Portrait of the Week – 23 November 2002

Three men of north African origin were arrested under the Terrorism Act, and some newspapers said that a plot to spread poison gas in the London Underground had been foiled. The government denied this was so; Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said: ‘If there is a specific threat against a specific target, we of course will warn people.’ The Fire Brigades Union held ‘very constructive’ talks with Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister. But Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in the Commons: ‘This is exactly the wrong time, with exactly the wrong claim, pursuing the wrong methods to demand wage rises so much higher than inflation.’ Miss Clare Short, the Secretary of State for International Development, denounced the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy for giving ‘every European dairy producer two dollars a day for each cow that he owns, while 2.7 billion men, women and children around the world are living on less than that’. Earlier she had said that government plans to charge top-up fees for university tuition were a ‘really bad idea’. University College and Imperial College, both parts of London University, said they had decided not to merge after ‘an intense period of deliberation’. Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, launched a National Policing Plan. A White Paper called ‘Protecting the Public’ proposed that a defendant in a case of rape will have to show that he took reasonable steps to establish consent; that offences such as buggery and so-called ‘cottaging’ – where a man solicits another for sex – should be repealed; and that a new offence should be created of ‘undertaking a course of conduct’ leading to a meeting where an adult intends to engage in sexual activity with a child. Myra Hindley, who was jailed in 1966 for her part in the torture and death of three children, and later confessed to taking part in the murder of two more, died in hospital but still in custody, aged 60.