Portrait of the week
Sir Geoffrey Howe's fifth Budget, of- ficially unveiled on Tuesday, though widely predicted in outline by the Sunday newspapers, pleased Conservative MPs but failed to earn much praise from the com- mentators, who saw its benefits as being too widely dispersed. Mr Michael Foot criticis- ed it for failing to deal with the overriding problem of the day, 'hyper-unem- ployment'. The Chancellor announced per- sonal tax cuts and extra allowances worth around £2 billion, with benefits for business amounting to a further £750 million. But there were tax increases on alcohol, tobacco and petrol. Just before the Budget, the clearing banks announced a cut in interest rates from 11 to 101/2 per cent. The stock market had reached an all-time peak the same morning, and it moved fractionally higher, to 673.6, after hearing the details. With France withdrawing its objections, the way was cleared for Britain's £500 million European Community budget rebate, but tough negotiations on reforming the EEC budget still lie ahead. There was a revival this week in industrial disputes, led by the car industry, with strikes at the Ford fac- tory at Halewood over the dismissal of a man alleged to have vandalised a car on the production line, and at British Leyland's Longbridge plant, where workers objected to police, investigating factory thefts, sear- ching the homes of some BL storemen. Dockers at Tilbury also went on strike, claiming parity with tally clerks who, while on a higher basic rate, were said actually to earn less than the dockers. Lord McCarthy, the railway industry arbitrator, recom- mended that a six per cent pay rise, frozen for almost a year, should now be paid to all railwayman except members of the train drivers' union, Aslef, on the grounds that the flexible rostering agreement reached after last year's strike had still not been fully implemented.
In the second round of the French muni- cipal elections, the Socialists pulled back some of the ground they had lost in the first. But this success was still relative: the Left lost control of a number of cities, and in Paris, the Gaullist M Chirac achieved a clean sweep of every arrondissement. Mr Joshua Nkomo arrived in London from Botswana, whence he had fled for his life from persecution in Zimbabwe. The former guerrilla leader denied that he was in exile, and indicated that he was seeking face-to- face negotiations with the Zimbabwe government for assurances as to his per- sonal safety before returning home. In New York the Roman Catholic establishment withheld support for this week's St Patrick's Day parade, and the Pentagon refused to allow US army bands to take part: the donnybrook is over the appoint-, ment of a self-confessed gun-runner and IRA supporter, Martin Flannery, as mar- shal of the parade. In South Africa, surgeons removed a live 15-inch rifled grenade from the chest of a soldier wound- ed in a clash with guerrillas in Namibia. Despite hopes of land redistribution in the Falklands, the House of Lords was told that only 59 farmworkers on the islands had shown any interest in buying land.
Dame Rebecca West died at 90. Donald Maclean, former high Foreign Office official and Soviet spy, died in Moscow, ap- parently of cancer, at the age of 69. A con- victed murderer, Walter Iles, who served six years of a life sentence for killing his wife, rode to his 'own death on a motorcycle over Beachy Head. In a bad week for show business, the gala opening of a new musical, 'I', at the Piccadilly Theatre on Tuesday was suddenly cancelled after rehearsals were described as 'disastrous'; the Royal Opera House's forthcoming production of Manon Lescaut, due for a gala opening on 3 May, is in jeopardy unless sets can be brought over from Germany; and a book by one of the sons of Bing Crosby claimed that the late singer beat his children with a metal-studded belt until they bled. Si! Robin Day broke his pelvis in a skiing acci- dent, but pluckily attended the BBC to preside over Budget Day programmes. Junior hospital doctors complained that medical students were conducting opera- tions on live patients. And the latest MORI poll put the Conservatives ahead with 41 per cent, the SDP-Liberal Alliance second with 30 and Labour trailing with 27 per 'Well I won't need a job now, have more children.' we'll just
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