PORTRAIT OF A WEEK
Unseasonal fare
MICHAEL WYNN JONES
Tf, as was widely rumoured, the ill-timed food price increase in Poland was a con- spiracy within the Government to overthrow First Secretary Gomulka, it succeeded—at the cost of many lives and much misery. For five days reports from the beseiged cities of Gdansk and Szczecin filtered through (via Sweden) telling of police brutality, riots and tank charges. One report from Stockholm told of 300 including women and children killed in clashes in Gdansk. On Sunday Gomulka euphemistically resigned 'because of illness' and his place was taken by Edward Gierek, the miners' leader whose appoint- ment was seen as a victory for the rioters and an attempt by Moscow to prevent another Czechoslovakia.
Riots brought another dictator out into the open this week, too. For the first time in years General Franco spoke in public (allegedly before half a million cheering, fast cist-saluting supporters) to defend the rightq eousness of his stand against the Basques. One Spaniard with whom he cut no ice, though, was Picasso who forbade the Spanish government to associate his name 'in any way whatsoever' with the new Barcelona museum to which he had donated many of his works. Judgment on the sixteen Basque separatists on trial in Burgos appears to have been postponed till after Christmas, but in Germany the thalidomide trial came to an end two and a half years after it began in Alsdorf. Nearly £12 million has now been made available by the chemical firm of Griinenthal to 2,000 children and 300 adults damaged by their drug Contergan. And it was revealed in the High Court that the British marketers of thalidomide had also paid out more than £1 million to deformed children.
No sooner had the conservationists mus- tered to do battle at Gatwick airport, where an extension to the runway is imminent, than they were caught this week in a flank- ing movement from the Roskill Commission. Mr Justice Roskill and five of his committee surprised politicians and environmentalists alike by plumping for the Buckinghamshire villages of Cublington and Stewkley as the site for London's third airport. The seventh commissioner, Professor Buchanan, called their recommendation 'an environmental disaster' which proved to be the rallying cry for the 160 assorted MPs lined up against the choice of any inland site. The doomed villagers prayed in church that, since the- Government has not yet made up its mind, the ultimate decision would fall on Foulness. But few of them were entirely prepared to trust in God: posters pleading `Stewkley God help us' were soon outnumbered by banners thundering 'Airport? Over our dead bodies' and pamphlets urging guerrilla action and giving instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail. Even the vicar of Dunton, the Rev Hubert Sillitoe, was in blood-and- thunder form when he declared how devilish it was 'that the churches be razed to the ground and the resting-places of our dead be ravished, and all in the interests of Mama mon and Moloch who are the twin gods of bureaucracy'. One of the bureaucratic con- siderations that determined the commission's preference, it transpired, was that `traffic estimates show that in the single year 1991 some twelve million more air passenger journeys would be made through the airport if it were at Cublington; a prediction that must have sounded just a little hollow to the thousands of 1970 travellers stranded at Heathrow, London's first airport, by the work-to-rule and overtime ban of airport workers.
Also in the prediction businets this week was Lord Snow with the publication of his American lecture foretelling 'a major catas- trophe in the world before the end of the century'. He envisaged a 'food population collision' with 'rich countries surrounded. by a sea of famine', and castigated Britain for being passionately involved only in its kit- chen politics warning that 'if this habit per- sists, we are going to sink in the North Sea'. We would then presumably join the mercury- contaminated fish being investigated last weekend by government scientists. Earlier in the week it had been reported in Wash- ington that nearly a million tins of tuna fish were being withdrawn from the market because of high levels of mercury discovered by analysis. Nor were the other elements immune this week from the march of tech- nolow. A huge cloud of radioactive par- ticles, leaked from an underground nuclear test. hung over the Nevada desert on Friday. The us Atomic Energy Commission repor- ted that none of the 600 workers who fled the site 'had a dosage above the permissable level.' It was the seventeenth such leak in America since the 1963 partial test ban treaty,
In the offices of the Immigration Appeals in the Strand the tribunal was opened to hear Rudi Dutsohke's appeal against the Home Office decision to expel( him. His de- fence, which was heard in public, produced a procession of professors, doctors and bish- ops and even the ex-mayor of West Berlin, Heinrich Albertz, who pictured the ex-Ger- man student leader as 'one of the most alert and honest people in Europe'.
'Better red than bread'
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