PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
We have ways of making you walk Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, out of an annual state income of £375 billion, gave the National Health Service an extra £2 billion from next month; a total increase of £20 billion will be added to the NHS budget over the next four years. The opposition soon said it would stick to these increases if elected. Otherwise in the Budget the promised penny reduction in income tax came into effect; personal allowances rose according to the usual slen- der formula; pensions rose very little, but the winter fuel allowance went up £50 to £150. Stamp duty on the sale of houses costing more than £250,000 rose by half a percentage point. Duty on beer went up by lp a pint, on wine by 4p a bottle, but did not rise on spir- its; petrol went up 2p a litre. Mr Brown reaf- firmed an inflation target of 2.5 per cent a year; the latest figures stood at 2.3 per cent, up three-tenths of a percentage point from the month before. Government spokesmen kept saying that the burden of taxation was falling, although they could not deny that the percentage of gross domestic product taken in tax was greater than at the end of the Tory administration. At least 4,000 redundancies at Longbridge were expected by a venture capital company called Alchemy after it acquired what was left of Rover from BMW, which retained the new Mini brand and sold Land-Rover to Ford. A 344-page report into banks by Mr Don Cruickshank, the Trea- sury's special investigator, found that per- sonal customers and small businesses were paying between £3 billion and £5 billion a year too much for their banking services; retailers were being charged too much for accepting credit cards, and he called for a new regulator, PayCom, to be given powers over plastic-card networks. Mr Stephen Byers, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, said that banking would be referred to the Competition Commission. The Home Office threatened to put asylum-seekers charged with begging violently or begging with children on a 'fast-track' route to having their applications decided upon; but it was difficult to see what this might add up to. A fraud trial expected to last six months began after the liquidation of the Ostrich Farming Corporation, which had promised returns of more than 50 per cent to investors in a Bel- gian ostrich farm. Ampleforth Abbey in Yorkshire is to close its dairy farm of 190 cows because of low milk prices. Orangemen will march through Dublin in May at the invi- tation of the city council to unveil a plaque at the site of an Orange Lodge founded in 1798.
MR Chen Shui-bian, who seeks indepen- dence for Taiwan, was elected its President, despite threats from China that it would invade if he were given power. The defeat in elections of President Abdou Diouf, the head of state since 1981, by Mr Abdoulaye Wade marked the end of 40 years of socialist domination of Senegal. The Queen visited Australia; she said, 'I shall continue to serve as Queen of Australia.' The Pope visited the Holy Land; he said, 'In this area of the world there are grave and urgent issues of justice and of the rights of peoples and nations which have to be resolved.' President Bill Clinton visited India, which he called 'the most dangerous place in the world', for which he was chided by President K.R. Narayan. In Kashmir, Muslim gunmen mas- sacred 35 men in a Sikh village. In the town of Kanungu in Uganda about 500 members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments died when they gath- ered in a church, the doors were nailed up, and the building set on fire. The High Court in Zimbabwe ordered squatters who have invaded more than 600 white-owned farms to leave them. A judge in Lahore sentenced a murderer to be strangled, cut into pieces and have his body thrown into acid, the same treatment he was found to have given to more than 100 murdered children. Three Bosnian Serb officers went on trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, charged with the rape of women and girls. A psychiatrist was put on trial in Austria on charges of having mur- dered children in a clinic in the Nazi era. An attempted coup was thwarted by the army in the Comoros islands in the Indian Ocean; there have been 19 attempted or successful coups there in the 25 years since indepen- dence from France. Eleven cases of Marburg fever, a haemorrhagic disease, were con- firmed in Durba, in north-eastern Congo.
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