Professor Geoffrey Alderman - News

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Alderman (University of Buckingham) and Professor Colin Holmes (University of Sheffield) were permitted to read an unpublished manuscript penned by Burton in the 1870s, and subsequently purchased by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.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...

Rabbis, it's time to join the union! Go to: http://www.thejc.com/home.aspx?ParentId=m12s32s34&SecId=34&AId=56984&ATypeId=1

My comment on the "Donorgate" scandal and the role of Jewish businessman David Abrahams can be found at: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/geoffrey_alderman/2007/12/a_selffulfilling_prophecy.html

My Comment on the release from the Sudan of schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons can be accessed at: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/geoffrey_alderman/2007/12/a_shabby_triumph.html

This morning the Sunday Times reports that in the Netherlands a proposal is being considered to pay – or, more accurately, to bribe – citizens to encourage them to donate one of their kidneys for transplantation. The plan, being considered by the Dutch health minister, is to ‘reward’ donors by giving them free-for-life health insurance – calculated by the Dutch Health Council to be worth around €50,000 – say £35,000. The background to this proposal is that there is in the Netherlands, as in the UK, a chronic shortage of healthy kidneys for transplantation, partly because advances in medical science mean that there are fewer cadaver-derived kidneys from – for example – road accident victims. Meanwhile, patients suffering from kidney failure are dying while on dialysis. Currently, in the Netherlands as in Britain, the sale (as opposed to the simple donation) of organs is illegal. The British legislation was rushed through parliament in 1989 without any public debate (there was, it is tr...

The Conservative party – of which I am neither a member nor supporter – will today unveil a plan to give local-government electors the right to vote down large council-tax rises. Apparently, a threshold will be set, and any rise above this threshold will automatically trigger a local referendum. Of course the devil will lie in the detail, but no-one concerned with the present moribund state of local democracy in England can do other than welcome this idea – as I do. In response to the Tory proposal, the Local Government Association has said that “Local authorities should have the power to determine, without interference, the appropriate levels of council tax for their areas." Presumably, however, the words “without interference” do not include local electors. Of course it seems unlikely that local councillors will welcome these proposals, because the power of these councillors will – in effect – be usurped by the voters whose interests they are supposed to represent – but rarely d...

Lord Ashcroft is a multi-millionaire, whose fortune is said to amount to some £800 millions. He is a major donor to the Conservative party (of which I am neither a member nor a supporter). He is said to reside in Belize. It is not clear whether he pays any UK income tax. The Guardian of 9 November 2007 ran a front-page story on him, alleging that prior to the conferment of his life peerage pledges were made by the Conservative party that he would return to the UK and pay UK income tax. The Guardian quoted David Heath, Liberal-Democrat spokesperson on constitutional affairs, as declaring that “No one should take a place in the legislature of this country who doesn’t pay taxes in this country.” Why not? There are plenty of people living in this country who don’t pay any taxes. Are they, for that reason, to be barred from sitting in either House of Parliament? And what about voting? You don’t have to pay taxes in order to exercise the right to vote. The linkage between voting and payme...