The Spectator

Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, proposed a points system, measuring desirable skills and suchlike qualities, to determine which immigrants from outside the European Community would be allowed to settle permanently in Britain. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) refused to return a man with alleged al-Qa’eda links to Belmarsh prison, where he had been driven mad; the Siac judge ruled that the Home Secretary had failed to prove ‘to the necessary standard’ his allegation that the man, known as G, had received two unidentified visitors at his home. Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, proposed that prisoners should serve the whole of a minimum term specified by the courts.

Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, was reported to have warned ministers that plans to allow the Home Secretary to put suspected terrorists under house arrest were likely to be challenged and ruled illegal by the courts. A man known as ‘C’, suspected of terrorist activity, was suddenly released; another man, whom imprisonment had made increasingly mad, was released on bail. Mr Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, issued advice on how to deal with burglars; they could be killed, he said, as long as it was done ‘honestly and instinctively’. The Association of British Insurers said that a third of the housing announced by Mr John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, was located on flood plains where the risk was ‘unacceptably high’.

The government proposed that foreigners suspected of terrorism and held illegally at Belmarsh prison should be let out but somehow put under restriction. Four British citizens held in America’s prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba were flown home and arrested. Mr Michael Howard, the leader of the Conservative party, said he sought a substantial reduction in immigration, which has averaged 157,000 a year under Labour; if the Tories won the election they would withdraw Britain from the 1951 UN convention on refugees. But European Union officials said that EU law prohibited Britain from setting a quota for refugees.

The Conservatives published plans for spending if they were to win the next election. Presuming savings proposed by Sir Peter Gershon’s report for the Treasury, and incorporating new savings devised for them by Mr David James, they said they could reduce government spending by £35 billion, partly by cutting 235,000 Civil Service posts. Of this, £23 billion would be spent on extra services, principally health and education, £8 billion would fill the ‘black hole’ (borrowing) incurred by Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and £4 billion would pay for tax cuts; tax revenues for the current year are expected by the government to be about £450 billion.

Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was jolly annoyed when Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, decided not to step down in his favour last year after all, according to a new book by Mr Robert Peston; ‘There is nothing that you could say to me now that I could ever believe,’ Mr Brown reportedly said to Mr Blair. During a heated meeting between Labour backbenchers — displeased with the wrangling — and Mr Blair and Mr Brown, Lord Campbell-Savours asked Mr Brown either to deny the attributed quotation or rescind it, lest the Tories use it in the election campaign. The confirmed number of British people killed by the great wave in the Indian Ocean was 51, with 416 presumed dead and 701 unaccounted for.

Sex, war and the Word It is interesting how people reveal their prejudices by the words they use. So, to A.N. Wilson (‘Holy Sage’, 18/25 December) those who oppose homosexuals taking high office in the Church of England are ‘bigots’, while those in favour are ‘enthusiasts’. He argues that because the Church has changed its position in the past towards such things as pacifism and sexual abstinence except for the purposes of reproduction (both demanded by the early Church), it is therefore possible to ‘move on’ in other areas as well, e.g., in the case of homosexual clergy. We need to make a distinction, however, between the Bible (the word of God) and extra-biblical writings (the words of men).

JANUARY Lord Hutton’s report declared that the government was not ‘dishonourable, underhand or duplicitous’. Mr Mikhail Saakashvili, who had led popular demonstrations in Georgia against Mr Eduard Shevardnadze, won the presidential elections. Hundreds of reformist candidates were banned from standing in the Iranian elections. Hope was given up of hearing any signal from Beagle 2, the British craft sent to Mars. Dr Harold Shipman, who had murdered at least 215 patients, was found hanged in his prison cell. Parmalat, the Italian food group, was exposed in a vast fraud. The dollar weakened against the euro. Police in Madhya Pradesh were paid a bonus of 35p a month to grow moustaches to increase their authority.

Lord Butler of Brockwell, who had headed the inquiry into intelligence about Iraq, accused Mr Tony Blair’s administration of ‘bad government’, being unchecked by Parliament and free to bring in a ‘huge number of extremely bad Bills, a huge amount of regulation and to do whatever it likes’ with an eye to the next day’s headlines. The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, denied a fresh allegation that he had helped fast-track a tourist visa to Austria for his ex-lover’s nanny, Leoncia Casalme.