Why was the Jason Arday story broken by a racist blogger and not the mainstream press? Because Times Higher Education was intimidated off the story by a letter from notorious libel firm Carter-Ruck. I'm publishing the letter. Its central claim may be false.

THE's Jack Grove spent months on the story. He first put the allegations to Arday in June 2025. Arday never responded; there was correspondence with the University. On 14 September 2025, Grove alleged Arday plagiarised his PhD thesis. That prompted the Carter-Ruck letter.

The result: the story was spiked. It stayed spiked for ten months. (THE is no longer Murdoch-owned — it was sold off in 2005. It doesn't have a national newspaper's legal budget.)

It's a typical Carter-Ruck letter because the firm behaves like a post box: it repackages its clients' claims, sticks a letterhead on them, and uses that to intimidate people. The firm isn't remotely bothered that it's saying things that may be false.

At the centre of the letter is a denial of plagiarism. It's a very strange denial. It doesn't discuss any specific copied text. It just offers three percentages.

Carter-Ruck say the different plagiarism scores are "indicative of the difficulties associated with plagiarism reviews". That's obviously wrong.

The services search different databases. Scribbr (not "Scribber") says that it can't access private student-paper databases. Turnitin can. The alleged source is an unpublished PhD thesis. Odd to use a plagiarism detection service that can't see that thesis.

But the big question is why Carter-Ruck report a Turnitin similarity score of 6%. Turnitin appears to give a 6% score for similarity with the Zwozdiak-Myers thesis *alone*.

(This Turnitin report posted by (another) blogger: https://batheticfallacy.substack.com/p/jason-ardays-phd-turnitin-report… Overall similarity score is 24%. But it postdates the thesis by a decade and doesn't exclude Arday's bibliography. I ran a rough calculation to reverse both factors, and got to somewhere over 15%.)

So what's going on? Did Arday use some weird settings? Or misread the report? Or did he just make the number up? And did Carter-Ruck really relay the 6% figure without checking it at all?

Carter-Ruck then invent a new principle that a university's internal investigation prevents a journalist from publishing a report. (I haven't seen any reporting of a Sept 2025 investigation, so I expect they decided to do nothing. )

And having responded to the plagiarism accusation with a number that appears to be false, and invented a rule that prevents publication, Carter-Ruck then go into attack mode. THE are racists.

This was a SLAPP. A meritless letter by a lawyer intended to shut down legitimate reporting. It worked. The reporting was suppressed.

It's wrong that journalism is silenced by letters containing falsehoods. And it's wrong that there is never any consequence — not for the client who tells them, and not for the lawyers who relay them.

I've uploaded a PDF of the letter here. Redacted to remove personal information. https://taxpolicy.org.uk/wp-content/assets/arday/ARDAY_-_Letter_to_Times_Higher_Education_-_24.09.25_Redacted.pdf…