2:48pm
Some of the comments at Coffee House miss the point about on Poole council's 'spying' on parents to check that they live where they say do:
The report in the Telegraph is misleading. RIPA did not give any powers to local authoriities. It restricted the use of powers they already had.
But surely the real point of this story is not the law under which such investigations were carried out, or their efficacy. It's rather the sheer lunacy of a school system in which catchment areas and bureaucratic diktat matter and which entails such checks.
So what if someone lives in one part of town where schools are rubbish and wants their child to go to a better school in another part of town? Nothing will ever improve until we have a system in which parents rather than LEA employees choose childrens' schools, and in which schools expand or contract depending on that parental choice.
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8:05am
I have mixed reactions to this.
The Barbican has been forced to cancel a concert by the Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov because of changes to visa regulations requiring non-EU citizens to provide fingerprints. Sokolov, 57, was due to perform a programme of Mozart sonatas and Chopin on 10 May at the London concert hall, followed by an appearance at Glasgow's City Hall. But the pianist will no longer travel to the UK, where he has been performing regularly for the past 18 years, because he is unwilling to disrupt his schedule to apply in person for the new biometric visa.
Sokolov is a wondrous pianist and I had tickets for that now cancelled concert. And if his unwillingness to travel to the UK is the first of other such decisions by great artists, I will be despondent.
However, these comments made me see red:
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1:17pm
I've been catching up with the Max Mosley story, which broke while I was away.
One thing puzzles me about his attempt to remain in office since his predelictions became public knowledge. Why has he stayed? Surely he wants to be punished?
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11:00am
Some thing very odd has happened. I have just read a piece by Inayat Bunglawala with which I mostly agree.
Given that Bunglawala is, as Harry's Place calls him, unfit for his role - I'd go further than that - this is most odd. Bunglawala holds some pretty repellent views, such as his belief that the BBC and the rest of the media are controlled by Jews:
The chairman of Carlton Communications is Michael Green of the Tribe of Judah. He has joined an elite club whose members include fellow Jews Michael Grade and Alan Yentob...[They are] close friends… so that's what they mean by a 'free media'.
Last year, I pointed out that the Telegraph
has reported this about him:
In January 1993, Mr Bunglawala wrote a letter to Private Eye, the satirical magazine, in which he called the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman "courageous" - just a month
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10:49am
It's hard to believe this, n'est-ce pas?
Olympic chiefs were accused of understating the true cost of the 2012 Games yesterday as it emerged that the bill for the aquatics centre was already four times higher than the original bid price.
The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) announced that the contract, which was awarded to Balfour Beatty, had risen from the 2005 price of £75 million to £303 million.
And this just doesn't ring true:
The figures come after soaring costs at most of the Olympic venues and have led to renewed fears that the £9.3 billion 2012 budget will be exceeded. Jack Lemley, the former chairman of the ODA, gave warning that the bill was now likely to be £20 billion and he claimed that Ken Livingstone and Tessa Jowell had been understating the true costs.
I mean we all know that the...
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