PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
`I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o er vales and hills, When all at once 1 saw a crowd, a host of nuclear power stations!'
Mr Nigel Lawson introduced his fourth Budget. He made an unusually short speech, and his measures were char- acterised by most commentators as 'pru- dent,' which meant that there was little else to be said about them. He reduced the rate of income tax from 29 to 27 pence in the pound, and the target for government borrowing from seven to four billion pounds. The high street banks responded by cutting their interest rates by half a per cent. The Liberal candidate, Mr Matthew Taylor, who is 24 years old, won the by-election at Truro caused by the death of Mr David Penhaligon, gaining an increased majority over the Tories. The Government approved the building of a pressurised water reactor at Sizewell, in Suffolk. Lord Skelmersdale, a junior minister at the Department of the Environment, opened Britain's first toad tunnel under a road near Henley. Mr Kinnock lectured Labour MPs on the need for self-discipline. The Labour Party's unconstitutional black sec- tions movement held a conference in Not- tingham, from which white journalists were barred, and declared that Labour's black parliamentary candidates would form a black section in the House of Commons if elected. Mr Roy Jenkins was elected Chancellor of Oxford University, the Tory vote was split between Lord Blake and Mr Edward Heath, who came third.
THE New South Wales Supreme Court dismissed the British Government's attempt to stop publication in Australia of the memoirs of a former MI5 officer, Mr Peter Wright. The British Government decided to appeal. Mr Merlyn Rees, the former Home Secretary, demanded a for- mal inquiry into Mr Wright's allegation that MI5 had attempted to destablise Mr Harold Wilson and the then Labour Gov- ernment, and before that the Conservative Government led by Mr Heath because of its policy on Northern Ireland. The Soviet news agency Tass issued a sharp attack on Mrs Thatcher, two weeks before she visits Moscow: 'In her philosophy, nuclear weapons are something of a blessing, and there is no alternative to the nuclear strategy.' In Washington, Mr Richard Perle, the assistant secretary of defence, also known as 'the Prince of Darkness', resigned in order to write a novel. In London, four members of the mafia, of whom the leader had a luxurious house at Woking, were sentenced to a total of 97 years' imprisonment for heroin smuggling. The Home Office reported a seven per cent rise last year in recorded crime. The Appeal Court ordered that a 17-year-old girl with a mental age of five should be sterilised: 'Child-bearing can provide no- thing of benefit to her,' according to the judge. Mr Harvey Proctor, the Tory MP for Billericay, was arrested by police inves- tigating allegations that he was involved in spanking sessions with young male prosti- tutes, but was released on bail. In North- ern Ireland, the number of deaths in the feud within the INLA rose by three, to ten. AJSG
Previous page
