Society

Identity cards threaten law-abiding citizens more than they threaten terrorists, says Peter Hitchens. Their introduction would signal the end of privacy — and of England The arguments in favour of identity cards are empty and false. The Prime Minister says there are no civil liberty issues involved in their introduction, when he means that nobody in his gutless Cabinet is prepared to put up a principled fight on this issue. He himself does not know what liberty is. Nor, clearly, does David Blunkett, who is planning to introduce legislation that could force everyone in Britain to have identity cards within five years. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir John Stevens, says

American interventions in the Middle East have led many commentators to regard the USA as a new imperial power. But there are many ways to control an empire, as the Romans knew. It is automatically assumed that Rome controlled its empire through its provinciae (a word whose origin is unknown, unless Mrs Wordsworth has been keeping it secret), i.e., having conquered a territory, the Romans moved in a governor complete with soldiers and a retinue of advisers to run the show, carving out deals with the local elites relating to taxation, the billeting of troops, legal institutions, etc. This is indeed a large part of the story, but not all

Seven hundred police made 24 simultaneous raids around London, seizing half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser in Hanwell, west London, arresting two men in Uxbridge, one in Ilford, one in Horley, one in Slough and three in Crawley — all British Muslims of Pakistani descent, aged between 17 and 32. Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, suspended immigration from Romania and Bulgaria in a scandal involving immigration checks. First Miss Beverley Hughes, the immigration minister, was found to have cleared backlogs by letting through unchecked applications from people already in Britain. Then the British consul in Bucharest was suspended after informing Mr David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, that

Philip Pullman, author of the apparently anti-Christian His Dark Materials, and the Archbishop of Canterbury debated the significance of religion, and both enthusiastically agreed that ‘myth’ was an important feature of it. But why? The Greek word muthos originally meant ‘word, speech, message’. It gradually came to mean ‘significant story’. At the one extreme, these were stories that had strong traditional and communal significance because (for example) they ‘explained’ the nature of the human and divine worlds; at the other, they were straight inventions by philosophers to make a point (e.g. Plato’s muthos of Atlantis). At all times there was an uneasy balance between myth as history that preserved a

Liberal Democrat delegates at the party’s spring conference in Southport voted in favour of 16 year olds being allowed to appear in explicit pornography and of doctors being allowed to assist suicides. Mr Charles Kennedy broke into a sweat during his speech to the conference, following his sudden absence during the budget debate the week before with a stomach disorder. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, flew to Madrid for a requiem Mass for those killed in the train bombings. He then flew for talks with President Gaddafi of Libya. A Nottingham brain surgeon was suspended while an investigation was ordered into allegations that he had failed to pay for