What possible justification can there be for a respected examination board providing a GCSE syllabus apparently designed to foster an ultra-Leftist view of immigration?

Schools are there to teach, and exam boards to test their students. Neither schools nor examiners should engage in contentious propaganda. And if the exam regulator Ofqual can approve such material, it is hard to work out what it is for.

The ludicrous new GCSE course is devised by what most see as the most reliable and conventional of the examination boards.

The history course has outraged some of Britain’s most eminent thinkers (file photo)

Yet it takes its inspiration from a Marxist professor and a politically correct lobby group. It is explicitly designed to banish a supposed 'white, male-dominated view' of history. Even assuming there was any such view of history in our schools or anywhere else, this is not its job.

Take the inclusion of the fact that African soldiers were stationed at Hadrian's Wall during the Roman Empire. It might be an interesting answer to a quiz question. But to base a statement that 'there were Africans in Britain before the English came' is propaganda, not learning.

They were here as temporary occupying troops, much as British soldiers were once in Somaliland. They were not here as part of the general population, and they did not remain long.

This is similar to New Labour's misleading claim – as it flung open the nation's gates to unprecedented levels of migration – that this was a 'nation of immigrants'. In fact, we have experienced nothing like the present levels of migration for a thousand years, and it is certainly not for schools or teachers to spread misinformation on this subject.

This country's long, continuous history of peaceful undisturbed settlement is one of its chief characteristics and one of the main reasons why it has developed the laws, liberties and institutions which make it what it is, and make people want to come here from all over the world.

Whatever anyone might think about the junior doctors' dispute with the NHS, one thing is beyond question. Doctors should never go on strike. Mercy is not a commodity to be withheld in the hope of getting a higher price for it.

The planned stoppage is already causing pain, anxiety and misery in thousands of homes, where letters have begun arriving cancelling or postponing long-awaited and necessary operations. It is hard to overstate the distress this will cause.

It is no use the BMA saying it 'deeply regrets' this disruption. This is evasive and dishonest. If you know something is going to be regrettable, you do not do it in the first place. Call it off now, before any more harm is done.

Doctors should never go on strike. Mercy is not a commodity to be withheld in the hope of getting a higher price for it

Now Jeremy Corbyn lets slip that he plans to introduce a new local income tax in the English regions.

He may think this scheme is 'very interesting', but the people of England, already subject to national income tax, VAT, council tax, and a host of other duties on almost everything we buy and do, including savings and pensions, will recoil in amazement and anger that anyone should want to take yet more money from our pockets.

Has Mr Corbyn learned nothing from the past few decades, when a nation released from punitive taxation became more prosperous at every level?

Probably not.