Portrait of the week
Is your passport Black or White?' read the banners in London on Sunday as large-scale demonstrations protested against the Government's emergency immigration Bill; on Tuesday sixty-two MPS voted against it, amongst them Mr lain Macleod, fourteen other Tories, all the Liberals and thirty-five Labour back-benchers, despite Mr Callaghan's last-minute promise to set up ad hoc machinery to hear appeals in Kenya.
Monday saw yet another back-bench rebellion in the Government ranks when thirty Labour MPs voted against the decision to cut off free school milk and twenty-two against raising the cost of in- surance stamps. On Wednesday 165 -ruc-affiliated unions met in Croydon to discuss Mr Woodcock's yoluntry incomes policy, finally approved by a marrow margin, 4.620.000 votes to 4,084,000. The sac and ITA agreed to impose a voluntary ban on 'television trials' and Bristol Siddeley Engines was discovered to have 'budgeted for and achieved ex- orbitant profits' on certain engine overhaul con- tracts for the Government: the implications, said the Minister of Technology, were grave. £140,000 was stolen from mailbags in a raid on a Paddington sorting office; after the shelving of the Stansted airport plan a private firm offered to build (and finance) an alternative at Foulness; and twenty- four women patients died in a fire at Shelton Men- tal Hospital.
General Thieu visited Hud to see the reconquered citadel, and it was announced that so far the Tet fighting had made over 695,000 people homeless. Sir Alec Douglas-Home had two meetings with
Mr Ian Smith. The sixty-seven-nation communist congress opened in Budapest to appeals for secrecy from Russia and rumours of disagreements between the delegates happily being leaked by the Rumanians.
The Supreme Council for Sports in Africa agreed to boycott the Olympic Games in protest at the readmission of South Africa. Two hundred students sat down and slept in at Leicester university, Spike Milligan got the breathalyser, a bundle of police records was found on a road near Manchester and a gravedigger in Birkenhead tried unsuccessfully to get a warrant for the arrest of Mr Wilson on a charge of treason.
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