Portrait of the week
The 22-week-old dispute between the National Graphical Association and the management of the Messenger group of newspapers in Stockport spread to Fleet Street. In response to the NGA's refusal to pay a £50,000 fine and its stated plans to continue secondary picketing, Mr Justice Eastham sitting in the High Court imposed a further fine of £100,000 and ordered the union's £10 million assets to be seized. The union's Fleet Street members, some of whom are said to earn £700 a week, staged 'spontaneous' walk-outs with the result that the entire newspaper production of the weekend was lost. The Newspaper Publishers Association at first seemed determined to take a hard line against the strikers. The newspapers filed writs against the union for damages and sacked print workers for breach of contract. There was a movement among the financially strong NPA members to use the dispute to crush the NGA for once and for all. However, by Sunday, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and Financial Times had reinstated NGA members without assurances that there would be no further disruption. By mid-week the other newspapers followed suit. The original dispute over the sacking of six Messenger employees was no nearer settlement, Mr Eddie Shah, the Persian-born owner of the group, said that he would go to arbitration as long as the NGA agreed to be bound by ACAS's decision. The NGA refused and announced plans for mobilising 4,000 of their members to picket the Warrington plant. The TUC's employment committee at first seemed reluctant to back this de- fiance of the law but then came down strongly in favour of the blockade. There were several arrests and injuries as the pickets tried to stop a lorry carrying 60,000 newspapers leaving the plant. The Labour party in the shape of Mr Eric Helfer said that the pickets were right to challenge 'a bad law', while Mr Neil Kinnock simply blamed the law for making what was a local dispute into a national dispute. Throughout, the government was at pains to distance itself, stressing that it was an un- complicated conflict between the law and law breakers. Mr Leon Brittan, Home Secretary, made it clear that pickets would be treated like any other criminals.
Sunday newspaper editors were par- ticularly angry about the dispute for they were unable to cover the story of the largest robbery ever to have taken place in Britain. Twenty-five million pounds worth of gold, waiting to be freighted to the Middle East, was spirited away by a gang of masked-men who held up the Brinks Mat warehouse on an industrial estate near Heathrow. The gang doused the guards with petrol and
threatened to set them alight. The police found few clues to work on, although they have let it be known that a mysterious figure nicknamed 'the Colonel' may have masterminded the robbery. A Lloyds in- surance underwriter offered a record £2 million reward. Meanwhile the price of gold rose on the international markets, making the thieves £1 million richer. In a raid on a village post office in Pomeroy, Northern Ireland, an 80-year-old widow was shot dead while collecting her pension and Christmas bonus. She was caught in the crossfire between police and two masked raiders who made their escape. Mr Jim Prior, Northern Ireland Secretary, attacked the main political parties of the province for not attending his meeting with security chiefs.
The Commonwealth summit continued in Delhi and at Goa in western India. Much of the discussion was taken up with disagreements over the American invasion of Grenada and recent developments in . Cyprus. Mrs Thatcher, who is said to be taking a relaxed attitude to the summit, strongly opposed the call for a global con- ference on the reform of the international monetary system. She did, however, back a proposal by the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Mr Robert Muldoon, to set up a 'task force' to investigate alternatives to the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement. In Spain a Colombian Avianca Boeing 747 crashed as it was preparing to land at Madrid airport. 181 people including at least six British na- tionals were killed. A young French family of four were among eleven survivors. They report that an engine caught fire just before the crash. In another airline crash, this time involving a Nigerian Airways Fokker F28 at Enugu airport, Nigeria, a British businessman was among the 68 people kill- ed. President Reagan returned from a short holiday to meet the Israeli premier, Mr Shamir, in Washington. They discussed their joint policy in Lebanon and ways of preventing the growing influence of Syria. The French government emerged as the eminence grise of the Lebanese civil war. Having negotiated the release of Palestinian
guerrillas, Monsieur Mitterrand's diplomats played an important role in the negotiations between Mr Yasser Arafat and the PLO rebels in Tripoli. President An- dropov of the USSR remained out of sight but sent letters to Mrs Thatcher, Chancellor Kohl of West Germany and other heads of government warning that the deployment of cruise missiles could only increase East- West tensions. Both sides continued to deploy. The first missiles arrived in Sicily and the Russians announced that they would arm submarines along the American coast with intermediate missiles.'
Following Sir Ian Gilmour's criticism of the government's handling of the economy, the former Foreign secretary Francis Pym — who was dismissed from cabinet last
June made a strong attack on Mrs That- cher's style of leadership in a speech to the Oxford University Conservative Associa- tion. Union leaders at the Ford Motor Company were confused by the outcome of the vote on the company's 7.5 per cent pay offer. The majority of the plant came out in favour, but the majority of the workforce rejected the offer. The National Union of Journalists lost its appeal against the High Court order outlawing a strike at David Dimbleby's Richmond-based newspaper group. London, already declared a 'Nuclear free zone' has been made into an 'anti-apartheid zone' by the Labour con- trolled Greater London Council. The GLC will cease to buy goods from South Africa and is to encourage the naming of streets and buildings after prominent opponents of apartheid.
Tn the House of Commons the Secretary 1. for Health and Social Services, Mr Nor- man Fowler, announced the end of the 25-year monopoly of the opticians. This follows a recommendation by the Office of Fair Trading who found that the cost of spectacles might come down by as much as 400 per cent. The Government's measures mean that glasses will be on sale at shops although eye testing will still be given free under the National Health Service. Sir Keith Joseph, Education Secretary, an- nounced plans for equipping school leavers with a character report. Two who, perhaps, might not have done very well are pop singers Adam Ant and Boy George. Mr Ant's video of himself and former Miss World Mary Stavin stripping off in a show was banned by the BBC, while Boy George swore at a security guard at Heathrow who wanted to give him a body search. Two per- formances received more attention than they possibly merited. At Cambridge Prince Edward made his acting debut in Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible' and afterwards ad- mitted to stage fright. And at Barcelona zoo, a mime artist named Albert Vidal con- fined himself in an enclosure alongside the zoo's other exhibits. The object of this was not clear but it is believed that Mr Vidal was making the point that urban man is like any other animal. NASA launched the space shuttle Columbia at Cape Canaveral. It car- ried the European space lab and a record crew of six which included a European, Ulf Merbold, for the first time. Judge Bruce Campbell, who had been apprehended by customs men after they discovered 125 litres of whisky and 9,000 cigarettes on a boat he had used to cross the channel, was fined £2,000 by Ramsgate Magistrates and told that he would lose his job, and possibly his flat in the Inner Temple and his pension.
HCMP.
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