Professor Geoffrey Alderman - News

Fifteen months ago the Esmé Fairbairn Foundation announced that it was funding the first independent review of primary education in England since the ill-fated inquiry presided over by Lady Plowden in 1967. That investigation led to a widespread, chilling decline in standards that have scarred successive generations of pupils. I had hoped that the new inquiry, chaired by Professor Robin Alexander, of Cambridge University, would avoid the obsession with reform for reform’s sake that had so comprehensively undermined the Plowden review. Now, with the recent publication of its latest batch of reports, I am not so sure. The report which caught my eye is entitled Aims for Primary Education: the changing national context, co-authored by two London University academics, Stephen Machin and Sandra McNally. It makes a ritualistic bow to acknowledge that one of the aims – I would have thought an overriding aim – of primary education is to inculcate a basic proficiency in literacy and numeracy. ...

My advice to Jewish voters in London is: whoever else you vote for in next May's London Mayoral Election, do not vote for RedKen Livingstone: http://www.thejc.com/home.aspx?ParentId=m12s32s34&SecId=34&AId=57391&ATypeId=1

My critique of the British government initiative to rewrite the history of Northern Ireland can be found at: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/geoffrey_alderman/2008/01/past_troubles.html

My critique of Gordon Brown's proposals for constitutional reform can be accessed at: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/geoffrey_alderman/2008/01/the_illusion_of_reform.html

For my comment on the Labour government's ill-considered proposal to criminalise prostitution, see: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/geoffrey_alderman/2007/12/the_business_of_sex.html

In my Jewish Chronicle column of 07 December 2007 I posed the question whether Jews cause, to any degree, the prejudice from which they suffer. My column focussed on the anonymous donations made to the Labour party by a Jewish property magnate. A number of correspondents have asked me for other specific examples. Well, here is one, ongoing, that does I think get to the heart of the matter. In May 2005 the governors of the Beis Soroh Schneirer school for Jewish primary-age girls applied to the London Borough of Barnet for planning permission to convert for their purposes a disused warehouse on an industrial estate in West Hendon. The planning committee, for very cogent reasons, unanimously refused the application. But what the governors had not told the committee was that they intended to move the school into the warehouse whatever the outcome of the application. And on the very next morning after planning permission had been refused builders started converting the warehouse. Not to ...

Captain Sir Richard Burton, the 19 th century explorer and adventurer, who first translated the Kama Sutra into English and was one of the earliest Christians to enter Mecca, was both an anti-Semite and a plagiarist, according to new research published by the Royal Asiatic Society . These stark conclusions appear in an article on Burton in the January 2008 edition of the Society’s Journal (published December 2007), written by two of the country’s leading experts in the history of anti-Jewish prejudice in modern Britain. In 1989 Professor Geoffrey Alderman (University of Buckingham) and Professor Colin Holmes (University of Sheffield) were permitted to read an unpublished manuscript penned by Burton in the 1870s, and subsequently purchased by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. In their article, Professors Alderman and Holmes unravel the history of the manuscript, in which Burton alleged that Jews murder Christians in order to use their blood for ritual purposes. “Burton completely...