W hile miners'. votes in the strike ballot were being counted
it seemed by no means certain that the NUM executive would secure the necessary majority in favour of a strike. Arthur Scargill blamed Joe Gormley, the outgoing President, who took a page in the Daily Express to advise his members against striking. The issue was between the union's 23.7 per cent claim and what Mr Scargill described as the Board's `contemptuous' offer of 9.3 per cent. A vote of censure on Mr Gormley in the NUM executive failed by one vote. Len Murray came out in favour of ASLEF's claim for a further 3 per cent increase without produc- tivity strings, and the rail dispute entered its second week with Sir Peter Parker threaten- ing to suspend all 20,000 striking train drivers. As Mr Scargill attacked Mr Gormley, Mr Foot attacked Mr Benn in the Observer, but nobody on the left wing of the Labour Par- ty seemed to notice. Later, complaints were made about Mr Foot's behaviour on an aeroplane between Oslo and London. Opin- ion polls showed a shrinking lead for SOD- PAL, from which a Labour victory at the next election might be deduced. But preliminary soundings in the Glasgow Hillhead by-election suggested a comfor- table win for Roy Jenkins. On the Conser- vative side, Mrs Thatcher was thought by some to have improved her image by bursting into tears in public while her son Mark was still missing in the Sahara. The cost of rescuing him was put at £330,000. T n Warsaw, government spokesmen I denied a claim made by the Polish am- bassador to Britain that Lech Walesa would be released from confinement 'in the very near future'. The ambassador, Mr Stefan Staniszewski, had also claimed that martial law would be lifted in two or three weeks. In France, the Constitutional Council ruled that parts of President Mitterrand's programme of nationalisation were un- constitutional. A man describing himself as an ecological pacifist claimed responsibility for firing five Soviet-made rockets at a nuclear power station. In Spain, security militia freed the kidnapped father of a pop singer called Julio Iglesias. First reports coming out of Accra after the New Year's Eve coup in Ghana suggested that the regime of Jerry Rawlings was not quite so secure as was first thought. In Washington, President -Reagan celebrated the first an- niversary of his inauguration amid angry noises from the Right about his refusal to sell advanced jet fighters to Taiwan and about his inactivity over Poland. A Boeing 737 airliner crashed into a bridge over the Potomac river in central Washington, kill- • At home, thawing snow caused further Jr. 1' rli Hum, the apostolic delegate, was promoted , being pro-nuncio, and Heath, was paklaimed ambassador. Mr Libilarliy Wilson Nq:On the Embassy Interna- T ord Lane suggested that prison La sentences should be statutory for rape `except for wholly exceptional cir- cumstances'. Rape dominated much discus- sion. Charges were dropped against three teenagers accused of raping a woman in East Glasgow after psychiatrists advised that she was not fit to give evidence. She denied this. A BBC television programme showed policemen interviewing a woman in Reading who complained of being raped; they thought she was lying. The Tottenham rapist, a young black man, was sent to Broadmoor and Mrs Thatcher described rape as 'odious'. A radical sociology stu- dent of 18 was sentenced to three years for brandishing a knife in the Palace of Westminster. He had expressed a desire to murder Mrs Thatcher, possibly in protest against her failure to honour Mr Peregrine Worsthorne. A centre for young women of- fenders in Hackney was revealed to cost £875 per week per offender, with 36 social workers attending 21 female reprobates. Mr James Prior denied that Belfast in- quiries into the sexual abuse of boys in public care incriminated anybody in the Northern Ireland Office, the police, and various other branches of Ulster public life. However, the inquiries would be held in private just the same. Lord George-Brown was banned from driving for three years for obvious reasons. AAW
'Rape! Rape!'
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