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John Casey is a British academic and a writer for the The Daily Telegraph. He is also a Lecturer of English at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1975, along with Roger Scruton, he founded the Conservative Philosophy Group. He was editor of The Cambridge Review between 1975 and 1979.

In an article published in the first issue of the Salisbury Review in 1982 he advocated the revocation of the citizenship of all non-white people and their deportation from the United Kingdom.^[1] Eight years later, in 1990, a student found the article in the University Library. This led to a long lasting uproar amongst some students at the University. In the same year CUSU (Cambridge University Student Union) passed a motion, proposed by Nick Taylor, condemning Casey. Additionally, Arun Kundnani initiated a boycott of Casey's lectures at the English faculty by organising a series of alternative lectures. These lectures were held by, amongst others, Julia Swindells, Peter Osbourne, Jonathan Ree, and Terry Eagleton.^[2] Eagleton reportedly described the article as "that disgusting Casey piece".^[3] Casey later claimed in a Varsity interview that he "was substantially wrong, historically mistaken" in writing the article.^[4]

Publications

• The Language of Criticism (Methuen, 1966),
• 'Tradition and Authority' in Maurice Cowling (ed.), Conservative Essays (Cassell, 1978), pp. 82-100.
• 'One Nation: The Politics of Race', The Salisbury Review, Vol. 1 No. 1, October 1982, pp. 23-28.
• 'How Can We Have a Duty to the Dead?', The Salisbury Review, Vol. 1 No. 3, April 1983, pp. 4-6.
• Pagan Virtue: An Essay in Ethics (Clarendon Press, 1990).

Notes