The Spectator

Austria and the JewsIn Austria it is illegal publicly to deny the Holocaust (‘Let Irving speak’, 3 December). ‘Words are deeds,’ said Sigmund Freud, and in Austria we are aware of this connection. ‘There is no more anti-Semitic nation in Western Europe than Austria’? Neither the report on ‘Manifestations of anti-Semitism in the EU, 2002–2003’ by the EU Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, nor the recent study by the Anti-Defamation League on ‘Attitudes towards Jews in 12 European countries’ corroborates this claim. It is true and shameful that many Austrians participated in the Holocaust. Was this guilt ‘extraordinary’?

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was forced by the presence of protesters to have a cup of tea instead of delivering a speech in Islington on nuclear energy. After his cup of tea he said that energy policy was ‘back on the agenda with a vengeance’ while ‘round the world you can hear the heavy sound of feverish rethinking’. The government is expected to produce a preliminary White Paper on the matter next spring. Even before it was published, a report on pensions by a commission headed by Lord Turner was discounted by Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in a leaked letter.

Downing Street let it be known that Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was sympathetic to plans to build new nuclear power stations; but then government ministers announced he had not made up his mind after all. The wholesale price of gas reached five times its cost at the beginning of November. Because of increased rail freight traffic (from 15.1 billion tonne-kilometres in 1996 to 20.7 billion in 2004), chiefly in imported coal, new goods-lines might be built in Britain, according to Mr Iain Coucher, the deputy chief executive of Network Rail. Two probationer policewomen were shot, one fatally, when they were called to a travel agency in Bradford that was being raided.

There was much speculation about the import of the government’s defeat, its first since it came to office in 1997, on a vote on the Terrorism Bill by 322 votes to 291, despite the jetting back from Israel of Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had only got as far in his visit as Tel Aviv airport. Some 49 Labour MPs voted against the provision to allow 90 days’ detention without trial; an amendment was then passed limiting detention to 28 days. Some commentators saw the defeat as a straw in the wind for the last days of Mr Tony Blair as Prime Minister; others wondered how he’d get on with his reforms of the health and education systems.

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, insisted on pressing ahead with a Bill to allow police to hold anyone suspected of a terrorist offence for 90 days without charge. The government prepared legislation to allow terrorists who had fled Northern Ireland before the Good Friday Agreement to return to the province without prosecution. Six men were arrested in connection with the £26.5 million Northern Bank robbery in Belfast last December, and two were released without charge. The High Court heard a case for compensation by more than 5,000 serving and former officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (now the Police Service of Northern Ireland), which they said had failed those who suffered lasting effects from traumas in dealing with terrorism.

Nuclear hedge fund Andrew Gilligan (‘A terrifying plan for nuclear strikes’, 29 October) is being unduly alarmist about the future of Britain’s small nuclear deterrent. The development of so-called ‘usable’ nukes does not imply a wish or intention actually to use them, but rather is an essential element of effective deterrence. If you rely simply on the sheer awfulness of nuclear weapons for their deterrent effect (‘existential’ deterrence in the jargon), the person you’re most likely to deter will be yourself. You won’t then deter anybody else, which defeats the whole purpose of a deterrent in the first place.

In the Lozells district of Birmingham, Isaiah Young Sam, a black man aged 23, was fatally stabbed as he returned from the cinema in an attack by ten or 11 men. The murder came amid fights and rioting by black Caribbeans and South Asian youths. The violence came after a rumour had gone round, and was retailed on a pirate radio station, that a 14-year-old black girl had been raped by 19 Asians after being caught shoplifting. Another man was shot dead nearby the next day. A White Paper on education set out plans to free schools from the control of local authorities and give them power to expand, change curriculum and set admission policies. Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, was said not to like it.