Portrait of the Week – 15 October 2005

Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said that the government had ‘got to make sure that the police have the powers they can to deal with people who are drug dealing in the street’. Mr Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, said that the government had abandoned plans to introduce a new offence of ‘glorifying terrorism’. Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the new Lord Chief Justice, said, ‘Occasionally one does feel that an individual politician is trying to browbeat the judiciary.’ Britain’s Assets Recovery Agency and the Irish Republic’s Criminal Assets Bureau looked into the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s link to a £30 million property portfolio in Manchester. The government put pressure on health authorities to fluoridate water, under the Water Act 2003. The Civil Service is employing 117 staff and consultants on an identity card scheme that has yet to receive parliamentary approval. Mr David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, said he was considering using a lie detector to catch people fraudulently applying for benefits; he called the present incapacity benefit system ‘crackers’.