Next November we will be celebrating the centenary of the Balfour Declaration. But who will be joining us?

This week's launch of the rather splendid Balfour 100 website comes just days after a Palestinian Return Centre meeting in the House of Lords, under the chairmanship of Baroness Tonge, which launched a campaign for the British government to apologise for the Balfour Declaration.

The campaign is run by the usual suspects and is simply a new formulation of their usual BDS, delegitimisation agenda. But we can be sure of one thing: they will be relentless in pushing the nonsense that the Balfour Declaration gave birth to an illegitimate state that handed Palestinian land to a bunch of colonial settlers.

That may be a grotesque lie. But it is a lie that is going to be repeated, ad nauseam and then beyond, over the next twelve months. And we know from previous experience that the more such lies are repeated, the more danger there is that those who know nothing of the real history may incline to believe them.

This will not be an easy twelve months.

UCL's betrayal

There could hardly be a greater betrayal of the Benthamite principles that have underpinned University College London since 1826 than the screaming mob that tried to stop a meeting taking place because the speaker was Israeli, and which set out to intimidate the Jewish students who wished to hear him.

But the pathetic response of UCL's governing body - it only called an inquiry after the Board of Deputies demanded one and now, a week on, it still cannot be bothered to convene it - makes a bad situation even worse.