I asked the Foreign Office for the legal basis of its opinion that the settlements were illegal. It replied that it was the Geneva Convention, which forbade the movement of a population into occupied territory. I asked whether it was basing this on a ruling by any particular body or whether this was merely its own reading of the Geneva Convention. Oh, everyone accepts this is what the Geneva Convention means, came the breezy reply. I then asked what was its legal definition of the ‘occupied territories’. ‘As...
Wednesday, 19th November 2008
Gove's long march back
12:32am
The Tories’ education spokesman Michael Gove has consistently shown that he gets the most important point about the collapse of Britain’s education system: that it’s not just the structures that have gone badly wrong -- the schools and the education authorities that run them – but the substance of what is actually taught, or to be more precise the absence of any substance as the concept of education itself has systematically been eviscerated. For years it has been obvious that the claims of ever-rising levels of achievement have been utterly bogus, since examination standards and the content of the syllabus have been steadily lowered and hollowed out in order to achieve this sleight of hand through grade inflation and exam devaluation. As children ‘achieve’ more and more, they learn less and less. In a speech yesterday evening at...Monday, 17th November 2008
Another banana moment?
11:25pm
With his remarks about the Israeli settlements, Foreign Secretary David Miliband (pictured eating an ice-cream in Damascus) has signalled a sharp deterioration in relations between Britain and Israel. Miliband has urged enforcement of an EU boycott of produce from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, settlements he has called ‘illegal’.
Wednesday, 19 November 2008
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