Tory!
Tory!
Tory!
Cameron is coming! Hurrah, hurrah!
PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK Mr David Cameron was elected leader of the Conservative party in a ballot of members, beating Mr David Davis by 134,446 votes to 64,398. Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in his preBudget report astonished investors planning self-invested personal pensions by announcing that they ‘will be prohibited from obtaining tax advantages when investing in residential property and certain other assets such as fine wines’. He also enraged North Sea oil producers by increasing corporation tax on their profits, from 40 per cent to 50 per cent. Mr Brown hoped to get an extra £2.3 billion from the oil taxes and another £700 million from other corporate taxes, in order to shore up public finances. Last March he had predicted economic growth of 3.5 per cent this year; now he has reduced that to 1.75 per cent. He hatched a scheme to spend hundreds of millions lying dormant in unused bank accounts to fund volunteer projects during young people’s gap years. Two companies behind a plan to build 30 wind turbines on a sandbank off Porthcawl in Wales shelved the idea because of the cost. The government floated the idea of raising the legal age for buying cigarettes from 16 to 18. Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, the retired head of the High Court Family Division, said that the government has ‘done nothing practical to support married couples.... There is now no financial incentive to marry or remain married, and a financial incentive to cohabit.’ Civil partnership ceremonies between unrelated people of the same sex are to be allowed from 21 December in England and Wales (from 19 December in Northern Ireland, and 20 December in Scotland); Sir Elton John and his friend Mr David Furnish are to celebrate a civil partnership ceremony at Windsor Guildhall, where the Prince of Wales married the Duchess of Cornwall. State prayers for the royal family in Church of England services, it was announced, will make no mention of the Duchess of Cornwall. It was also announced that the Prince and his children would be interviewed by Ant and Dec, while the Duchess would be seen but not heard. A firstclass stamp is to go up two pence in April.
Miss Condoleezza Rice, the United States secretary of state, toured Europe and countered demands for her to elucidate claims that the Central Intelligence Agency runs prisons in Eastern Europe and flies terrorist suspects to countries where they may be tortured. ‘The United States does not use the airspace or the airports of any country for the purpose of transporting a detainee to a country where he or she will be tortured,’ she said carefully. Britain, which holds the presidency of the European Union, proposed a cut of €14 billion from the €160 billion grant to newly joined members; it also proposed an overall cut in the EU budget from €1,025 billion to €847 billion; British net payments would decrease by €70 billion, but it would forgo €8 billion of its rebate. French diplomats called the plan ‘cynical’ and Mr José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, called it ‘unacceptable’. An Iranian military transport aeroplane crashed into a 10-storey block of flats in Tehran, killing all 94 aboard and 25 on the ground. Two women suicide bombers killed 27 in a classroom at a police academy in Baghdad. President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan was re-elected by 91 per cent of voters for a third term; international observers said the election fell short of accepted standards. The Fifth Republic Movement of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and its allies won all 167 seats in a general election; opposition parties boycotted the election, which puts the ruling group in a position to change the constitution to allow the president to serve further terms. In Hong Kong 250,000 people marched in a demonstration demanding democracy. People were evacuated from the island of Ambae in Vanuatu when Mount Manaro began to erupt.
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