Ed Davey has spoken to Politics Home about the death of Jason Arday following an extended period of vicious press coverage.
Davey told PoliticsHome that parts of the media had seemed to “focus in on it and attack him in a way which seems awfully disproportionate, unfair, mean, and nasty”.
What it shows is that we have to push back against this Trump-like attack on liberal values where we embrace everybody equally and respect everybody.
“There seems to be a movement, particularly on the right, to move away from the liberal progress I thought we made, where we respect people, we judge them on their merit, and we celebrate the contribution that everybody made.”
However, the Lib Dem leader said it was “very difficult” to hold any one person or organisation to account for the treatment of Arday.
“There are different parts of the media jumping on that shameful bandwagon, but I think we’ve got to see the problem facing our country on a broad level,” he said.
The article also references the open letter by BLAC Liberal Democrats which we published earlier this week.
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3 Comments
Ed, the word you are after is ‘racist’.
‘Mean’ is utterly inadequate.
Do better. Now.
“ ….we judge them on their merit…”
Yes, and if it appears we have been seriously misled as to a person’s merit, we change our judgement accordingly. And this applies irrespective of a person’s race or any other characteristic.
Are we still taking this silly track with the Arday case. The tragedy is because he was a fantasist who was exposed. The failure in care comes from those who took on a responsibility to him such as Cambridge University who accepted extreme claims with no evidence, then pushed him in to the public focus and abandoned him when it all fell apart.
I can’t imagine accepting such unlikely stories from someone, but once you have taken on that person as an employee you have a duty to support them if they become the centre of a media storm partly due to their association with you.
This will not have been the first time someone associated with Cambridge has faced intense media pressure but they seem to run a play book of abandoning the individual and letting them suffer alone. The issue here is not that the media found the story that just kept on giving during silly season, it is that Cambridge has an MO of abandoning people when the media heat is on.