At the state opening of Parliament, the Queen said, ‘My government is committed to creating safe and secure communities, and fostering a culture of respect.’ For the next 18 months 45 Bills were scheduled. An Identity Cards Bill would be introduced; Sinn Fein said this would undermine the rights of Irish citizens in Northern Ireland.
More prisoners, less crime Douglas Hurd pointed out that the prison population increased from 44,000 in the 1980s to over 75,000 today (‘Does prison really work?’, 14 May). If ‘“prison works” in reducing crime,’ he says, ‘then obviously a sensational increase in the number of prisoners should produce a sensational reduction in crime. But it
If Michael Howard were a football manager, he would be entitled to some very bitter post-match expletives. Tony Blair’s respectable-sounding majority of 67 cannot cover for the brutal geometry of the election result. Labour, with a mere 36 per cent of the popular vote, lower than any previously commanded by a British government, secured 356
Labour won a majority of 67 in the general election, securing 356 seats (of the 645 contested), 47 down, with 9,556,183 votes, 35.2 per cent of the total; the Conservatives won 197 seats, 33 up, with 8,772,598 votes, 32.3 per cent of the total; the Liberal Democrats won 62 seats, 11 up, with 5,982,045 votes,
Tories must be less strident Simon Heffer tells us that what the Conservative party now needs, above all, is ‘stability’ (‘The way ahead for Conservatives’, 7 May). But it cannot have escaped his notice that the level of success we have enjoyed in the last decade has been all too ‘stable’, and that this is
They are Achilles and Patroclus. They are David and Jonathan. They are Wallace and Gromit. Not since the emergence of the youthful Blair and Brown has there been a pair of politicians who have been so evidently close in ideology and outlook, and who have so captivated spectators by their general voter-friendliness. In making George
Britain held a general election, except in South Staffordshire, where the death of the Liberal Democrat candidate after ballot papers had been sent out required the holding of a by-election later. More than five million requests for postal votes had been met. The Conservatives had hoped that the result would be unexpected in the same
Made in Britain ‘Today, the Mother of Parliaments has lost half its power, with Brussels making half of British laws,’ says Anthony Browne (‘Parliament of eunuchs’, 30 April). My Conservative opponent in Rotherham goes further. His election address says that 70 per cent of UK law is now made in Brussels. The truth is more
The Spectator appears as the electorate goes to the polls, and any analysis of the outcome must therefore be hypothetical. Some points can be made with assurance. The first is that if Michael Howard wins, he will be rated a miracle-worker. Never in the history of magic would so colossal a rabbit have been pulled
The Mail on Sunday claimed that before the war on Iraq, Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, had warned Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, in a 13-page letter that it was questionable whether Britain could legally attack Iraq under UN Resolution 1441. A nine-paragraph summary of the Attorney General’s advice, containing no such caveat, was
Deadly recipes Andrew Gilligan takes a characteristically certain view on what the headline describes as ‘Ricin certainties’ (23 April). Mark Easton researched the background to the trial over several months, travelling across Europe and pressing reluctant police and intelligence officials to talk. The BBC also attended every single day of the court hearings. Mark’s report
Given that most readers will have voted by the time this magazine next appears, we have no hesitation in now urging them to vote Conservative. This is no time for dwelling on any deficiencies in Tory personnel or programmes. Nor is it a time for bashing Mr Blair and his clapped-out, deceitful, nannying and discredited
Kamel Bourgass was sentenced to 17 years in prison for conspiring, with one named fellow terrorist and others unnamed, to cause a ‘public nuisance’, a common law offence said by the Crown in this case to have involved plotting to use poisons to cause ‘disruption, fear and injury’. Bourgass, an Algerian, had been an ‘illegal
China is still a tyranny As usual Mark Steyn makes some good points, this time in his piece on globalisation (‘The sovereign individual’, 16 April). But he is mistaken in his praise of China, ‘the dynamic, advanced, first-world economy’. The Telegraph, for which Mr Steyn also writes, summed up China’s rulers in its leader of
National debt: Taken from public sector net debt figures (PSND) in Table B13 of Pre-Budget 2009. PSND rising from £618.8 billion on 5 April 2009 to £798.9 billion a year later. This is the most conservative of the available debt indices as it excludes liabilities for PFI deals, public sector pensions and bank bailouts. Family share: Calculated
When Tony Blair made Stephen Byers Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, it is now clear that he was entrusting that office to the most incompetent, the most cynical and the most financially illiterate Cabinet minister of the last 20 years. This spring the last British-owned volume car manufacturer has been brought to its
In the Conservative manifesto, six pledges designated as ‘the simple longings of the British people’ appeared in facsimile handwriting: ‘more police, cleaner hospitals, lower taxes, school discipline, controlled immigration and accountability’. Details included an undertaking to match Labour spending on the NHS, schools, transport and foreign aid, while spending 1 per cent less in total
The nurses and midwives at St Thomas’s Hospital this week faced a rewarding task: to bring Donald James Kennedy into the world. They could have been as slapdash as they had liked, even pulled the poor chap out by the ears — knowing full well that nothing would have prevented his father bounding down the
The wedding of the Prince of Wales and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles was suddenly postponed for a day because it clashed with the funeral in Rome of Pope John Paul II on 8 April. The Prince of Wales was to represent the Queen at the funeral, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was to perform
When Richard Mawrey QC, who presided over the inquiry into electoral fraud in Birmingham, said the tactics used in the episode would ‘disgrace a banana republic’ he was, if anything, understating his case. It was shocking enough that six men, all of whom were subsequently elected councillors, were found to have committed electoral offences so