that both von der Leyen and Carney went out of their way to emphasise the ideological reasons for seeking closer relations between the EU and Canada. In her speech before the European Parliament, von der Leyen pointedly observed that the EU and Canada “see the world with the same eyes” through shared democratic values, and common approaches to many global challenges, such as AI, climate change, the Ukraine war and geopolitics. Carney tweeted that “Canada and the EU are natural partners, united by shared values.” The implicit contrast with, and rebuke of, the US was unmissable. 

If the concept of associate membership does take root, it would mark a major shift in how the EU presents itself – moving beyond its geographically limited status to becoming an explicitly ideological bloc. In theory, it would imply that the EU is open to allowing associated membership with any country anywhere in the world which shares its democratic values. Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Japan might all be eligible future candidates for such membership. 

The significance of this is hard to overstate. The EU would effectively be throwing down a gauntlet to the US, and seeking to take over its mantle as the leader of the free world. 

Many commentators have also  speculated whether the UK could seek a similar associated membership status with the EU. But EU officials have reportedly already moved quickly to rule that out, by stressing that the model is only intended for countries that cannot join the bloc. One senior EU official was quoted saying “Unlike Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Norway and the UK, Canada is not in Europe” and “cannot join the EU.”

Carney 'Gets' the EU in a Way British Politicians Don't

Even if the EU had not already slapped down this idea, on its merits, the EU would be unlikely to want to grant the UK associate membership status anyway, given the current state of British politics. 

As reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, Carney has gone out of his way to cultivate closer relations with the EU and its individual member states, and identify areas where closer collaboration would be in their mutual interest.  He has approached the EU with respect, making clear he seeks an ambitious relationship, but also displaying an understanding of the potential constraints and concerns on the EU side. This is in complete contrast with the UK, which still seems to believe it can cherry pick from the EU, and displays irritation when the EU sets out its own terms. 

Unlike many British politicians, particularly those guilty of completely botching the Brexit negotiations, Carney has not conveyed the attitude that the EU “owes” Canada anything, or that Canada “holds all the cards.” Where British politicians have repeatedly liked to boast about what they have “got” from the EU, Carney has made clear he is seeking win-win outcomes. Unlike too many British eurosceptics, who seem to gloat over challenges facing the EU, and relish the prospect of its failure, Carney understands that a strong EU is in Canada’s interests. 

Moreover, unlike the political right in the UK, which still clings on to the fantasy of the US-UK special relationship, Carney understands that the US has fundamentally changed, and can no longer be fully relied upon as either a political ally or economic partner.  

Perhaps most importantly, unlike many British politicians and commentators, Carney fully understands that the EU is far more than just an economic bloc, but an ideological one as well, forged out of the ashes of World War 2 and the Cold War, and committed to its democratic foundations. Hence the numerous references to shared values. He “gets” the EU, in a way that too many British politicians still don’t. 

Given the enormous political hurdles, the associate membership status plan for Canada may well end up coming to nothing.  But, on the merits, Canada is displaying all the right attitudes and attributes to make it an attractive partner for the EU.

And if I had to put money on it, I believe Canada could succeed in achieving even closer ties than that between the EU and the UK, for as long as so much of the current British political establishment retains its high-handed, disrespectful, and entitled approach towards the EU.   

Approaching it from King’s Parade in the last of the late summer sun, past the iconic King’s College Chapel, and tourists sitting here and there on the walls lining the street with ice creams, Senate House emerged behind its black gates. This time, flowers fresh and dead were taped onto the rails or left at their feet. People stopped to look at them, speaking and silent. 

One woman explained to her young son who the flowers were for – a man who had “received some scrutiny that was justified but a lot that wasn’t”.

“We have to be really careful with our words,” she told him. “He was absolutely hounded and he didn’t deserve to be.”

Jason Arday smiled warmly from the photograph at the centre of the tributes. 

Until 5 August, he was Cambridge University’s Professor of Sociology of Education. Following claims of serial plagiarism, first made by academics aligned with race science, and then a wider campaign of intense media scrutiny both in the UK and internationally – on many aspects of his life beyond academia, from his charity running to his childhood mutism – Jason Arday resigned.

Characterised in the right-leaning established press as “the nutty professor” and “the gift that keeps on giving”, outlets on the left – the Guardian and Novara Media – also contributed to the reporting, and the speculative and dehumanising commentary.

With his resignation, it didn’t stop, even if the public interest journalists subsequently used to justify their reporting appeared, at that point, to have. On 14 August, Jason Arday was found dead at his home in south London.

Just three years earlier, Cambridge University had celebrated the then 37-year-old’s arrival, through the BBC and elsewhere, providing him with a considerable platform as the youngest black person to ever be appointed to a professorship at the institution.

His death raises uncomfortable and urgent questions about appearances and reality in Arday’s story – and what it reveals about the harder, deeper work the institution has seemingly not done to meaningfully tackle structural inequalities around issues of race and class. Particularly now that these systemic issues are increasingly at the forefront of a ‘culture war’.

“On behalf of every working-class person of colour student at this university past and present, your worth and dreams will not go unnoticed,” one tribute to Arday read.

Another: “I wish I would be able to remove envy and racism from this existence.”

Others said “hope this sad injustice leads to positive change in all walks of society. Lives should not suffer” and “I am sorry this system failed you”.

I had last been in Cambridge some months before with my Byline Times colleagues investigating allegations around another Cambridge academic whose story appears to have evolved very differently.

Like Jason Arday, James Orr is unlikely to have been widely known to the public perhaps until very recently.

Byline Times’ investigation into Orr, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity, was published in July, when he was still Nigel Farage’s Head of Policy at Reform UK. He stepped down from that role in September, following the broadcast of undercover footage by Channel 4 News, in which he appeared. It is now the subject of a criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police.

Our reporting – produced over six months through 20 sources at the University – raised serious questions about the safeguarding of students (some of whom are resident at his private property in the city), their ‘recruitment’ as part of Orr’s stated ideological ‘pipeline’ project for Reform, and foreign influence through tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

The Financial Times’ recent follow-up of the story confirmed much of our reporting, with the newspaper speaking to some 40 sources, all of whom also requested anonymity.

What was as revealing as it was unsettling was the complete lack of response from Cambridge University to this publication’s queries about Orr. On at least one occasion, they were passed straight to his lawyers, Addleshaw Goddard, without our knowledge – even though separate queries were to be sent to Orr as a right of reply. 

When pressed for any response, the University provided a statement, which it warned could not be published: “Byline Times has sent the University a slew of unsubstantiated allegations, wilful mischaracterisations, and falsehoods, which we strongly reject. The volume of misleading claims and conjecture means we are unable to engage with the approach as a legitimate media enquiry.” 

The contrast with the Jason Arday case is striking in its simplicity.

I had lived in Cambridge for three years as an undergraduate reading law 17 years earlier. I could count on one hand the number of black people I ever came across, in contrast to those of colour from other backgrounds, particularly of Asian heritage. I have great memories of a place I grew up in and the belonging I found at my college – even if the institution was also somewhere I didn’t feel I fit and found intimidating.

To see it become an international news story around the death of Jason Arday, alongside Cambridge’s response to my publication’s serious queries about James Orr, was sad and deeply troubling.

For many others though, it is not only this. It is an actively dangerous state of affairs.

‘This Could Be Me’

Speaking to those close to the situation in Cambridge, there is an atmosphere of shock and fear following Jason Arday’s death.

As the stories were unfolding, students had wanted to speak up for him, but were advised not to by the University. Now, they feel too scared to speak about it for fear of unwarranted scrutiny.

Black academics and Arday’s students, in particular, feel unsupported and unsafe.

“They feel very failed by the university structures,” Sarah Misraoui, Cambridge University Student Union’s Vice President of Education and Widening Participation, told me. “There’s a lot of concern about safety. Students are grieving. Students are struggling. 

“The difficulty here is that, given the media attention not just on Jason Arday but on [Cambridge University’s Deputy Vice Chancellor and Principal of Homerton College] Simon Woolley, on other senior members of university staff and academics, students are seeing that the University is not protecting its highest-ranking members of staff and academics. How can students expect themselves to be protected?”

Lord Woolley called the treatment of Jason Arday a “lynching” and a “public assassination” by those who decided he “doesn’t deserve to be alive”.

After his death, Andrew Gilligan described Woolley as “not fit” to lead a Cambridge college in the Spectator magazine. He also questioned the appointment of Dr Farah Ahmed, Assistant Research Professor at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education, saying its problems went “beyond Arday”. 

Misraoui said the complete “lack of trust” students have in the University is a result of the reality of “just how much the University is ill-equipped to deal with something like this”.

“The trust has been severed, particularly for black and minoritised students of colour, because a lot of students are thinking now: this could be me, and I could be unprotected,” she told me. “It’s the University’s responsibility to rebuild that trust. Time and time again, we are seeing that, particularly minoritised students and academics, are not given that support when they need it. 

“In future, if such a thing was to happen, they need to know they would be safeguarded – that the institution genuinely cares about their wellbeing and safety.”

Students and academics within the Faculty of Education are perturbed by a lack of sustained and open communication from the University on pastoral care, potential disruption to their studies, and therapeutic support – beyond general signposting to internal services or responses that the University will get back to them.

For Aker Downie-Okoye, a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, who was studying in the Faculty of Education at the time of Arday’s appointment, his death has revealed a “significant shift in the Cambridge contract”.

“There’s a longstanding understanding that you go to Cambridge and get access to an exceptional education and a network that opens doors and that, ultimately, you leave with a sense of security about your future,” he told me. “That contract has been under increasing pressure… In the context of Professor Jason Arday’s passing, the reality of that has really been brought home for a lot of people.

“There’s a growing feeling the Cambridge contract is broken because, yes, Cambridge is still an exceptional institution, but there is also an expectation that if you’re going to thrive in an institution like this, you need to feel safe enough to actually do so. Unfortunately, that is not what everyone has experienced.

"These are people’s lives and livelihoods at stake. If something like this can happen to someone who was this prominent, naturally people start asking: what does this mean for me?”

Students and academics are now taking it upon themselves to draw up a proposal, to be put to the University, for a strategy “to protect black academics when they face racialised media scrutiny, online harassment, financial disruption, or psychological harm”. 

Distinct from ‘representation’ or a diversity initiative, it would focus on proactive safeguarding. It states “the concern is not simply whether Cambridge expresses support after something happens”, but whether academics “know, before the next crisis, who is responsible for protecting them, what concrete support is available, and how quickly the institution will act”.

Those proposing the strategy see it as “a test of whether Cambridge can move from expressions of solidarity to durable institutional protection”.

Downie-Okoye believes the Jason Arday affair has exposed the realities of a “particular mystique” Cambridge University has benefitted from historically.

Related reading: There Will Be Another Jason Arday

“It’s hard to get in there; it’s a very big achievement to even be admitted,” he told me. “There’s a perception of Cambridge as this single, highly coherent institution. When in reality, it’s an incredibly decentralised organisation with colleges, faculties, departments, and centres, with different parts of the University operating very independently of one another. 

“The University has benefited enormously from the strength of that brand while the complexity of how it actually operates hasn’t always been visible to the public. The University itself has acknowledged how unprecedented this situation is, and we’re watching it grapple with that reality in real time.

“Professor Arday’s passing has become a moment through which people are asking much bigger questions around Cambridge, what it promises its students, and whether that promise is actually being fulfilled.”

A Cambridge University spokesperson said it “is aware of concerns” and “firmly reiterates its commitment to protect and support all members of our community”.

In a statement, they told Byline Times: “In our immediate response, the University has focused on ensuring our staff and students have the pastoral care and welfare support they need. Where concerns are raised, especially in relation to abusive communication or personal attacks, they are taken seriously, assessed, and appropriate action taken. Our communications, legal, and information services teams are actively engaged in ensuring support is provided when cases are brought to our attention.”

The spokesperson said the University is “coordinating with external providers to enhance our provision of culturally and racially-sensitive support for staff and students” and “remains firmly committed” to being “a welcoming place for all staff and students and will continue to take steps to ensure it is sensitive and responsive to the lived experience of our black students and staff”.

‘University Could Have Changed the Trajectory’

Much of the fear and distrust stems from the belief that Jason Arday was inadequately supported and advised by the University as he found himself in the middle of a media firestorm – within an academic field that is increasingly vulnerable to culture war flashpoints around ‘DEI’ and ideas.

Those close to the situation point to the fact that Arday had been dealing with external scrutiny since his appointment and, on this basis, the University should have had a more robust plan in place to offer him the proactive safeguarding he required.

There is also sadness and anger that those within Cambridge’s senior academic circles, who vocally supported him when he was appointed, quickly “abandoned” Arday when the media scrutiny intensified.

Richard Sudan, of The Voice newspaper – a publication dedicated to covering issues of the black community – told Byline Times that “there is a legitimate role for scrutiny in journalism and academia, but scrutiny should never mean the abandonment of proportionality or humanity”.

Arday’s death, he added, “forces an uncomfortable reckoning with what happens when the subject of a story ceases to be treated as a person”.

Cambridge University’s position notably shifted as the coverage continued – raising questions about the extent to which, and why, it was influenced by this in its response; and how this was balanced with its duty of care towards Arday.

While it initially said that Arday was the “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility”, on 5 August the University announced an investigation into his “academic qualifications and honorary appointments” – a move which prompted Arday’s resignation.

Two days before his death, on 12 August, Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice called Arday a “damaging and difficult case” and said the University would investigate the “circumstances around his appointment… and his time here in Cambridge”.

Her statement also said Arday represented an “aberration”.

“We do not need the outcomes of an investigation to clearly and loudly affirm that our staff of colour are highly valued, for their scholarship, their achievements, and the contributions they make to the institution and the wider academic community,” it said. “This particular case is an aberration and should not be used to cast aspersions on their work or the legitimacy of their roles at Cambridge.”

Aker Downie-Okoye told me: “I think the University could have changed the trajectory of what happened, and what is happening right now, by being more proactive across the board.

“For example, by recognising that attacks on one minority ethnic leader could have implications for others. We have seen questions subsequently raised about the leadership of Lord Simon Woolley by Andrew Gilligan in the Spectator. That raises a much broader question about what happens when minority ethnic staff are targeted and the protocols under which they should be protected.”

Among the concerns raised about the safeguarding and advice Arday received from the University in the weeks before his death is that he spoke to the Daily Mail, which surprised those who knew him. It is understood that he did this on advice from the University.

The support he was offered before his death will be examined in the first part of an inquiry launched by the University led by former Chief Crown Prosecutor for North-West England, Nazir Afzal. It is due to report within three months.

Part two of the inquiry will consider “institutional processes and practice” and will be led by an external chair and an expert panel including individuals with lived experience, the University has said. It is due to report within six months. 

It will look at the “wider context of Professor Arday’s time at the University, including the recruitment of senior academic staff… the University’s response to allegations of research misconduct, and the support available to academics who are subject to extraordinary public and media scrutiny,” a statement said.

But there are already concerns around the short time-frames and the lack of wider consultation on who is involved; as well as whether the full reports will be released to the public, when “subject to legal and privacy considerations, a summary of the review’s findings, recommendations, and resulting actions” has been promised.

‘Good, Honest, Straightforward, Un-Christian Vengeance’

DEI – ‘diversity, inclusion, and equity’ – schemes are predominantly a feature of American public policy through affirmative action. It is an issue that has been successfully weaponised in recent years, with the hard-right ideology forming around it travelling across the Atlantic from Trump’s America, finding supporters and targets in the UK.

It is the framing its critics use – that DEI is resulting in people who do not deserve on merit to occupy certain positions in our institutions and culture being elevated unjustly – that the case of Jason Arday so powerfully ignited. 

In the wake of his death, the attacks on him have not stopped by commentators and academics holding views which aim to dismantle the premise of Arday’s work: that inequalities are not a natural consequence of differences in people’s abilities; and that structures that embed inequalities through issues such as racism, class discrimination, or ableism need to be identified and challenged.

One example of how prominently the DEI narrative was employed around Arday could be seen in comments by his fellow Cambridge University academic James Orr as the story continued to generate headlines.

“What terrifies me is if it turns out Jason Arday’s DEI qualifications were fake, his DEI chair was fake, his DEI discipline was fake, and his faculty and college were DEI bootcamps,” he wrote on X. “Imagine the backlash against hardworking DEI hires?”

That Arday’s resignation from Cambridge University was seen as a ‘victory over DEI’ was on display in an online interview between the controversial historian David Starkey – who has said that slavery cannot be considered to be genocide because “so many damn blacks” survived – and Nathan Cofnas, whose Substack post in July on allegations of serial plagiarism by Arday set the hares running. 

Cofnas, an advocate of race science and eugenics, describes himself as a ‘race realist’. His own role at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University ended in 2024 after he wrote that, in a true meritocracy, black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”.

In the interview, Starkey celebrated Arday’s downfall with Cofnas by observing, “the reason we’re both grinning is good, honest, straightforward, un-Christian vengeance”.

Part of the reason Arday’s death has been so shocking, Aker Downie-Okoye believes, is because “when those like Professor Arday pass, people aren’t just mourning an individual, they mourn everything else he represented”.

“He was the youngest black professor in Cambridge history and the youngest black professor who was neurodivergent,” he told me. “Even those who had not met Professor Arday are seeing something of themselves in him – and I think that makes sense. 

“He was working-class, of Ghanaian heritage, black, with dreadlocks, working within a predominantly white institution in a predominantly white country and, in that sense, he occupied a position within minorities. He had built his career around challenging existing inequalities, thinking seriously about questions of race, class, inequality, belonging, mental health. I think there are millions of people who relate to that experience: that their very existence can be an act of resistance.” 

Labour MP Dawn Butler, who spoke at a vigil organised in Trafalgar Square, London in the days after his death, said Arday “touched so many people’s lives” and that his students were “fundamental” to the role he played at Cambridge. 

Listening to them, she told me, “you know he was much loved and made students feel seen” and “it is so important at this time that those students are looked after and that Cambridge puts their arms around them and offers them the support they need”.

‘Who Influences Those Minds is Fundamental’

But the story of Jason Arday is also the story of James Orr. 

Of the wider hard-right ideology which Byline Times revealed has found a foothold in Cambridge University, and which fosters the sorts of ideas that formed the undercurrents – sometimes explicit and sometimes unconscious – that were used against Arday. 

The stories of the two professors are connected.

Butler said she “looks forward” to investigations by Cambridge “to make sure people feel safe when they are in an institution where they should be allowed to debate, yes, disagree, yes, but discriminate, no”.

“It is also vital that the rise of the far-right and white supremacy that has infiltrated certain establishments – Cambridge possibly being one of them – is looked into,” she added.

“The task ahead for Cambridge and society is huge. Cambridge holds the future of so many influential minds. Who influences those minds is fundamental.”

Aker Downie-Okoye echoed a similar sentiment: that the case of Jason Arday is another tragic example of the wider structural forces at play around societal hierarchies, accepted thinking, and cultural power.

This “war on ideas”, as he calls it, has also seen prominent black figures such as Misan Harriman, chair of the Southbank Centre, facing intense media criticism for his social media posts, expanding to wider questions about why he was appointed to the role in the first place. He will step down from his position in the autumn, as he has said he always intended to.

Many black public figures in culture, politics, and academia have been too fearful to speak out in recent weeks, aware of the water they are now swimming in.

“This moment is bigger than one individual or even one institution,” Downie-Okoye said. “Education and academia are increasingly sitting at the centre of conflicts around leadership, inclusion, and justice, and who gets to shape ideas. This wider conflict is a war on ideas, which I think has been going on for some time now. 

“Recently, there has been a real backlash across the board where some things are treated as though they are ideas worthy of consideration, while others are treated as though their very presence is somehow illegitimate. There is an important question for the University about who gets to decide who belongs in this institution.” 

Cambridge has sadly “lost a trailblazer” in Jason Arday, Downie-Okoye concluded. “But it now has the opportunity to decide what it wants to do with his legacy.”

As for James Orr, he may have lost his position in Reform, but he continues his work at the University – without any extensive public or media interest in his activities there. Following the announcement of the police investigation into the undercover footage in which he features, the University said it is “looking into these matters”. 

According to analysis by Newscord, 163 articles were published on Jason Arday in the week after he resigned – compared to 13 articles by the same media outlets on James Orr in the week after the broadcast of the undercover filming he appears in.

“The contrast with the comparatively limited attention afforded to controversies involving James Orr is profound,” Richard Sudan of The Voice told Byline Times. 

“Accountability cannot function credibly if its intensity appears to selectively change according to the person being held accountable. When black academics appear to receive levels of scrutiny that are not consistently replicated elsewhere, we are right to ask whether accountability itself has become a racialised weapon.”

Meanwhile, the petals of the flowers laid outside Senate House have now been scattered in Jesus College’s gardens, where Cambridge’s youngest black professor was a fellow.

Hardeep Matharu is the Editor in Chief of Byline Times

Harborne, who is based in Thailand, made much of his fortune in crypto. He is also the most important individual financier of Nigel Farage’s political career, sparking much controversy along the way.

But alongside his crypto interests, Harborne has also invested hundreds of millions of pounds into QinetiQ, one of Britain’s leading defence companies.

What is far less commented on is that QinetiQ’s biggest customer, by far, is the British Government and is a major source of Harborne’s wealth.

Byline Times has examined Harborne’s investments in QinetiQ against regulatory filings, share prices rises and dividend payments and estimate his investment has produced for Harborne an uplift of about £101.7 million.

QinetiQ says that roughly 58% of its group revenues over the relevant period came directly from Ministry of Defence contracts.

So, if you apply that proportion to Harborne’s estimated gains, the portion corresponding to QinetiQ’s MoD-derived revenues comes to £58.8 million.

Harborne has given £61.19 million to the Brexit Party and Reform UK.

The £61 Million Political Donor

The scale of Harborne’s political giving is extraordinary.

Electoral Commission data show that he had given £25.19 million to Reform UK across 21 donations – and this is before his latest promise.

About £10.19 million went to the Brexit Party in 2019 and 2020, before it became Reform UK. Harborne then donated £9 million in August 2025, followed by £3 million in November and another £3 million in January 2026. 

The latest £36 million takes his combined support for Farage’s political vehicles to approximately £61.19 million.

This does not include the controversial £5 million Harborne gave to Farage in 2024, which is now under scrutiny by Parliament’s standards authorities and which the Reform leader said was intended to help pay for his security.

Building a Stake in Britain's Defence Industry

Against this beneficent backdrop stands Harborne the arms dealer investor.

He began buying shares in QinetiQ – a UK company that manufactures military robotics, unmanned aerial drones, and specialised target systems – back in 2022.

A QinetiQ notification published on 30 May 2022 recorded that AML Global Ltd, a Hong Kong company ultimately controlled by Harborne, secured some 41,001,328 shares in the company between 06 and 25 May, equivalent to 7.08% of QinetiQ’s voting rights. This would have cost about £144 million in trading.

A 6 June filing put that holding at 47.35 million shares. A 27 June disclosure saw it rise to 54 million shares. And by 11 July, a further notification saw the stake reach 57,905,817 shares, or just over 10% of the company.

Those shares were subsequently transferred from AML Global to Klear Kite LLC, another vehicle controlled by Harborne.

He later strengthened his position. 

The latest disclosed notification, published on 24 August 2026, put Klear Kite’s holding at 72,547,733 shares, some 14.07% of QinetiQ’s voting rights.

Related reading: The Reform Councillors Embedded in Britain’s Masked ‘Patriot’ Anti-Migrant Network

What Has the Investment Made?

The precise value of each of Harborne’s purchases is not public. TR-1 filings reveal when ownership thresholds are crossed, not the execution price of each trade. But historic market prices provide a reasonable basis for an estimate.

Using QinetiQ’s closing price on each of the dates when Harborne crossed the relevant thresholds suggests that his original 57.9 million shares cost about £205.2 million, or roughly £3.54 a share.

The historic closing prices range from 340.6p on 6 May 2022 to 378p when the final threshold in the initial accumulation was crossed in July. 

By 15 September 2026, QinetiQ shares were trading at £4.84.

Harborne has subsequently reduced his holdings. Across a series of filings, his disclosed stake fell by a cumulative 7.76 million shares. The reductions include 656,156 shares between January and October 2025,, 1.84 million between May 2026 and 4 August, and a further 5.26 million by 17 August.

If those reductions are treated as coming from his original 2022 holding, about 50.15 million of those shares remain.

At 472.4p each, they are worth roughly £236.9 million. Factoring in what they are worth today compared to what they were bought for, this has produced an estimated unrealised gain of £59.2 million to Harborne.

Using market prices around the relevant disclosure dates, the sale of 7.76 million shares would have generated Harborne an estimated £42.5 million in gross proceeds. 

If those shares had an original cost of about £27.5 million, that implies a realised gain to Harborne of around £15 million.

Then there are the dividends.

Applying QinetiQ’s declared dividends to Harborne’s disclosed holdings suggests that he has received approximately £27.5 million in gross dividend income since 2022.

We know, for instance, QinetiQ paid a 5p final dividend for FY22, followed by full-year dividends of 7.7p in FY23, 8.25p in FY24, 8.85p in FY25 and 11p in FY26.

As such, if you put the three elements together – share price rise, share sales and dividends – the estimated economic gain on Harborne’s original investment is about £101.7 million. 

This is some £59.2 million in unrealised gains, £15 million in estimated realised gains and £27.5 million in dividends.

Harborne’s wider personal and corporate tax affairs are not public, and tax liabilities could arise in other jurisdictions depending on residence and structure.

The Ministry of Defence Contracts

So it is clear that QinetiQ has been a cash cow for Harborne.

The next question is where QinetiQ makes its money. 

It’s mainly from the UK Government. For instance, during Harborne’s time as a shareholder, the Ministry of Defence awarded QinetiQ a five-year extension to its Long Term Partnering Agreement worth about £1.5 billion. The deal covers testing, trials, training and evaluation at 16 MoD sites. QinetiQ puts the value of that extension at some £1.54 billion.

Overall, QinetiQ has reported that approximately 57% of group revenue came directly from Ministry of Defence contracts in FY23 and FY24.

Its FY25 financial statements again put the figure at 57%. In FY26, the company said 60% of group revenue came from the MoD, some £1.154 billion of revenue.

Weighted by QinetiQ’s group revenue over those four financial years, the MoD proportion comes to approximately 57.8%.

Byline Times then applied that percentage to Harborne’s estimated £101.7 million economic gain. 

On that basis, approximately £58.8 million of his estimated gains corresponds to the share of QinetiQ’s revenues generated by MoD contracts.

This number does not mean that the Ministry of Defence paid Christopher Harborne £58.8 million. It does not mean that 57.8% of every rise in QinetiQ’s share price was caused by an MoD contract. Nor does it allow particular dividends, share sales or capital gains to be traced back to particular government payments. QinetiQ is an international business. Its value reflects operations in America and Australia, acquisitions, investor expectations, market sentiment and much else.

No deduction has been made for tax in these calculations. Harborne’s QinetiQ investment has been held through corporate vehicles including Hong Kong-registered AML Global Ltd, and Hong Kong does not generally impose tax on gains from the sale of shares where those gains are capital in nature, although profits from share trading can be taxable. 

Byline Times has therefore calculated gross economic gains rather than attempting to estimate an after-tax profit.

Public Contracts and Private Political Power

There is no evidence that Harborne took money generated by QinetiQ and transferred those same pounds into Reform UK’s bank account.

There is also no evidence that his political donations influenced QinetiQ’s contracts with the Ministry of Defence. Many of those commercial relationships long pre-date his arrival as a shareholder.

Byline Times cannot trace Harborne’s personal money flows, which are not publicly audited.

Yet the underlying relationship with the British state is substantial.

Farage himself has sought to draw a sharp distinction between Reform’s donors and those of the established parties. In a post on X, he accused Labour and the Conservatives of rewarding donors with peerages and government contracts, before asking: “You know what … Christopher Harborne want(s)? Nothing. Just a government that will fix Britain.” 

There is no evidence that Harborne has sought anything from Reform in return for his money, or that his donations have influenced QinetiQ’s dealings with the UK Government. But the assertion of complete disinterest sits uneasily alongside the financial reality documented here. 

Harborne has given £61.19 million to Farage’s political project while making an estimated £58.8 million in gains corresponding, on a simple pro-rata basis, to QinetiQ’s dependence on Ministry of Defence revenues. 

Whatever Harborne may want from Reform, his fortune is hardly detached from the British state that Farage promises to remake.

Byline Times has identified seven Reform councillors who are listed as members of these groups on Facebook. Among them is Mark Thorn, Reform’s campaign coordinator for Gateshead, who has repeatedly urged his own followers to join Patriot Platform. Patriot Platform, fronted by Danny Thomas - an acolyte of convicted fraudster and thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (known as 'Tommy Robinson') - is formed from members of dozens of local groups. Among them is Poole Patriots and Northeast Patriots, which draw together councillors and ordinary residents alike.

The network has also given rise to Frontline Alliance (FA), a veteran-led offshoot. Its founders have set out plans, in social media videos, for a body of unelected figures inside Parliament that would decide policy for whichever party is in power, alongside a British version of the US immigration enforcement agency ICE – with a threat to form a new political party if mainstream parties will not meet their demands. One of the founders denied any such plan when Byline Times put it to him directly.

The network has grown out of the collapse of the Flag Force movement, which Byline Times has previously exposed for hosting neo-Nazis posing as ordinary parents within it. It has capitalised on residents’ fears, drawing otherwise peaceful people into mobilising against migrants under the belief they are protecting their communities.

The Civilians

The British Brotherhood (BB) is a prime example. Birmingham man Anthony Davies renamed a pagan Facebook group he operated, rebranding it in July 2025 as a Christian military order. Davies replaced pagan content with AI-generated nu-metal anthems about imagined crusades and clips declaring a need for the return of “Paki-bashing” – though older pagan posts still remain on the page.

Questioned about this change by Byline Times, Davies said: “The majority of its members began to feel called to the Christian faith, so that Facebook group change its path and gave members notice of this change and offer them to stay… but many choose to leave and join a new group which we advestive [sic] for them at the beginning to help them out.”

As many members left his group in disgust, hundreds more joined, looking to be part of what Davies called a “grassroots Christian fraternity of ordinary citizens standing together to make our streets safer, kinder, and stronger.” In his comment to Byline Times, Davies added that BB “is not political… has no extremist agenda, and we don’t seek power, our only aim is to make our local areas better places for everyone.”

At least two men in the group have criminal records, one of whom was recently sentenced to three years and five months for burglary, while the other has historic convictions for manslaughter and domestic abuse. The former has shared images of himself on the BB Facebook group, while the latter appeared in a video on their TikTok page ranting about immigrants receiving benefits.

Growing steadily for the past year, BB now has a large presence on both Facebook and TikTok and is advertising for people willing to “walk into Hell no matter the outcome”. For some, this seems to involve “patrolling” parks and attending the weekly pub quiz, but others have stated a desire to “fight for [their] country til [their] dying breath”.

It is unknown whether BB members were present in Dover and Portsmouth, but the group has approvingly shared content from Poole Patriots, another group in the network which was present.

Related reading: ‘Flag Man’ Behind Nazi-Linked Anti-Migrant Protests Pleads Guilty to Assaulting Woman

The Councillors

The investigation found multiple councillors from Reform UK and Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain spread across the 15 patriot groups. Of the seven Reform UK councillors identified, none have posted within the Facebook groups they are members of, but one has made multiple posts on his own page in support of Patriot Platform.

Thorn has actively promoted the Northeast Patriots. Asking his 5,100 followers if they want to “stand up to defend Britain when or where needed”, he has made multiple posts recommending that they join Patriot Platform. Thorn has also referred to the landing of migrants in Portsmouth as an “invasion” and exhorted followers to “defend our nation” and “fight, fight, fight”.

Despite presenting themselves as concerned citizens, the language of the network’s posts leans increasingly towards that of militias. Immigrants are presented as “the enemy”, and those who join are asked to take an oath to “stop the invasion”, “protect the children”, and “keep our flags flying”. While none wear camouflage, the selling and wearing of Patriot-branded hoodies ensures a uniformed bloc at street protests.

Journalist and military veteran Joe Glenton told Byline Times that “a majority of veterans, like anyone else, would cringe at this sort of cosplay... But we need to look at the deeper processes behind it: the accelerating collapse of public trust”.

He said that “the privatisation and hollowing out of so many services and institutions, 25 years of failed wars plus the profound anti-Muslim racism generated to wage them, the super-charged prompts of Farage, Robinson and Musk, the mainstreaming of far-right ideas, a crumbling social contract and the withered liberal prohibition on violence,” had likely contributed to the appeal of groups in the network.

Reform UK were contacted for comment.

The Veterans

For those who agree with Patriot Platform in principle but do not believe their protests will be effective, there is Frontline Alliance.

Formed in June this year by army veterans Alex Watts, Andrew Shaw, and Simon Dibb, and deeply involved with Richard Donaldson, who began the Great British National Strike movement which became Flag Force, they present a carefully curated veneer of respectability and have set out plans to gain influence over Government policy.

Related reading: How Neo-Nazis Posing as ‘Ordinary Parents’ Embedded Themselves in Anti-Immigrant Protests

Eschewing the idea of aggressive street protests, they still follow multiple members of the patriot network online, use similar language in their posts, and have claimed to be “on the same side” as Danny Thomas.

In a lengthy TikTok video, Watts proposes forming “an apolitical body within the Government [to] represent the needs of the nation”. Based inside Parliament, with members from all parties plus “proper economists and prominent commentators”, Watts claims this group will “decide what needs to be done and when”, while the ruling party will decide how it will do it.

Their first point of order is removing Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), followed by setting net migration targets, and a British birth rate target. This will, he says, allow them to “exploit the good bits of Islam while eradicating the bad”.

When Byline Times reached out to Watts for comment on the logistics of this plan, he said “we have no intention of forming a group inside Parliament so I’m not sure where you got this from”.

In another video, Watts advises veterans to “create and lead small teams” within their communities, assuring them that FA will provide “the infrastructure, the support and eventually the funding” to “unify British people and get our country back”. Despite regularly posting that FA is apolitical, he also tells viewers that this type of action will “hold the Government’s feet to the fire” and “win the next election”.

Once this has been achieved, the teams will become a British version of "ICE" - the US Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency which has killed US citizens during its mass deportation efforts. These teams will be responsible for “detaining and deporting immigrants” which will supposedly lead to net zero immigration within six years. The end result, he says, is that Britons will be able to live under “the good kind” of parochial system.

When asked to explain how this would work, Watts wrote:

“... we will put pressure on the Government and main political parties… to stop bickering and collaborate to ensure that one of them wins the next election with a written commitment to sort out the corrupt and criminal elements of the Establishment, mass immigration and radical/criminal Islamification once in power. 

If they indeed sort themselves out we will channel public support from across the communities to that party. IF they do not do this then we; alongside other organisations associated with Frontline Alliance and with the will of the people; will create a political party (in effect a ‘People’s Party’) to challenge for the next GE [general election].”

Discussing this, Glenton said: “The parliamentary angle is typical in my view. Fascist movements often seek to combine organised street violence with a ‘respectable’ electoral beachhead… This lot are aping 20th Century fascism… But the people answering their call to arms are motivated by deep alienation and misinformation.

They’re excited by the prospect of cleansing violence, by the idea that they’re somehow purifying the national body from a disease... Fascism is anti-intellectual. Those it recruits want to enact punitive violence. They want the buzz of the witchhunt. They want to feel powerful. For them this is exhilarating, it offers meaning, even community, that they do not have otherwise.”

FA’s plan looks as unlikely to succeed as the rest of the patriot network’s street mobilisations, but its 14,000 followers appear to believe in it, and – as with the wider network – its comments section fills with people asking where they can sign up.

Police were told in advance that a protest could take place ahead of the Dover demonstration, ITV News has reported. The patriot network’s numbers are still growing, and its capacity to mobilise large crowds at short notice remains undiminished.

In the second quarter donation releases for 2026 with the Electoral Commission, it was revealed that the Conservative Party has taken £50,000 in three instalments from Adam Stephen Franks, a former director and current shareholder at the Star Lizard Consulting betting syndicate. 

In court documents released late last year, reviewed by Byline Times, Tony Bloom, the founder of the syndicate, admitted to using Cottrell as a stalking horse. Bets that made $3.7 million profit were allegedly placed using betting accounts created under George Cottrell’s name, according to Guardian reporting on the court case. 

Tony Bloom, the founder of Star Lizard was sued by one of his former employees, Ryan Dudfield, over an alleged agreement to share the profits from the Cottrell account. Dudfield believed he was owed a sum potentially stretching into the millions from the profit, though this was denied by Bloom. 

Gambling syndicates like Star Lizard often end up with their accounts getting closed down because of the size of the wins and the calculated nature of the bets. Instead they use high-spenders, known as ‘whales’ to place bets on their behalf. Cottrell had a reputation as a high-roller who was not particularly successful, which meant he was a whale that could be used by the syndicate.

According to the court document reviewed by Byline Times the arrangement between Cottrell and Star Lizard ended in October 2025. 

Related reading: Nigel Farage Funder George Cottrell’s Inner Circle Hosted Indicted Cocaine Trafficker

According to Bloom’s defence, Cottrell’s Sportsbet.io account, for most of the period that the syndicate controlled it, was in net loss. The losses peaked at a net loss of $13.7 million, one month after Star Lizard controlled it, before the syndicate then took it into a position of net win. 

Adam Franks, the Conservative donor, was previously a director at Star Lizard Consulting, the firm that runs the syndicate, and now owns a substantial portion of the firm. 

Companies House documents show that Franks first took a 25% stake in the firm in 2016, which later became 75% in August 2025, meaning that Franks had a stake in the firm while it was using Cottrell’s accounts to place bets. 

According to a 2016 profile of Star Lizard, Franks is integral to the Star Lizard operation. He is a friend of Bloom’s from university and has worked as the financial director of many of Bloom’s businesses. He also sits on the board of Brighton and Hove Albion football club alongside Bloom who is the owner and chairman of the club. 

According to Bloom’s defence in the case brought by Dudfield, Bloom was to keep 60% of profits from Cottrell’s bets, Cottrell 33% and Dudfield 7%.  

Related reading: How George Cottrell’s Reform UK Network in Montenegro Is Tied to Sanctioned Russian Oligarchs

During the court case, it was alleged that the Star Lizard syndicate agreed not to place bets through sites in which Cottrell had a stake, such as Tether Bet, though Bloom’s defence denied that the syndicate had ever used Tether Bet at all. Cottrell has previously denied having any relationship to Tether Bet beyond being a customer. 

Sportsbet.io advertises itself as the best crypto sports betting and casino site. 

Franks’ name also appears in the Paradise Papers leak of offshore investments in tax havens. He is listed in the papers as a shareholder of igame holdings P.L.C., a Malta based gambling company which focused on the Nordic and Central European markets before it was sold to Unibet in 2015. It is unclear from the Paradise Papers how long Franks held the shares for. 

There is no suggestion of wrongdoing by either Adam Franks or the Conservative Party. 

Franks told Byline Times that he made the donation in a personal capacity, but did not respond to our question about whether or not he profited from the Cottrell account. 

A Conservative Party Spokesperson said: “All donations accepted by the Conservative Party are permissible and are properly declared and reported through the Electoral Commission.”

Crypto billionaires Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo gave the largest ever donations to a UK political party, £36 million each, to Nigel Farage's party.

Both were reported as living – until very recently – overseas. Delo was based in Hong Kong and Harborne in Thailand. The Labour Government's current Representation of the People Bill going through Parliament places a cap of £100,000 a year on donors living overseas, which will be retrospective.

Under the new bill, an individual is not a permissible donor if when the party receives the donation, they are an "overseas contributor" and their donations for that whole calendar year exceed £100,000. Assuming the bill passes as it is, this largely kicks in from when the changes were announced, 25 March 2026. There is therefore mounting speculation that the donations will have to be returned by Nigel Farage's party once the bill passes.

Under the legislation, the party would have 60 days to return the donations if they are ruled impermissible.

However, Byline Times has learned that even if the donations are ruled illegal, Reform UK will be able to keep any interest earned on the enormous gifts.

The interest could amount to nearly £500,000 if the donations are returned at the end of the 60-day legal deadline.

The current highest-earning, easy access business account Byline Times found pays 4.15% AER variable, which would amount to £491,000 interest. Other providers offer 3.91% AER variable interest (£462,800 interest) or have introductory offers of 4.00% (£473,000 interest over 60 days).

There is no sanction for a party if they return impermissible donations within the legal timeframe.

This arguably creates an incentive for parties to accept illegal donations, hold on to them for 59 days, return the donations and pocket the interest.

'Glaring Loophole'

Labour MP Phil Brickell, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Anti-Corruption, told Byline Times the weekend's mega donations mean democracy has entered "uncharted waters."

"They've exposed a glaring loophole which the government must urgently plug via the Representation of the People Bill currently making its way through Parliament.

"There's only one inescapable conclusion – that we need to pave the way now for a cap on the amount any individual can donate and which is fair, proportionate and workable."

Brickell said: "If the donations are forced to be returned, but with substantial interest being kept by Reform UK, then Nigel Farage should respect the spirit of the law and donate the inadvertent proceeds to a worthy cause, such as the RNLI."

A spokesperson for the Electoral Commission told this outlet: "When interest has been gained on an impermissible donation before it is returned…the interest accrued until that point may be kept by the party.

"The interest is not treated as a donation and does therefore not need to be included in the total reported to the Commission. The value of the impermissible donation returned must still be reported to the Commission."

The spokesperson insisted: "We have not seen evidence of parties or other regulated entities having received and returned impermissible donations for the purposes of accruing interest."

The Electoral Commission says parties must take "all reasonable steps" to satisfy themselves that the source of a donation is permissible, even if they have made permissibility checks for past donations from the same source. They must also keep a record of their permissibility checks to show that they have followed the rules.

Impermissible donations kept after the legal time limit party make them potentially liable for civil sanctions (such as fines), while the party and the treasurer may also have committed criminal offences. Any potential breach is dealt with in line with the EC's Enforcement Policy.

On X, accountant and Reform-watcher Chris Spencer wrote: "Even if Reform have to return the donations, they can keep any interest earned on the amount. If they manage to hang onto the money for a short while, that could be a nice way to give them a few £100k "off the books" as [ousted policy chief] James Orr might say."

Related reading: Why Reform UK Could Be Forced to Hand Back Their £72m Donations From Crypto Billionaires

Unease Over Cap

Pressure is growing for the Government to introduce an overall donations cap – not just for overseas donors. However, measures proposed last week by Labour backbenchers – including Stella Creasy – to introduce such a cap have met with resistance from trade unions, as well as from anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate. Those organisations now appear to be shifting towards a cap but there remains unease that it would hit their campaigning abilities.

A spokesperson for Hope Not Hate told Byline Times a "crucial part of our mission is stopping far-right forces at the ballot box."

"As registered third party campaigners we have made essential contributions including most recently our vital campaigning and research in Makerfield to prevent misogynist Rob Kenyon from being elected.

"We of course, believe that a cap on donations is sensible. However, any donation cap must protect against unintended consequences for campaigners like us and should not threaten our democratic right to campaign."

They pointed to hypothetical examples of a third-party campaigner being offered a potential grant of £600,000 by a British philanthropic foundation to be used for public-facing advocacy supporting Net Zero commitments. "Under a donation cap of £100,000 or £500,000 such a grant would not be permissible, as the cap applies to third-party campaigners," the Hope Not Hate spokesperson said.

"If a donor with an interest in immigration was deciding whether to give a grant of £300,000 over a three-year period to a migrant rights charity for comms and advocacy – this cap would come into their calculation," they added, as the donor might decide to give to a party instead (the cap targets the donor, not the organisation itself).

Related reading: Nigel Farage Funder George Cottrell’s Inner Circle Hosted Indicted Cocaine Trafficker

The group also pointed to the hike in election spending limits passed under the Conservatives as added impetus to spend more on campaigning. However, the Government has committed to reducing these limits, with the Electoral Commission currently undertaking a review.

And they pointed to proposals in the Rycroft review on foreign interference to mean that instead of a single regulated election period, there is an 'always on' regulated period where political spending is limited and monitored constantly. The Government appears to have rejected this proposal and it is not in the current Representation of the People Bill.

"A combination of these changes would prevent HOPE not hate from campaigning against Reform UK which is surely not the intention of these amendments."

Much of HNH's work would be unaffected by a cap. The group has only registered one donor for its election-related work (as per the Electoral Commission's database) over the value of £100,000 in the course of a decade: £200,000 from Lord Sainsbury in 2019.

About 90% of HNH’s work is charitable. In 2024, Hope Not Hate Ltd - the campaign entity - received a £787,858 charity grant but registered only £158,624 of regulated spending.

The Government has established a 'task and finish group' on electoral reform issues, which is likely to discuss these sticking points with affected organisations in the coming months.

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

A review of industry research found no demonstrated cycle of accelerating, autonomous self-improvement underpinning these warnings. Meanwhile, Byline Times calculations suggest OpenAI, Anthropic and Google’s parent Alphabet could face a $10.7 trillion research-computing bill during 2026–2030.

Even generous assumptions about business growth would cover only around a third of that sum, leaving a roughly $7 trillion gap to be met through existing reserves, financing, higher income or lower costs.

Two independent experts with experience developing AI programmes at the United Nations and a top-tier global bank told Byline Times that measures presented as protecting humanity could also shield leading companies from cheaper rivals, and give industry insiders greater influence on potential regulation or oversight mechanisms.

Apocalypse Now?

The current debate over AI was spurred by the resignation of AI safety researcher Jacob Coxon from Anthropic, the frontier AI giant behind the chatbot known as Claude. Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT – accused both companies of recklessly pursuing AI that can improve itself and become far more capable than humans. He said insiders believe AI could wipe out humanity before this decade ends.

Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger subsequently put the chance of human extinction over the next decade at over 10%; his colleague Samuel Marks warned of human extinction “within a few years”.

Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, claimed that AI would become capable of “taking over the entire internet” within six to 12 months.

He called for US Government support or antitrust exemptions allowing leading companies to coordinate safety standards and limits on development; outside monitors from the nonprofit Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR); and restrictions on Chinese access to advanced chips and chipmaking equipment. These restrictions would affect a major source of cheaper, openly available AI models.

Anthropic’s call to slow AI development has been supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and xAI CEO Elon Musk.

Testing the Runaway

AI is already used to help develop better AI systems, or “models”, which are trained by processing data and adjusting how they work. In the runaway scenario, each improved model becomes better at building its successor, accelerating the cycle as humans step back. This is an extreme form of “recursive self-improvement” (RSI).

Daanish Masood, Chief Executive of AI firm CX-1 and former co-lead of the UN’s Innovation Cell, where he helped develop AI programmes for peace efforts, cautioned against treating AI progress as proof of runaway self-improvement.

“The AI risks Dario details are serious enough to justify enforceable safeguards,” he told Byline Times. “I think we need to distinguish what’s been demonstrated from what is being predicted.”

He added:

AI is already helping to develop AI, but that alone does not establish the runaway, self-sustaining improvement process that is implied by the rhetoric or the term RSI. We also don’t need to declare or pretend that a takeoff has arrived to take the risks seriously.

AI research company Weco tested a crucial part of this process in July. Its system produced seven improved versions of an AI research programme over eight days without people intervening. Some improvements also helped with tasks beyond those used to develop them.

Although this was a meaningful success, when one of the improved programmes was put in charge of the next round, it ultimately produced results no better than those reached when the original AI ran the process. It seemed to get there faster, but the evidence was too weak to establish a reliable speed advantage. Weco said its system was not close to the runaway acceleration often called an “intelligence explosion”.

In another July experiment, METR gave AI agents up to five days and $10,000 to improve software used to train AI. The software had already been refined to run efficiently. Checks confirmed that the newest AI systems in the test made it roughly 1% to 1.5% faster – equivalent to completing a 100-second job in about 99 seconds. Such small savings are not insignificant - they accumulate into greater efficiency when a programme runs repeatedly - but these figures measure faster software, not a significant increase in intelligence.

Some results are much larger, but still far from the larger claims of autonomous RSI. In an Anthropic experiment, AI agents developed training methods that worked better on the chosen task than those produced by two human researchers. But the agents did not themselves become improved researchers and keep repeating that process. When a promising method was tried in the company’s main AI training process, the apparent improvement was so small that researchers could not tell whether it was a real benefit or just the normal difference between one test run and another.

A Princeton-led study published in August tasked AI agents with producing scientific-grade research papers that would explore the central research questions from two unpublished papers, submitted to a leading machine-learning conference. The original authors assessed the resulting papers and rejected both as unworthy of publication. The agents were capable engineers, conducting experiments, reviewing literature and writing clean code, but struggled with research judgement, creativity and knowing when to change course.

Anthropic’s Own Data

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark admitted just last month that the Princeton study offered a “somewhat bearish signal on short recursive self-improvement timelines…” – contradicting his claims in media interviews on Monday and Tuesday that AI is accelerating out of control.

In an August post on his own newsletter, he went on to explain that the Princeton study suggests “the singularity could be delayed”, because “whether AI systems prove to be capable of creative, paradigm-shifting insights is a big variable on how quickly we might get fully automated AI development.”

“Research papers like this continue to show that there’s a certain absence of valuable, intuitive creativity in today’s AI systems, and though they’re extraordinarily capable engineers, they seem to have a certain property of rote, formulaic thinking that might prevent them from being good researchers”, explained Clark. He further admitted that the study confirmed Anthropic’s own internal data disproving imminent RSI:

“This rhymes with an earlier result from Anthropic where the company tried to automate some aspect of scalable oversight research… and found that to make it successful a human researcher needed to prime some agents with particularly good research directions to pursue, otherwise though they made some progress they failed to explore sufficiently creative ideas to dramatically improve performance.”

Mohammed Marikar, former lead of the global AI programme at Royal Bank of Canada Wealth Management and now Director of Institutional Development at decentralised AI training platform FLock.io, said self-improvement does not mean AI will independently pursue humanity’s destruction:

“Self-improving models is quite straightforward from this point provided you can capture the next step  - whatever the human is doing with the output, or the response of the natural environment to an action taken - which is definitely feasible. But if there’s an extinction event it will be driven by humans. AI trained on human output is not going to independently reason towards an extinction outcome. It will only do so when driven and forced to do so by humans.”

Marikar called for serious debate about regulation, but said extinction warnings were a distraction:

“This isn’t traditional software where code can be audited, and you can ensure it’s safe. This is a massive neural network whose ‘thinking’ we actually don’t fully understand. It cannot be fully controlled. You can attempt to ‘align’ it with training, but it will be as manipulable as a human will be... All the RSI that exists is based on human input and interaction. Alignment or not, it’s not going to independently reason to an extinction outcome with this training dataset. It will only do so if driven to. The human controller can drive it to a certain outcome even if the RSI attempts to adjust the objective.”

The Human Decisions Behind the Breach

The July attack on Hugging Face, a platform for sharing AI software, is central to Amodei’s warning about rogue AI. METR counted around 700 OpenAI agents taking part: programs designed to work through tasks in several steps. But the incident began with human decisions about their instructions and safeguards.

OpenAI’s own report explains that before the attack, safeguards had been deliberately switched off by human operators to measure what the software could do.

The systems had also been taught to keep trying, while a service for downloading software provided a way around restrictions on internet access. Weeks before the July breach, OpenAI’s security staff identified agents using that same service to communicate and probe computer systems, yet testing continued.

Cambridge University AI researcher Eryk Salvaggio thus argues in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the systems had been pushed by humans to find weaknesses in computer security, including on tasks with no valid solution: “That is not rogue AI, it’s human decision-making”.

METR, the group Amodei recommends as independent auditors on AI safety, produced a report on the Hugging Face incident which illustrated the limits of its own independence. The report acknowledged that OpenAI could remove information not already public, and that METR’s decisions about drafting, editing and redactions were influenced by the goal of ensuring companies it was investigating would remain willing to allow future investigations.

In a separate May assessment, METR disclosed that at least six of its staff and collaborators had close personal relationships with AI-company staff. And while it does not receive cash funding from AI firms, it is dependent on in-kind use of their systems.

Information security specialist Greg Linares called the proposed use of METR as an independent oversight authority “dangerous, deceptive, and morally corrupt”.

The Rising Price of ‘Progress’

The cost of sustaining AI’s recent expansion is more immediate. A Byline Times analysis finds that the projected research-computing bill for 2026–2030 would amount to $10.7 trillion, equal to roughly a tenth of one year’s world economic output.

The calculation draws on Epoch AI’s database of AI systems, updated on 11 September. Comparing selected prominent models released between 2020 and 2025, Byline Times found that the estimated computing used for training grew about 1,200-fold between GPT-3 and GPT-4.5.

Epoch estimates GPT-4.5’s final training run at $389 million in 2023 prices, excluding wider research. Using its 2025 release as the starting point, extending the historical annual cost increase of 3.5 times would put one run at approximately $204 billion by 2030.

The projection assumes conservatively that each company trains one new flagship model annually at this rising cost. Adding 20% for other models and additional training, based on Epoch’s spending estimates, produces a combined five-year bill of approximately $1 trillion for final training alone.

The much larger expense is the research surrounding those runs. Epoch AI’s estimates suggest that final training runs for released models accounted for less than 10% of OpenAI’s research-computing spending in 2024 — approximately $480 million out of $5 billion.

Total research computing therefore costs roughly ten times as much as final training. Applying that ratio produces the projected $10.7 trillion bill. This assumes that all three companies maintain a similar spending pattern and value their computing at comparable rental prices.

Could the companies earn enough to pay for this expansion? Their own forecasts show the strain. OpenAI’s projections reported in February anticipated spending $218 billion more than it generated during 2026–2029. Anthropic has reportedly posted a quarterly operating profit on an adjusted basis, but the research bill projected here is on a different scale.

The Byline Times calculation gives both companies room for substantial growth. It assumes OpenAI reaches its reported annual sales target of $280 billion by 2030, while Anthropic reaches its reported $200 billion target by 2028, then grows another 50% annually.

Allowing for growth towards those targets, total sales during 2026-2030 would reach approximately $550 billion for OpenAI and $960 billion for Anthropic, in 2023 dollars. Each would face an estimated $3.6 trillion research-computing bill. Even spending every dollar of sales on research, leaving nothing for staff or serving customers, would fall far short.

Alphabet has more money to draw on. Byline Times' calculation starts with the cash generated by its businesses, including money already spent on research so that this expense is not counted twice. Assuming annual growth of 20-30% gives it approximately $1.7-2.3 trillion over five years, before paying for new infrastructure. Its projected research-computing bill is also $3.6 trillion.

Together, the companies would generate approximately $3.2–3.8 trillion under these assumptions, leaving a $6.9–7.5 trillion gap. Closing it would require existing reserves, financing already secured, further investment, higher income or reductions in projected costs.

Cheaper Rivals Keep Pace

Chinese developers including DeepSeek, Alibaba and Z AI offer increasingly capable alternatives that customers can download, adapt and run themselves or through another provider. These models do not necessarily disclose all their training data or methods, but reduce dependence on the original developer and make premium prices harder to justify.

Anthropic’s plan to sell shares on the stock market could put the company’s value at $2 trillion or more. Sustaining such expectations becomes harder if competitors can offer capable alternatives at much lower prices.

Proposed regulations would have the effect of allowing Western companies to coordinate development while holding back a source of cheaper competition.

Jack Clark’s proposed ‘kill switch’, verified by a third party such as METR, could also burden smaller competitors while strengthening industry insiders’ influence over oversight.

“I firmly believe that independent evaluation is worth having,” said Daanish Masood. “My concern is how the rules are written. A safety regime can reduce real risks while favouring the largest labs if its costs and requirements are disproportionate. The rules should track the actual risks, not make size and proximity to government the price of participation in the industry.”

The former UN AI lead said Beijing would see a proposal combining mutual restraint with chip restrictions as an attempt to “lock in a hierarchy” with the US on top. “That makes a broad agreement difficult,” he said. “But crucially, it doesn’t mean narrower safety cooperation is pointless.”

He added that: “The ultimate test of pacing is what happens when a safety finding conflicts with a commercially important deadline. Can independent scrutiny actually change the decision? Without that, pacing risks becoming reputational insurance.”

For leading companies facing high costs and capable rivals, such measures could provide a form of political bailout: protection for their market position and reassurance to investors about their long-term importance. Presenting AI as almost all-powerful can also strengthen the investment case for the companies developing it.

“Basically the competition is resulting in huge training costs and they are burning through cash and having to do increasingly unethical stuff, e.g. all the secret book buying, to get an edge. I think this scaremongering is for commercial reasons to get Formula-1 style regulation to control how competitors can spend”, said Mohammed Marikar.

Anthropic, OpenAI and Alphabet did not respond to requests for comment.

Related reading: Big Tech Helped Elon Musk Meet Jeffrey Epstein Four Times After Conviction

Ideological Roots of Doom

Commercial interests do not mean extinction fears are insincere. Those convictions may also have ideological roots.

Philosopher Émile Torres, a former participant in the transhumanist movement, argues that leading AI developers and their most vocal safety critics emerged from overlapping circles of researchers, donors and campaigners with a shared ambition: creating machines powerful enough to transform humanity’s future.

Torres and Timnit Gebru, former co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, call these movements ‘TESCREAL’. They include transhumanism’s pursuit of overcoming biological limits and longtermism’s emphasis on vast future populations. The authors trace transhumanism’s origins to eugenics and its pursuit of a supposedly superior machine-merged humanity.

In Torres’s account, Dario Amodei and AI-risk researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky share the ambition of a civilisation transformed by superintelligence and extending beyond earth, despite disagreeing about how safely it can be reached.

This may help explain the unswerving conviction behind extinction warnings, despite a complete failure to scientifically substantiate related probability estimates. If superintelligence is assumed to hold the key to an immense future civilisation, even a speculative threat can become an overriding priority. That urgency follows from the worldview; it does not establish that today’s machines are approaching the capabilities needed to cause human extinction.

Both were reported as living – until very recently – overseas. Delo was based in Hong Kong and Christopher Harborne in Thailand.

This matters because the Labour Government’s current Representation of the People Bill going through Parliament places a cap of £100,000 a year on donors living overseas.

Crucially, this will be retrospective. Under the new bill, an individual is not a permissible donor if when the party receives the donation, they are an “overseas contributor” and their donations for that whole calendar year exceed £100,000. Assuming the bill passes as it is, this largely kicks in from when the changes were announced, 25 March 2026.

From my reading, under the Bill, anyone who moved back to the UK during 2026 remains capped at £100,000 until 1 January 2028. The clock starts ticking from the start of the calendar year before the donation, not from the date of return*.

Reform UK have cried foul, claiming that the policy is an attack on them and their latest donations. This appears to give the Government credit for inventing a time machine.

The retrospective element was already there in the bill, and runs back to the point of the Rycroft review into foreign interference.

The rationale is that without it, donors would have rushed money in, ahead of the legislation. Which seems to be what Reform UK are trying to do.

The 25 March is of course well before these donations were made over the weekend. That’s linear time for you.

It is quite odd then that Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne each made £36 million donations to Reform over the weekend.

Reform and the mega-donors almost certainly knew this law was coming (they would have to have been ignoring legislation that clearly affected them to have not).

Reform and in particular Robert Jenrick MP has been insisting that Harborne and Delo are living in the UK, and that the overseas donor cap supposedly won't affect them.

In April 2026, while still apparently based in Hong Kong, Delo wrote in The Telegraph that he would move be moving back to Britain early so he could contribute more to Reform, framing Labour's £100,000 cap on donations from Britons living abroad as a "rigged game". If he was still living in Hong Kong in April, that is clearly after the 25 March donation cap implementation date.

And a claim form filed by Harborne in the High Court only this June lists his address as (still) being in Bangkok.

A Narrow Route to Legality

There is a very narrow route in the bill where Harborne’s donation could be legal. From our reading, it requires three things to have happened by three dates.

1. Firstly, his removal from the register as an overseas elector on or before 25 March 2026, when the cap was announced.
2. Unbroken (not even for one day) UK residence from 6 July 2026 onwards.
3. And registration as an ordinary UK elector by the date of the donation.

That means Harborne would have had to deregister as an overseas elector before the £100,000 was even announced, which suggests foresight that is unlikely to have existed. We know Harborne was registered to vote in February this year, as on the 19th he donated £25,000 (as a benefit in kind) to Nigel Farage for a trip to the Maldives, on a “humanitarian aid mission.”

And we know he gave a Bangkok address as recently as 9 June, from the High Court filing — so he surely cannot have returned before then. We also know that Companies House still records Harborne's country of residence as Thailand, and has done so continuously since 2018. No change has yet been published for the two UK firms Harborne controls - despite a 14-day legal duty to notify the company regulator on a change in residency status.

So for his donation to be legal, Harborne would have had to have made that gift in kind – presumably as an overseas elector – then deregistered quickly as an overseas elector before 25 March – then moved back to the UK before the July cut-off, then quickly registered to vote in the UK. And, it seems, for the Companies House entries to be incorrect.

That’s a lot of ‘ifs’.

Related reading: Nigel Farage Funder George Cottrell’s Inner Circle Hosted Indicted Cocaine Trafficker

On the morning broadcast round, Richard Tice couldn’t say when (or if) Christopher Harborne moved back to the UK from Thailand. You would think they’d be pretty clear about that if they were sure the donation was in line with the new elections bill.

Tice told the BBC the proposed change showed Labour was "terrified" of the party. "We believe that we've done everything in complete accordance with the laws," he told BBC Breakfast. He also accused Labour of trying to "retrospectively introduce legislation in order to significantly disadvantage another political party". Again, Labour would have needed a crystal ball for the legislation to have foreseen the weekend’s record-breaking donations.

So what is going on? My theory is that Harborne (and possibly Delo) are chancing it. They know the donations could be ruled illegal. But it creates a lot of headlines and turns the debate around the elections bill into one of Labour “targeting” Reform UK.

They know it will cause a headache for the Government if the law is passed and the Electoral Commission (or indeed police) must soon get into a fight with Reform to hand back over £70 million in donations.

It has already generated a lot of media attention, with Reform attempting to put ministers on the back foot. This morning’s Lobby briefing was dominated by questions – including from GB News – about Labour supposedly going after Farage’s funders but not the unions.

It may equally however be a dumb move on Reform’s part.

Because it is likely to push Labour closer towards introducing a domestic donations cap. If the donations are legal, simply because Delo and Harborne recently moved back to the UK, the question remains: why should crypto billionaires be able to (almost entirely) bankroll a political party?

Ordinary voters do not stand a chance at getting a fair hearing. Reform has already made extremely friendly noises about deregulating crypto. The word ‘donations’ when it comes to multi-million bungs feels misleading. They are tickets to influence.

Related reading: ‘A Cap on Donations Is Not Anti-Union — It Is Anti-Oligarchy’

What Canada Shows Us

I am reminded of a recent conversation I had with the former Chief Electoral Officer for Canada, Jean-Pierre Kingsley.

Kingsley recalled a memorable anecdote from an official visit to the UK during his time in office, when a prominent Conservative asked him three times what proof Kingsley had that money corrupts. The Canadian answered simply with Louis Armstrong’s apparent reply when asked to define jazz: “If you gotta ask, you’ll never know.”

On another trip, he shared that a senior Tory insisted that a £10,000 contribution held no sway over him. “I asked if he personally responded to all calls from constituents,” Kingsley said. No, there were too many, the MP replied. “I then asked him if he personally responded to all calls from persons who had made a contribution of £10,000 or more. He did not answer.”

Kingsley’s point is that money buys access, and access is influence. If Canada can fix this, why not the UK? After all, “our parliamentary system comes from yours”.

Without action to clean up parties’ coffers, British politics “will continue to flounder” with “as good a democracy as money can buy”.

Canada is an excellent case study showing that we can reduce the power of big money in politics.

Their parliamentary system closely mirrors the UK's, for obvious reasons. Except in one crucial respect: they've totally clamped down on mega-donations.

Canada has a total ban on company donations. Only individuals who are Canadian citizens or permanent residents can make contributions, and it's capped at $1,750 a year. They still have functioning parties and the sky hasn't fallen in. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Canada does have a far greater share of public funding for parties to compensate for this low cap. There are generous tax credits for individual (small) donations, and rebates for parties' campaign spending, based on a fair and transparent formula.

We would need to increase public funding in UK politics to have a cap approaching the Canadian level. But we do already have public funding – particularly Short money given to opposition parties. The question voters have never been asked is: How much should it be, to root out any whiff of corruption?

It is perhaps a price worth paying for ending the stench of cronyism in British politics once and for all.

Related reading: Reform UK Donations Overwhelmingly Have Overseas or Tax-Haven Ties

The Unions Start to Shift

It seems that the trade unions, many of which have been lobbying hard against a UK donations cap in recent weeks, are starting to wake up to this fact. They stand no chance at competing with the likes of Delo and Harborne.

The GMB union, which has been lobbying against a UK donor cap, has given the Labour party just over £600,000 since last August. The GMB represents over 500,000 workers.

In over a year, they have given 0.8% of what just two individual oligarchs gave to Reform in a weekend, seemingly as loose change.

The unions are starting to shift. Today, TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak, who has opposed a UK donations cap, told the union federation’s congress: “This is a crisis for our democracy. We cannot allow our political system to be captured by corporate interests.

“Let no one tell you there is any similarity – any similarity – between care workers chipping in a few quid a year through their union and a party bought and paid for by billionaires.

“So, we need a proper conversation about how we clean up our politics that doesn’t push workers to the margins – but does stop the super-rich corrupting our politics.”

There is movement here, and it should be welcomed. After scuppering Labour MP Stella Creasy’s efforts to cap donations in the Commons last week, time is running out to introduce a UK donations limit in the House of Lords, where the bill has its second reading today. The public seems on board.

Any change will have far more credibility if, even knowing it may affect them, unions and major progressive organisations say: bring it on. This is bigger than us. It is about a principle. That democracy is too important to be sold down the river, or to be treated as a plaything of the global ultra-rich.

This is a chance that will not come round again soon.

*(At Monday's lobby briefing, the Prime Minister's spokesman used a different formulation, saying a returning overseas elector could not exceed £100,000 "until the point at which they had resided in the UK for a full calendar year after the date on which they returned", which is not quite what the bill says. Either way, it’s bad news for overseas donors)

Got a story? Get in touch in confidence on josiah@bylinetimes.com 

George Cottrell’s partner is the younger sister of two men indicted over an alleged operation involving 5,670 kilograms of cocaine – including a man US authorities believe is a senior figure in the Kavač clan.

The Kavač clan is one of the Balkans’ most powerful cocaine-trafficking organisations. It emerged when Montenegro’s Kotor organised crime ring split into two rival groups in 2014; the ensuing conflict has been linked to at least 60 murders across Europe.

Cottrell’s partner Andjela Vukadinović, is also plugged into a nexus of corporate services firms in Tivat representing Cottrell, which administer companies owned by several other Reform UK figures - including Mehrtash A'zami, the party's former treasurer; Christopher Harborne, its largest individual donor; Gawain Towler, its former communications chief and board member; and Samee Bhatti, its former digital strategist. 

That corporate overlap is significant for reasons extending beyond the organised crime connections. The Sunday Times has reported that a company owned by Reform UK’s data protection officer, Mowbray Jackson, unlawfully enabled British customers to move money into and out of tether.bet – a cryptocurrency-gambling platform linked to George Cottrell which was not licensed to serve customers in Britain.

Records seen by Byline Times now reveal a second Reform-related connection to the same platform through Mehrtash A’zami, Reform UK’s former treasurer for some six years. He was legally responsible for the party’s compliance checks on the Cottrell-linked donations now under police investigation.

Unexplained Wealth

George Cottrell has spent a decade inside Farage’s political circle and paid for staff, security and social-media filming while providing the use of his London home. 

In 2024, Cottrell’s mother Fiona made three donations totalling £1.5 million into Reform UK and a fundraising company controlled by its Deputy Leader Richard Tice. The Guardian reported that George transferred $2,047,693 to her in three tranches, each arriving between 24 and 72 hours before she made one of those payments. The money passed through US cryptocurrency exchanges and some was routed through money-transfer services.

The Metropolitan Police is investigating whether the ultimate source of the donations was disguised.

The Electoral Commission says that, before accepting a donation of more than £500, a political party must take all reasonable steps to establish the donor’s true identity and confirm that the source is permissible. 

The Sunday Times reported that George Cottrell was involved with tether.bet, an offshore cryptocurrency-gambling platform, which Cottrell denied. Filings seen by Byline Times now show that a corporate services firm in Cyprus linked to Reform UK’s then treasurer Mehrtash A’zami incorporated the company handling tether.bet’s payments in 2021. That company is called GT eServices Ltd. The firm which set it up, McMillan Woods Cyprus, is a member of McMillan Woods Global, where A’zami is a partner. A’zami was Reform UK’s treasurer from 2019 to 2025.

“McMillan Woods Cyprus was engaged on a one-off basis in connection with the incorporation and registration of GT eServices Ltd in Cyprus”, the firm’s managing director Angelou Aristodimou told Byline Times. “Our involvement was limited to that corporate incorporation engagement. We did not provide ongoing accounting, audit, tax, financial, payment-processing or operational services to GT eServices in relation to its business activities. McMillan Woods Cyprus did not administer tether.bet or its payment arrangements.” He denied dealings with A’zami “concerning GT eServices or tether.bet” and said he had “no knowledge of him being involved in the work undertaken by McMillan Woods Cyprus.”

A’zami did not respond to a request for comment. Nor did McMillan Woods’ global and UK offices.

Alongside the alleged use of Jackson’s company, this establishes two Reform-related points of contact with tether.bet’s corporate and payment infrastructure. The platform shut down in late August following the scrutiny around its links to Cottrell.

Together, the findings raise questions about whether Reform figures helped provide the corporate and payment infrastructure surrounding Cottrell’s crypto-gambling activities.

Reform UK did not respond to requests for comment.

Related reading: ‘Posh George’, Two Passports, and a Fraudulent Identity: Convicted Fraudster and Nigel Farage Funder’s Connections to Reform UK’s Murky Financial Structures

Cottrell’s Partner

Those questions give Cottrell’s Tivat associations wider public importance. His partner Andjela Vukadinović intersects directly with the corporate infrastructure surrounding Cottrell in Montenegro.

The connection has been hidden inside a glamorous public life played out around Porto Montenegro.

On 11 March 2023, after she had been with Cottrell for close to a year, Vukadinović was crowned Miss Montenegro at the Regent Porto Montenegro – the hotel complex that contains Cottrell’s penthouse. The pageant’s organiser thanked three main sponsors that evening, including Salon Privé, the casino downstairs owned by Cottrell’s landlord and longstanding associate, Hon Kong Yong, who had helped Cottrell get his first job under A’zami. Cottrell had used a fraudulent identity to get that job, along with a fake Swiss passport, adopting the same name as a former school friend. Yong had been fully aware of the false identity at the time.

Byline Times has tracked down Cottrell’s friend. He confirmed that the identity theft has been reported to the police and Swiss authorities. 

The Sunday Times has also identified Yong as one of two men involved with tether.bet alongside Cottrell from an early stage. 

Yong’s company Global Trust, which owns the casino, shows a rapidly expanding asset portfolio (including the flat where George Cottrell resides) funded by revenue far short of what the portfolio would require. It has accumulated €7.46 million in short-term liabilities.

But Vukadinović is connected to the same corporate services network that administers the casino, Cottrell’s flat, and which filed paperwork for his Tivat company, Private Family Office.

In July 2024, following a Guardian story citing her as telling the newspaper she had been present when Cottrell gambled and lost €20 million, Vukadinović publicly denied it and claimed she had ended her relationship with Cottrell months earlier.

Her statement was delivered to the Montenegrin newspaper Vijesti by her lawyer, the late Ratko Pantović. But Pantović had also acted as lawyer for George Cottrell and Hon Kong Yong, including during the 2023 controversy over a cryptocurrency ATM installed inside Salon Privé.

His son, Nino Pantović, owns Global Financial Solutions, part of an interlocking network of Tivat corporate services firms used by Cottrell, Yong and several Reform UK figures. The firms were mapped in a previous Byline Times report. Nino – who has flown on Cottrell’s private jet – personally filed October 2020 paperwork for Cottrell’s Private Family Office while it was being administered by another firm in the network, Artemon.

Vukadinović’s relationship with Cottrell, her legal representation and the corporate machinery surrounding Cottrell’s life in Montenegro therefore converge inside the same compact Tivat circle: her lawyer was Cottrell’s lawyer, and that lawyer’s son handled a critical filing for Cottrell’s company.

By 2025, Cottrell and Vukadinović were together again. At one point, they were taken to a police station in Tivat in April 2025 over an alleged domestic violence offence. 

Cottrell’s lawyers described her as his “former partner.” However, Byline Times has established that they have continued their relationship since then into 2026. 

The Brothers

Vukadinović’s two older brothers are Marko and Miloš Radonjić, whom she has described as being like “second parents” and best friends to her, having grown up together in a family of five children.

Marko and Miloš had developed a reputation for participating in regattas – sporting events featuring boat races. Marko served as tactician and Miloš as skipper for MM Sailing, a Montenegrin ocean-racing team. 

Earlier this year, however, they were arrested on serious charges. On 6 April 2026, Montenegro’s Special State Prosecutor’s Office filed an indictment against 12 people over an alleged operation involving 5,670 kilograms of cocaine. Marko and Miloš were among the defendants, both charged with creating a criminal organisation linked to the notorious Kavač clan.

Two other defendants, Jovan Babović and Ivan Krsmanović, had crewed the MM Sailing team’s racing yacht, Maxi Jena, alongside the brothers in 2021 and 2022 regattas. Cottrell’s partner Vukadinović has previously publicly promoted the Maxi Jena yacht.

Marko Radonjić also attended a charity fundraiser organised by his sister at Salon Privé on 24 September 2023, placing the indicted Kavač clan drug-trafficker at the casino central to Cottrell’s Montenegro business and social life alongside several of the Farage funder’s closest associates: his landlord Hon Kong Yong, his personal assistant Katerina Djurovic and his legal advisor, the late Trump ally former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich.

Miloš faces separate US charges. Italian police had arrested him outside a Trieste hotel on 6 October 2023, two days before he was due to captain Maxi Jena at the Barcolana, leaving Marko to take the helm instead. Miloš was extradited to the United States in July 2024 after a Montenegrin court confirmed his identity with fingerprint samples as well as the passport and telephone number flagged by US authorities. The case remains before a federal court in New York.

US prosecutors described Miloš as a high-ranking member of a transnational criminal organisation and accused him of organising three attempts to load more than 2,500 kilograms of cocaine onto a container ship. He denies the allegations and the US proceedings remain ongoing.

Vukadinović did not respond to a request for comment.

The Corporate Client List

Beyond the Radonjić family, Cottrell’s immediate Tivat circle connects to other figures caught up in organised crime investigations. 

Byline Times revealed on 3 August that Artemon – the accountant and company administrator of Cottrell’s Private Family Office – is the registered contact for two companies belonging to indicted Kavač organised crime lord Mileta Ojdanić, and co-invested in a property development with a company owned by him. 

Cottrell’s loss-making company was sustained by more than €400,000 in loans from unidentified sources, reinforcing unresolved questions about the beneficial ownership and origin of money controlled in Cottrell’s name.

Two weeks after Byline Times' report, George Cottrell shut down the company. 

Montenegrin prosecutors have named Ojdanić as one of the organisers of a wider Kavač clan network of 21 people accused of smuggling 4.3 tonnes of cocaine and laundering around €7 million. 

Ojdanić is also one of four people placed under investigation in July 2026 over an alleged €1 million money laundering scheme.

A second Artemon client has also surfaced in a major organised crime case linked to the Kavač clan: the firm’s website publicly lists Modena Gradnja as a “major client”.

Related reading: Nigel Farage Funder George Cottrell’s Accountant Co-Invested With Russia-Linked Indicted Cocaine Trafficker

Modena, a Serbian real estate firm, was the formal investor behind a luxury development in Budva, built using proceeds from drug-trafficking according to Montenegro’s Special State Prosecutor. A key figure linked to the development is separately accused of helping a fugitive Kavač clan leader.

Why Tivat?

Cottrell’s lawyers told Byline Times that Tivat is a small coastal town with a small community, making it unremarkable that people and companies should use the same advisors. They said that Artemon was one of Montenegro’s largest and most widely used corporate service providers, and that Cottrell had no knowledge of other connected corporate service providers, their clients or their alleged activities.

“The imputation our client has been involved in, or benefitted from, drug trafficking or organised criminal activity is categorically untrue”, they told Byline Times. “In the circumstances, the premise of your enquiry is utterly misconceived. It appears to be yet a further exercise in seeking to associate Mr Cottrell, and in turn Nigel Farage and Reform UK, with serious wrongdoing on the basis of nothing more than indirect associations that our client supposedly has with others.”

The evidence now reaches well beyond a shared accountant or the accidental encounters of a small expatriate community. Cottrell’s partner is the sister of two indicted members of the Kavač crime clan; his accountant has acted for, and co-invested with, another alleged organiser of a Kavač cocaine-trafficking network; and companies belonging to Reform UK figures sit inside the same corporate services infrastructure surrounding Cottrell and his unexplained wealth.

That infrastructure extends into cryptocurrency gambling. A company owned by a Reform employee enabled British customers to move money into and out of tether.bet, while the accounting group of Reform’s then treasurer helped incorporate tether.bet’s payment company. Hon Kong Yong – Cottrell’s landlord, casino-owning associate and the man who introduced him to that accounting group – was reportedly involved with tether.bet from an early stage.

These intersections occur in a country long flagged by high money-laundering risk. The Council of Europe’s anti-money-laundering body, MONEYVAL, has identified drug trafficking, organised crime and misuse of companies among Montenegro’s principal threats. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime describes the Kavač clan as both a major cocaine-trafficking organisation and a leading regional cryptocurrency player.

Nor is the role of Tether – the USDT stablecoin used by tether.bet – in moving drug money hypothetical. In 2024, US prosecutors alleged that an international network converted approximately $14.5 million in drug proceeds into Tether before moving it through shell companies. A separate US indictment alleges that a multinational cocaine organisation used a “sophisticated Tether network” of intermediary wallets to conceal the origin of its proceeds.

There is no evidence that tether.bet laundered money for the Kavač clan. But questions remain about the organised crime links around Cottrell. Whose money entered tether.bet’s betting accounts? What checks were conducted on its source? What prevented third parties from using the platform to convert or disguise criminal proceeds? 

Cottrell has repeatedly refused to explain the origins of the millions he provided his mother before her donations to Reform UK. His lawyers told Byline Times: "Information relating to banking transactions is subject to strict obligations of confidence and can only have been obtained by unlawful means; that is, by someone acting in breach of obligations of confidence." 

Which still begs the question - where did the money come from?

The killings laid bare systemic failures in how the British state detects and responds to individuals showing warning signs of mass violence.

Between 2019 and 2021, Rudakubana was referred to Prevent by his schools three separate times. Teachers warned about his interest in weapons, mass killings and terrorist attacks.

Yet none of the referrals progressed to Channel, the programme through which agencies assess individuals and coordinate support. The subsequent learning review identified premature closure and failures to gather information. Rudakubana lacked a clear political motive, and officers treated his vulnerabilities as matters for other services without adequately assessing the cumulative danger.

These failures were examined by the then interim Independent Prevent Commissioner, Lord David Anderson of Ipswich, whose July 2025 report highlighted the difficulty the Home Office’s counter-terrorism programme faces in responding to warning signs of mass violence that do not fit a clear political ideology.

The Post-9/11 Legacy

In the years following 11 September 2001, at least 4.5 million people died in post-9/11 war zones from fighting or its indirect consequences, according to a 2023 estimate by Brown University’s Costs of War project.

In Britain, this war opened up a domestic front with the establishment of Prevent in 2003 – a flagship programme designed to identify individuals at risk of radicalisation and provide early intervention. Home Office funding across Prevent-related units reached £49.1 million in 2020–21, according to the independent review published in 2023.

From its inception, Prevent focused exclusively on Islamist terrorism, with early local authority funding allocated according to the size of the local Muslim population. Its remit was broadened in 2011 to include all forms of terrorism.

‘Salad-Bar’ Terrorism

The British approach to counter-terrorism has continued to place considerable emphasis on whether an extremist is “Islamist” or “extreme right-wing”. But that tidy taxonomy is not enough.

According to official Prevent data, 18% of referrals in England and Wales in 2023–24 involved “conflicted ideology”, while 36% involved vulnerability but no identified ideology or counter-terrorism risk. Referrals are concerns raised for assessment, not confirmed terrorist threats.

As MI5 Director General Ken McCallum said in October 2024, straightforward labels “don’t fully reflect the dizzying range of beliefs and ideologies we see”.

Alongside established ideological threats, the British state is confronting “salad-bar” extremism – where lone actors pick and choose from an online smorgasbord of misogynist forums, violence-fixation gore communities, gaming platforms and subcultures glorifying US school shootings.

Radicalised in a digital dark, these individuals are among those who cannot be fully understood through current approaches to counter-terrorism.

Prevent’s guidance has recognised people without fixed ideologies for years. But Anderson’s report identified significant inconsistency in how cases involving a fascination with extreme violence progress through the system.

Addressing the Roots of Alienation

Proposals following Southport include a new offence targeting preparations for mass killings without a terrorist motive, put forward by Jonathan Hall, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, in March 2025. His review argued against broadening the definition of terrorism itself.

Anderson’s separate report explored greater use of online evidence, including a suggestion to aggregate anonymised data from school monitoring software, and recommended closer oversight of existing information-sharing obligations.

However, civil rights groups and security analysts question whether administrative expansion can solve the problem.

Dr Asim Qureshi, research director at CAGE International, questions whether predictive interventions are viable at all.

“The problem with these reforms is that they operate on the logic that we can make expressions of mass violence disappear – but we can’t,” he said.

“These intervention programmes have no capacity to stop these acts; there just aren’t enough violent individuals that we can study to be able to actually predict anything.”

Instead, Qureshi points to the collapse of social safety nets: “We look to explain mass violence with ideology, rather than looking at our mental health services and the lack of support systems that vulnerable people have access to.

“Prevent fails in getting to the heart of why these people feel alienated and disenfranchised enough to commit these acts in the first place – it doesn’t look at why they feel like they do not belong, why they turn to these spaces in the first place.”

Related reading: Terrorist Narratives: The Biases in ‘Prevent’ Training Show How Counter-Extremism is Politicised

The Silo Problem

By contrast, Claudia Wallner, a fellow in the Terrorism and Conflict research group at the Royal United Services Institute, argues that while exact prediction is impossible, behavioural warning signs can provide opportunities to act.

“The post-9/11 framework is not entirely obsolete, but it is no longer sufficient on its own,” said Wallner. “It was built around clearer ideologies, networks, and organisational structures than many current cases display.”

Rather than viewing terrorism as an isolated category, Wallner suggests the state must move beyond separate, security-focused responses: “We need to understand terrorism less as a completely separate category and more as part of a broader targeted violence landscape. Low-base-rate violence can never be predicted with certainty, but many attacks are not entirely without warning.”

Waiting for “clearer ideological labels before acting” will not bring about change.

Has Britain learnt enough about terror since 9/11?

When confronted with emerging forms of “salad-bar” violence, the state risks institutionalising its own misdirections. Proposals for wider criminal offences, greater digital monitoring and tighter data-sharing must not become another expression of the illusion that administrative control can predict the unpredictable.

Unless the Government moves beyond rigid labels and addresses the social dislocation and gaps in mental health support highlighted by its critics, Prevent risks remaining a costly, reactive sticking plaster.

Despite having its press passes revoked at the last minute, Byline Times spoke to delegates as they queued to enter the conference hall last weekend. They were happy to share their views, with some describing climate change as a means of Government control.

The interviews suggest that the rejection of climate science by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and Deputy Leader Richard Tice finds a receptive audience among sections of the party’s membership.

Reform UK opposes net zero – the goal of balancing greenhouse gas emissions with their removal from the atmosphere. An analysis published by DeSmog in April found that the party had received more than £24 million from donors with financial interests in fossil fuels since its launch as the Brexit Party in 2019.

Watch: Reform UK Delegates Dismiss Climate Change

Jared Iverson, a Reform UK party conference delegate, described himself as a journalist and climate change denier. He told Byline Times outside the conference hall that the Government was lying to the public about climate change, as he claimed it had about COVID-19. He expressed a “deep distrust of the Government” and accused climate scientists of “following the money”, an allegation unsupported by evidence.

“What climate crisis?” said a smartly dressed couple in their late 60s, sporting a Union Jack jacket and bow tie. They claimed scientists had “cherry-picked the data” to support their theories.

The couple accepted that the climate had changed over time but insisted the world was heading towards a cooling period rather than “some catastrophic warming”.

“What we are talking about is controlling mankind,” they said. “We are passionate about that.”

A farmer based in Devon, dressed in tweed, was equally dismissive, calling the climate crisis “a farce”.

“I’ve lived and grown up in the countryside all my life,” he said. “They all talk about the temperatures moving and that, but I think we are colder now than when I was a kid.”

Asked how he knew it had been “definitely” a lot warmer during his childhood, he told Byline Times: “Because I spent my life in shorts.”

The temperature records tell a different story. The Met Office has announced that this summer was provisionally the UK’s hottest on record, with temperatures reaching 38.1°C at Kew Gardens in London. Wildfires also engulfed homes in Stourbridge.

Dr Amy Doherty, who leads the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre, said: “The conditions we’ve seen this summer have broken UK climate records once again. These records are now breaking with increasing frequency, reflecting the influence of human-induced climate change on the temperatures we’re experiencing in the UK.

Particularly notable is how much we’ve exceeded the previous summer mean temperature record, set just last year. The figures also knock the infamous summer of 1976 down to seventh for average summer mean temperature, with the top five warmest summers all occurring since 2003.

A common refrain among those interviewed was that they had done their own research.

“There is no climate change. It’s absolute nonsense,” one delegate told Byline Times. “What you have got to do is do some of your own research, and you will find out that it is cyclical.”

“I looked into it,” the delegate added. “I’ve spent 10 years and I can’t find a single scientist who agrees with any climate change.”

Another delegate in a Union Jack jacket treated the question as a matter of personal choice: “Pick a camp, believe what you want. Do your own research. You decide.”

A less common explanation came from a delegate carrying a Moses-style staff, who said climate change was the will of God. “God can change the climate any second he wants, because he is the creator,” he said.

The scientific consensus on human-made climate change is overwhelming. A 2021 study, drawing on a dataset of 88,125 climate-related papers, concluded that more than 99% of the scientific literature supported human-caused climate change.

Responding to similar claims on a television panel show more than a decade ago, world-renowned physicist Professor Brian Cox said: “The absolute, absolute consensus is that human action is leading to an increase in average temperatures.”

Warnings about climate-driven migration met a similar response in the conference queue. A mixed group of five men waiting patiently said immigration was a top priority for Reform UK. Asked about the prospect of mass migration from places made uninhabitable by climate change, they shook their heads.

“That’s not going to happen,” they said.

Related reading: Drowning in Denial: One in Five Homes in Reform UK Heartlands Could Be Under Water Within 25 Years

The UN’s International Organisation for Migration has cited estimates ranging from 25 million to one billion environmental migrants by 2050.

A 2018 World Bank report estimated that climate change could force as many as 143 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America to move within their own countries by 2050. It identified water shortages, declining crop productivity, rising sea levels and storm surges among the pressures driving people from their homes.

That projection concerned large-scale internal displacement, but nevertheless highlighted the scale of disruption that the delegates dismissed.

The risks to Britain itself were addressed by Professor Tim Lenton, Chair in Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter and founding director of its Global Systems Institute, at the National Emergency Briefing in Westminster last November.

Speaking to an audience of politicians, business leaders, leading scientists, academics, environmental organisers and representatives from culture, faith, sport and the media, Professor Lenton described the consequences if the current trajectory towards three or four degrees of warming later this century continued.

“Then we’ll definitely be in a national emergency because we’ll be at a high level of likelihood of crossing a tipping point in the climate,” he warned. “That will make this country a very different place, and a less habitable place to be.”

Bailey spoke at the event alongside David Paton, a professor of industrial economics at Nottingham University Business School. 

The event, condemned by Abortion Rights and Amnesty International, was put on by anti-abortion lobby group The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), which has received US ‘dark money’ - funding for which the true source of funds is obscured. 

Lord Bailey, who hosted the event in the House of Lords, is a former special advisor to David Cameron, and the Conservative Party’s candidate for Mayor of London in 2021. He entered the House of Lords in 2023 after receiving a peerage in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours.

Among those in attendance at his event on Tuesday were far-right activists and ethnonationalists, who were given a platform to air their opinions. Bailey denied inviting them or knowing who they were.

They included Callum Barker, a founding alumnus of the fascist and ethnonationalist Homeland Party and former member of Patriotic Alternative, the largest neo-Nazi group in the UK. Barker is one of a growing crop of ethnonationalist influencers also known for his role in the anti-migrant actions in Epping last year, which became the scene of violent far-right protests after an asylum seeker living in a hotel there sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and woman. 

Barker claimed on X that he attended the House of Lords event and told those present:

... we should stop importing an invasive foreign serf class to subsidise pensions and the falling birthrates, and instead build a system that prioritises us, makes homeownership affordable, encourages motherhood, and boosts Britain’s native birthrate.

Conservatives Hosting the Far-Right

Barker, described by campaign group Stand Up To Racism as a “hardened neo-Nazi”, quit Homeland after complaining of lack of support from its leader, former British National Party member Kenny Smith, during the protests in Epping. 

Also present at the Lords event was Gregory Moffitt (AKA Young Bob), a self-styled Christian nationalist who describes himself on X as a “pro-life remigration activist”, and who has campaigned for Disciples of Christ - a Christian activist group influenced by UKIP leader Nick Tenconi. He was previously involved with Turning Point UK and worked as a journalist for the far-right media outlet Vox Populi.

Remigration is a far-right concept calling for ethnic cleansing via forced mass deportations of non-white, particularly immigrant, populations. 

Moffit is currently the CEO of the Christian nationalist group ‘Project Britannia’, which calls for abortion to be banned for creating “the greatest genocide in human history” - claiming that “if you don’t want children, don’t have sex”. 

David Paton, who sat on the panel alongside Lord Bailey, sits on the academic review board of the Family Education Trust, which campaigns against LGBTQ+ rights. Its leadership has praised former president of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, while its events have featured far-right activist Connor Tomlinson and preacher Calvin Robinson, who has since promoted antisemitic claims about Jews collectively exercising control and pressuring others to silence opponents.

Anti-Abortion Lobbying

The topic of discussion at the panel hosted by Lord Bailey was “falling birth rates and what this means for the future of the UK”, with the event page stating “Birth rates across the UK are crashing to historic lows, threatening life as we know it”, and that “for decades, anti-life narratives have pushed the myth of overpopulation to justify abortion and anti-family rhetoric and policy”.

Lord Bailey has previously described himself as “pro choice”, but favoured reducing abortion time limits from 24 weeks, stating: “Unless there were mitigating circumstances, I would reduce it to 22 weeks”. He has also previously said children are “using abortion as contraceptive”, in remarks brought to light when standing as London mayoral candidate. 

A spokesperson for Lord Bailey told Byline Times: “The event was organised by SPUC and was open to members of the public. Lord Bailey had no involvement in advertising it or issuing tickets. He did not invite, does not know and has had no contact with either of the individuals named and categorically rejects their political views.

“Lord Bailey’s participation should not be interpreted as endorsing the views of every person who attended or statements they may have made elsewhere. He rejects fascism and ethnonationalism and does not support a policy of remigration.”

The Conservative Party did not respond to request for comment.

The SPUC, which organised the event hosted by Lord Bailey, is an extreme right-wing lobby group campaigning to ban abortion, as well as opposing assisted suicide, emergency contraception, birth control, and buffer-zone safe-spaces created for women being intimidated outside of abortion clinics - which the groups claims violates free speech and freedom of religion.  

It was among a number of groups that previously tried to influence anti-protest legislation to end buffer zones by writing to MPs and submitting evidence to parliament. Secret recordings revealed that the organisation misinformed parents, pupils and staff about the effects of abortion.

The group celebrated the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe V Wade, a move which dismantled abortion rights for women in the United States. It also has a history of promoting misinformation about abortion in schools. 

Dark Money

Between 2020 and 2022, the SPUC received anonymous funding via NPT Transatlantic - an affiliate of the US-based National Philanthropic Trust which frequently finances right wing causes - including the Heritage Foundation which architected Project 2025 (the Trump administration's authoritarian transition blueprint to reshape the federal government). 

NPT Transatlantic has also channelled more than £1.5 million to think tanks in the UK-based Tufton Street network. It provides a vehicle for US and UK taxpayers to donate to organisations across the Atlantic, while obscuring the true source of the income. 

A spokesperson for SPUC said that they were “extremely grateful to Lord Bailey for hosting this event… As an open event, members of the public were not screened, but had to adhere to the rules associated with attending any event in Parliament. We do not know the individuals mentioned and they have no connection with our organisation.” 

Related reading: Revealed: The ‘Right-Wing Arms Race’ to Deport Non-White Britons – Backed By the Tufton Street Brexit Lobby

Speaking to Byline Times, Kerry Abel, Chair of Abortion Rights, described the event as "a stark reminder that attacks on abortion rights do not happen in isolation. They are increasingly part of a broader political project that seeks to control women’s choices, restrict bodily autonomy and push women back into narrowly defined social roles...

“What is especially concerning now is the growing overlap between that agenda and wider hard-right and racist politics. Women’s rights cannot be treated as collateral in debates about population, family or national identity. Decisions about pregnancy belong to the person who is pregnant, not to politicians, campaign groups or ideological movements.”

Naomi McAuliffe, Amnesty International’s Head of Policy and Research added that the same groups calling for “remigration and promoting racist conspiracy theories of population replacement” are using the “very real issue of violence against women and girls to drive a racist agenda but there is clearly no genuine commitment to women’s rights – quite the opposite. Their vision is for a world where women can’t make choices about our own bodies”.

This is not the first time members of the far-right have attended parliament. A 2025 investigation by HOPE not hate revealed that Conservative peer Lord Moylan, a former advisor to Boris Johnson, hosted far-right activists Charlie Downes and Jake Scott at a panel event. 

Former Homeland organiser and ethnonationalist Steve Laws, who runs the ‘Remigration Now’ pressure group, has also boasted about “meeting with two members of the [House of Lords]… to discuss remigration”, claiming that “We're gaining ground”.

After stepping down, hundreds of articles were published on Arday – scrutinising many aspects of his life beyond academia, including his charity fundraising and his childhood mutism – across the established press in the UK and internationally. The 41-year-old was found dead at his home days later on 14 August.

One of the key articles which raised questions about the credibility of Arday’s work beyond his PhD – ‘Jason Arday: Times Analysis Finds “Impossible” Data in His Work’ by Emma Yeomans – was published by The Times on 5 August.

Cambridge University announced its investigation into Arday later that day. In a separate report on Arday’s subsequent resignation on that same day, The Times wrote that the institution’s investigation “came after The Times submitted fresh evidence to the university suggesting that large parts of his research were fabricated and­ contained ‘impossible’ evidence”. ­ 

The characterisation of Arday as a possible serial plagiarist was repeated by reporting in the Guardian and Washington Post. After his death, The Atlantic claimed that a “preponderance of evidence” showed that he was a “serial fabulist and unrepentant plagiarist” who had “conned” British academia. 

The central claim in The Times article was built largely around a paper published by Arday in 2018 that had already been formally investigated by its publisher, MDPI. The Times reported that Arday had been “forced to retract and republish” it.

But a MDPI spokesperson told Byline Times that its investigation did not establish plagiarism or data fabrication in the paper or result in a retraction, finding that the article’s scientific conclusions were unaffected. It did identify problems with citations and the handling of interview data, which required corrections. These correctable errors did not invalidate the study. 

The Times did not report this.

It explored the findings of its own “audit of five years of study” conducted by Arday. In addition to the 2018 paper, four other related studies by Arday were reported as possible evidence of fabrication and plagiarism. 

It did not mention that one of these, a 2020 paper by Arday, had already undergone a similar formal investigation by another scientific publisher, Taylor & Francis, again resulting in a correction of errors with no finding of plagiarism or data fabrication.

In his career, Jason Arday authored 33 peer-reviewed papers and was one of the most cited scholars in his field.

While media organisations choosing one ‘angle’ over another to pursue in a story is not in any way uncommon – indeed, it is often the norm – the case of The Times is an important one to examine, considering the extent to which the narrative around Jason Arday being a serial plagiarist took hold in the media firestorm that followed, culminating in his death.

What is striking about The Times article is that it did not seriously examine the reasonable – or at least possible – alternative that problems in the papers it audited had resulted from the same kinds of error as the 2018 paper that had been investigated and cleared of plagiarism.

The academics The Times spoke to said that “the cumulative impact is pretty damning, even if some individual examples might have more innocent explanations in terms of sloppy work or coincidence”; that “the studies seemed to show signs of fabrication… which is far worse than plagiarism”; and “I can’t think of any alternative explanations of this… but maybe I just don’t have a good enough imagination”.

In contrast, Professor Colin Talbot, a Research Associate at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School and Professor Emeritus of Government at Manchester University, told Byline Times that the evidence offered by The Times against Arday appeared to him to be “extremely thin”, and that the problems in his papers amounted to, in his own analysis, “unintentional… correctable errors, at worst”.

Although The Times acknowledged that a Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) misconduct panel cleared Arday of plagiarism in his PhD, it omitted the finding that citation problems in his PhD were due to “honest and reasonable error”, identifying seriously inadequate supervision as a contributing cause.

While LJMU, as the supervising body, could be viewed as an interested party ‘marking its own homework’ and thus having an eye on its own reputational considerations – it was the institution that awarded Arday with his PhD in the first place – its misconduct panel rules required three trained academic decision-makers, separation from Arday and his programme, advance conflict checks, and a separate presenting officer bearing the burden of proof.

The fact that two separate publishers, MDPI and Taylor & Francis, had also investigated and cleared Arday of plagiarism, makes it reasonable to suggest that the balance of probabilities tipped significantly in the academic’s favour.

While Byline Times cannot – and does not – rule out the possibility of plagiarism in Arday’s work, this publication raises the other possibility that no media outlet reported: that the problems reported by The Times may have been honest errors. It was a possibility considered plausible by many academic observers. 

Wherever available evidence allowed for more than one explanation, The Times chose to put forward the version most damaging to Arday. Discrepancies in participant numbering and quotation attribution across the four further papers – similar to errors made in his cleared 2018 paper and therefore potentially explainable due to similar coding and cataloguing issues – became a sensationalist headline about “impossible” data. 

Related reading: The Peter Thiel-Linked Race Science Network that Penetrated Cambridge University and Targeted Jason Arday

The Original Critics

In 2023, retired Plymouth Marjon University academic Professor Dave Harris began questioning Jason Arday about his 2018 paper, ‘Understanding Mental Health: What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students at University?’, published in Social Sciences by MDPI. 

Harris had identified similarities in Arday’s paper with a 2016 BMJ Open study led by Professor Anjum Memon into perceived barriers to mental health services among black and ethnic minority communities.

Harris, who has a PhD in sociology, is a critic of ‘critical race theory’, the academic field developed in the United States that examines how racial inequality can become embedded in institutions. 

On his website, he annotated one of Arday’s articles recommending measures to confront racial inequality in universities with the comment: “What liberal shit.”

By this summer, Harris began promoting the work of Nathan Cofnas, who regurgitated the plagiarism allegations against Arday in a Substack post in July, framing the claims as evidence against ‘diversity, equality, and inclusion’ (DEI) policies and the appointment of black academics.

Cofnas, an advocate of race science and eugenics, describes himself as a ‘race realist’. His role at a Cambridge University college ended in 2024 after he wrote that, in a true meritocracy, black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”.

It was Cofnas’ Substack post that triggered the far-right campaign which saw more than 200 articles written about Jason Arday in the weeks before his death. The page on Harris’ website links directly to Cofnas’ Substack post. 

Byline Times has previously reported on the role of a far-right race science network around Cofnas, with ties to tech billionaire Peter Thiel and Cambridge University, in fuelling the media campaign against Arday.

Harris asked Professor Martyn Hammersley, an Open University social research methodologist, to review Arday’s 2018 paper. 

Similarly to Harris, Hammersley is a sustained critic of anti-racist and decolonial fields in sociology. His 2024 paper questioned whether theories of knowledge and social science methods could ever be racially unjust, while a 2025 article criticised ethical arguments for “critical”, “activist”, and “engaged” social science aimed at social change. 

In a 2023 email to senior Cambridge figures, cited by the website Retraction Watch – a blog and database that reports on the retraction and correction of scientific papers – Hammersley alleged “substantial plagiarism”, while acknowledging that Arday had cited relevant articles. His case was that passages, structures, and quotations were insufficiently attributed where they appeared.

The Times did not report in its article that both academics had originated the plagiarism allegations against Arday or that they held longstanding intellectual disagreements with central premises of Arday’s work on anti-racism, decolonisation, and activist research.

While The Times said that its audit of Arday’s work was a “new analysis” by an anonymous academic, it appears that much of it derived from the Retraction Watch article published on 27 July, citing Harris and Hammersley. 

The Times article, which did not refer to that previous article, focused on the same papers and even referred precisely to many of the same citation and data anomalies, down to the same quotations and participant number issues described a week earlier by Retraction Watch. The website, however, is vulnerable to being gamed by anonymous sources.

According to Stephanie Lamy, a teacher at Sciences Po Toulouse, one of France’s most prestigious specialised public universities, Retraction Watch relies not only on academic databases, but also on “social media and tips from readers”. 

“This creates a potential selection bias: organised or anonymous actors can repeatedly scrutinise and flag particular academics, making them appear unusually problematic when they may simply be unusually scrutinised [and] its public fields and filters do not appear to show how cases first came to its attention, making such patterns difficult to detect,” she said. 

While retractions, corrections, and concerns “do not in themselves establish misconduct or poor scholarship, their accumulation can, however, create suspicion – and potentially make Retraction Watch an unwitting amplifier of an organised campaign,” Lamy told Byline Times. 

Related reading: There Will Be Another Jason Arday

Similarities and Citations

Among the allegations made by these academics were questions around extensive passages in Jason Arday’s PhD that resembled the earlier doctoral work of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, now a Reader at Brunel University, London.

Arday’s thesis – ‘An Exploration of Peer-Mentoring Among Student Teachers’ to Inform Reflective Practice within the Context of Action Research’ – repeatedly cites Zwozdiak-Myers’ work and lists her 2009 Brunel University thesis by title, as well as her subsequent book, in its references – undermining the suggestion that Arday had appropriated another scholar’s work while deliberately concealing its origin.

LJMU convened a misconduct panel to investigate the allegations in February this year.

It concluded that the PhD’s citation problems amounted to “honest and reasonable error”, and that the textual overlap between his work and that of Zwozdiak-Myers was “well within the accepted range of compliance with academic standards of the time”. 

The panel also accepted that Arday had received seriously inadequate doctoral supervision.

The Times’ article did not state these details, which would have provided a more accurate context. It said only that Arday “denies plagiarism and was cleared by investigators at Liverpool John Moores University” and that his “PhD still stands”.

In terms of his 2018 paper, The Times described serious errors that went beyond attribution issues. Some passages, presented as the words of Arday’s own research participants, bore striking similarities to participant quotations in the Memon study.

One Arday participant was quoted describing clinicians as having the power “with the stroke of a pen” to have a person sectioned or sent for counselling and administer medication. An extremely similar formulation appeared in Memon attributed to a different participant. Another apparent Arday participant’s quotation about distrust of psychiatrists within West Indian communities also closely resembled Memon’s wording.

Yet, Arday’s 2018 paper cited Memon throughout, and stated clearly that its two broad themes were adapted from Memon and colleagues. The Memon study was also fully identified in his references. Neither of these would be expected had the intent been deliberate plagiarism.

What The Times failed to explore is the possibility that plagiarism or data fabrication were not the only reasonable explanations of what it had identified in Jason Arday’s work. This raises questions about the rigour of the journalism and reporting ethics employed by The Times.

A Correction, Not a Retraction

The 2018 Arday paper at the centre of The Times story had already been formally investigated by MDPI, and the errors identified were corrected, with no finding of plagiarism or data fabrication.

However, The Times reported that the publisher had been “forced to retract and republish” the paper “with corrections”. It had not. The Times conflated two fundamentally different things: ‘retraction’ and ‘correction’.

Misrepresentations by The Times, through error or otherwise, were stated on two other occasions in the article: once describing the 2018 paper’s methodology sentences as “corrected by one journal, due to plagiarism from Memon”; and describing their reappearance in four later papers as happening “despite him retracting them once”. 

As with many scientific publishers, MDPI’s policy is to retract papers the findings of which are “unreliable”, where there is “detection of misrepresentation or fraud”, “extensive overlap with previously published content”, “unauthorised use of data and materials”, “copyright infringement”, and “unethical research” among other issues. 

Alternatively, if “errors can be rectified without impacting the results or conclusion, a correction is sufficient to address the error”, according to Dr Ioana Craciun, MDPI’s scientific content lead.

MDPI’s record shows that Arday’s 2018 paper was never retracted, but “corrected” on 6 December 2023 and remained in the scholarly record. MDPI’s substantial correction found that the original article had acknowledged adaptation from Memon but had “inadvertently omitted overlap”.

Citations were inserted throughout the abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusions. Of 31 participant quotations in the original paper, 12 were trimmed or reworded and six were removed entirely. The methodology was also amended, in line with MDPI’s own published guidance on the difference between a correction and a retraction. 

Arday’s paper had also repeated Memon’s description of using NVivo and independent coding – claims that were removed when it was corrected, and replaced with a simpler description of recording, transcription, review, and reflection. This did not establish that Arday had invented his interviews or data. 

One reasonable explanation was that, while using Memon’s study as a template, he had imported its methodological language and thereby inaccurately described procedures he had not followed. 

This would represent a serious failure of research reporting, but not necessarily deliberate data fabrication. Distinguishing between those possibilities would require the original transcripts, coding files, and records.

Asked to clarify the outcome of the review of the 2018 paper, an MDPI spokesperson said: “I can confirm that the article was not retracted; it was corrected.”

The spokesperson added that the purpose of the publisher’s review was “to verify the accuracy, integrity, and validity of the published article to ensure the accuracy of the scientific record. In line with the Committee on Publication Ethics guidance, MDPI’s focus was on evaluating the publication itself, and determining the appropriate editorial action needed to maintain the integrity of the scholarly record”.

The vulnerability of qualitative research to errors due to data-handling is well-established. It involves extensive interviews with groups of participants. That material is transcribed, and then its contents analysed and extracted into new documents or spreadsheets by which key points can be coded and categorised. 

In a SAGE methods guide, UCL researcher Jon Swain describes how he “cut and pasted” interview extracts into a separate Word document and stresses that it is “essential to give each interview a number for identification purposes”. Errors can arise when interview material from multiple participants is mishandled when copying, coding, and processing across documents and spreadsheets. Inadequate record-keeping can lead to misattribution or what looks like plagiarism. 

UK Research and Innovation, the UK’s national research funding agency, states that qualitative research can fall short for reasons “many of which do not reflect the intent of researchers”. It classifies “mislabelling” as an honest error and “inadequate documentation or record-keeping” as poor research practice that may occur inadvertently – separately from intentional fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism.

Oxford University guidance on plagiarism states that “poor working practices can lead to unintentional plagiarism”, with copied wording becoming so familiar that a researcher forgets its origin or becomes “unable to recall” its provenance, while insufficiently careful cutting and pasting can cause quotation marks and citations present in one draft to disappear from the next.

This can lead to confused attribution, recycled wording, and mislabelled material, producing the kind of errors seen in Jason Arday’s 2018 paper and beyond. 

Such errors are not acceptable in academic research and reasonably raise questions around the credentials of those occupying leading academic positions. But they are not necessarily the same as fraud, fabrication, or plagiarism.

A Pattern Does Not Establish Its Cause

In addition to the 2018 paper, The Times focused on similar irregularities across four other qualitative studies by Jason Arday. 

Participant numbers did not reconcile, and individuals were described inconsistently. The same or near-identical wording appeared in different papers as the testimony of apparently different participants, while material resembling quotations originally published by Memon and colleagues was reused or misattributed inconsistently. Methodological language from the same body of work was also repeated across several papers.

Again, these are clear failures of research practice. But the pattern does not in itself establish its cause. 

Poor control of transcripts, coding tables, source material, and successive drafts could result in quotations being mistakenly copied, relabelled, or detached from their origins. Deliberate fabrication is another possibility. 

In an interview with The Times as the story was beginning to dominate UK headlines, Arday said: “It’s more likely that I’ve made a mistake; there’s a clerical error. It’s not that I’ve fabricated.” His early writing had “relied heavily on mimicry”, he added, which he connected to how he learned to process and structure information as an autistic researcher. 

The concentration of these errors could be consistent with that explanation – in the least, it cannot be definitively dismissed. 

Arday’s published output spans other research methods and multi-author projects. The five papers singled out by The Times are clustered around a single methodological strand centred on qualitative interview and focus group research linked to the Memon paper that was so influential on that body of work.

The Times noted that the same problematic sentences found in the 2018 paper formed “the basis for his methodology section in four further papers”. That these may have occurred due to citation and data-handling errors around the same corpus of material related to Memon is a reasonable possibility The Times did not consider.

One of these papers, published in 2020 – co-authored by Arday with two other academics – had also already been formally investigated and corrected in 2024 by its publisher, Taylor & Francis, as follows: “A correction has been made to clarify the relationship between the study presented in this article and a prior study (Arday 2018), that utilised similar methodologies which in turn were based on Memon et al’s (2016) study.”

The publisher’s policy similarly distinguishes between ‘corrections’ and ‘retractions’, clarifying that while a retraction would result from fabricated data, plagiarism, or other misconduct, a correction addresses an “error or omission” where “the scholarly integrity or reliability of the original findings remain intact”.

No finding of plagiarism or data fabrication was issued in relation to the 2020 paper. But The Times suggested it as evidence of both, without reporting it had already been cleared in a previous formal investigation.

Following The Times’ reporting, this paper is now being re-investigated.

Related reading: Jason Arday: We Must Rage – Rage Against the Journalism of Cruelty

‘The Press Effectively Answered Them in Advance’

To support its angle on Jason Arday’s work, The Times used quotations in its article from academics who also hold views that were not disclosed to readers. It is more accurate to state that there is academic disagreement about the serial plagiarism claims against Arday.

Several scholars have publicly stated that they appear to be evidentially weak, including Professor Jason Stanley of the University of Toronto; former Associate Professor of Philosophy at Felician University Irfan Khawaja; and Kehinde Andrews, former Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University.

In contrast to The Times, Byline Times spoke to three senior academics who all independently concluded that Arday’s errors were in citation and data-handling relating to a few papers using qualitative research methods.

Professor Colin Talbot, a Research Associate at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School and Emeritus Professor of Government at Manchester University, said: “The central issue seems to be the whole affair was successfully framed as a ‘plagiarism row’ when the evidence for plagiarism was extremely thin and only related to one strand of Professor Arday’s work. 

“It is also clear most of the so-called plagiarism – which is a deliberate act – is actually unintentional mistakes, and not huge ones at that. Nor are they consistent or widespread across Arday’s body of work. So framing this as about plagiarism is, in my opinion, not sustainable. It’s about correctable errors, at worst.

“Most of the other main accusations were about his non-academic CV and directed at undermining his credibility. I’ve supervised and examined dozens of PhDs and refereed hundreds of articles and books and I have even had my own work plagiarised… There is nothing about this sad story that says to me it was a ‘plagiarism row’. It was certainly something, but not that.”

Eric Goodyer, formerly Professor at De Montfort University with decades of experience in technology data, told Byline Times that Arday had “an excellent mid-career academic record”, pointing to his papers listed on Scopus, the international abstract and citation database. “He has almost 1,200 citations, demonstrating how much his research is valued by his colleagues.” 

“Contrary to media speculation, three claims of plagiarism and data fabrication have been formally investigated, one relates to his PhD and the others to papers published in 2018 and 2020,” Goodyer told Byline Times. “All claims have been rejected; not least because the sources he used were included in his list of references and cited throughout the texts.

“There have been no formal allegations of plagiarism made about his numerous other published works or against any of his many co-authors. There are issues with the management of some of his data, which may be due to his disability… Arday has 33 peer-reviewed papers, the majority co-authored. Why is it that he alone was singled out for manufactured accusations of plagiarism but none of his co-authors?”

A senior sociology professor working in race and criminal justice at a major British university, who only spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “The central point is quite straightforward: a formal process and two publisher reviews looked at the allegations against him, and none found plagiarism or fabrication. The questions raised about the later papers are serious and legitimate. But they are also the kind of questions that only a proper investigation, with access to transcripts and coding records, can answer. 

“The press effectively answered them in advance. That is the real failure here, and it does not require anyone simply to take the work on trust.”

A number of academics Byline Times spoke to, especially those of colour, expressed fears of being subjected to unwarranted scrutiny by mainstream media organisations and therefore do not wish to speak out. 

The Times, its publisher News UK, and Emma Yeomans did not respond to requests for comment.