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eformers versus wreckers. That is the battle for this Parliament,' Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, told a meeting in Cardiff known as the Labour spring conference. He identified the enemies of reform as sinall-c conservatives' who, he also suggested, were militants and indeed dyed-in-the-wool trade unionists. Certainly Mr John Edmonds of the GMB union saw his members as targets: This is crazy stuff,' he remarked, Mr Bill Morris of the TGWU said, We are not the wreckers.' Earlier Mr Stephen Byers, the Transport Secretary, had labelled opponents of public-service reform as wreckers; the application of this term to trade unionists was made with the help of his ministerial adviser, Miss Jo Moore. Lord Wakeham, who had been a non-executive director on the audit committee of Enron, the bankrupt American energy company, stepped 'aside' for a time from his post as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission while retaining his £156,000 salary. Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, began a campaign to impose identity cards under the guise of a computerised card recording 'entitlement' to public services. Mr Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, met Mr Josep Pique, his Spanish counterpart, to negotiate an agreement to share the sovereignty of
Gibraltar; any referendum in which Gibraltarians voted against the agreement would only suspend its application, not annul it. In the year 2000-2001, 77,818 operations were cancelled in England and Wales, a 50 per cent increase since 1997. Labour's 409 MPs were required by whips to pay 2 per cent of their salaries, £920 each, to the party, which is said to be £10 million in debt. The Boundary Commission for Scotland has decided to reduce the number of Scottish constituencies from 72 to 59 from the year 2006.
MR Ken Lay, the former chairman of Enron, declined at the last moment to appear before a Congressional hearing in Washington; but a Senate committee voted to subpoena him. The United States planned to increase its military budget to $379 billion next year, a sum exceeding the total of the next 15 biggest military spenders. including China, Russia and the main Nato allies. The Argentine supreme court ruled that government prohibition of people withdrawing funds from banks was unconstitutional; but the government issued another decree against withdrawals. Dozens died in riots in Lagos between Christian Yorubas and Muslim Hausas; the numbers who had died in the city a week earlier by crushing or drowning, as crowds fled an explosion of military ammunition, rose to 1,000. Mr Blair toured Africa by air. An earthquake in rural central Turkey killed more than 40. Villagers were evacuated from their homes at the foot of the 12,664-ft Colima volcano in eastern Mexico, which spewed out lava. The Italian Senate voted to amend the constitution to allow back from exile the 64-year-old pretender to the throne. Victor Emmanuel, who has already declared his willingness to accept the republican political system now in force. In an attempt to deal with illegal immigration, Malaysia said that punishments for those caught, and for their employers, would include whipping; it also announced a policy of employing Indonesians as a last resort, on plantations and in domestic service. An outbreak of chicken influenza in Hong Kong prompted the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of birds; in an outbreak last May 1.37 million were killed; in 1997 a chicken virus infected humans, killing six. Mr Hamid Karzai, the interim leader of Afghanistan, changed its lunar calendar, introduced by the Taleban in 1999, back to a solar one. Russian emergency services rescued 232 men fishing on an ice floe that had broken adrift in the Gulf of Finland.
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