Leaving aside the irony in Australia returning a criminal to the UK there is a singular contrast with our treatment of Stephen Lawrence’s killer, whom the courts ruled could not be deported. Few will be surprised at Australia taking the action it has, and Raymond Horne is just the latest in a line of paedophiles deported by the Australian authorities, but he has lived in Australia since he was five, and has no friends or family in this country. Leaving aside the consequences of deportation (as those who treat men like Horne are concerned that the stress may make him more likely to reoffend), there is something particularly inhuman in sending someone who is to all intents and purposes, and notwithstanding what he has done, an Australian, back to a country he now has no connection with save by accident of birth. Our government pleads that this is simply international law, as it suits their purposes (they too want to deport non-UK criminals: it is just that they have to find them first). But it reflects no credit on Canberra.
Teacher knows best
Mary Boustead, the General Secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, wants the focus of teaching to change, to equip pupils with the skills, such as teamwork and the ability to research, required by employers.
“Is the world going to collapse if they don’t know ‘To Be, or Not to Be?’ Our national curriculum should be far more focused on the development of life skills and ways of working than whether or not we teach the Battle of Hastings.”
Although she may be right when she say that a new curriculum should not focus on “regurgitation but more interpretation of knowledge” she is in danger of our throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We already have the least curious generation ever. We run the risk of following it with the least knowledgeable.
A turbulent priest
Just when you thought that the Church of England was slipping into managerial mediocrity, a surprisingly splenetic rant in the Telegraph this morning from Peter Mullen, the Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange. He is not a follower of the Rowan Williams’ school of muddled thinking. Read the entire column, but here is a taster:
“We might have expected the Church to resist the decay, but instead it has connived with the destructive sexual and social revolution begun in the 1960s. Back then, I voted for homosexuality to be decriminalised. But this meant “between consenting adults in private” – where “between” meant two, “adults” meant men over 21 and “private” meant behind locked doors. I did not foresee the obscene and coercive “Gay Pride” pantomimes that now disfigure our high streets.
Who would have thought we would live to see the Bishop of Hereford fined £47,000 and made to attend a re-education course because he refused to employ a practising homosexual in his diocese’s youth services? How long before I am carted from the pulpit to the nick for preaching that sodomy is not morally equivalent to Christian marriage?”
Shrewd Bill is still Slick Willy
A fascinating column from Clive Crook in the FT today, on Bill Clinton’s play of a joint Clinton-Obama ticket. After setting the context (Obama ahead in elected delegates after Pennsylvania but not enough to settle the nomination), he comments
This swirling uncertainty is the context in which Bill Clinton’s recent claim that a Clinton-Obama ticket would be unstoppable must be understood. It was an extremely shrewd political manoeuvre. It asserts a presumption, nothing if not bold, that Mrs Clinton is still the senior partner. It nominates Mr Obama as the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2016 – and he is young enough for that to make sense. And it issues a summons, cynical as this may be coming from the Clintons, to party unity. This way, the Clinton campaign is saying, the party can come together, front both its favourite candidates (two for the price of one, three if you count Bill) and maximise its general election prospects.
Trouble in Tibet
Some things don’t change, and this remains true of China. However hard the West seeks engagement, and despite the clear importance of China in global economic terms (see this week’s Economist Special Report), we remain in different worlds. Nothing has pointed this up so starkly than the unfolding violence in Tibet, and the response of China, caught between what it probably would like to do (Tianmen Square Mk. 2) and still may, and what it can, given the Beijing Olympics. In FT.com, Richard McGregor reports:
A dispatch from Xinhua, the state news agency, over the weekend, called the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader a “master terror maker” who had willed his supporters in Lhasa to stage violent demonstrations.
“Now the blaze and blood in Lhasa has unclad the nature of the Dalai Lama, it’s time for the international community to recheck their stance towards the group’s camouflage of non-violence, if they do not want to be willingly misled,” the Xinhua report said.
Such hectoring missives typify the Chinese response, which has been to place the protests firmly in the context of the wider sovereignty dispute, the most sensitive issue for the ruling communist party.
With the Beijing 2008 only months away, and a US Presidential election campaign gathering steam, what is now happening in Lhasa and elsewhere in Tibet will have much wider repercussions, whether the Chinese like it or not. Meanwhile the Dalai Lama walks a difficult line:
“The Tibet nation is facing serious danger. Whether China’s government admits or not, there is a problem,” he said at a press conference at Dharamsala, India, on Sunday. “(But) the Olympics should not be called off.”
Enough said: George Wilkinson's blog 