Portrait of the Week – 27 November 2004

In the Queen’s Speech, the government announced 32 Bills: one to impose ‘voluntary’ identity cards and then compulsory cards; another to create a Serious Organised Crime Agency; a Counter-Terrorist Bill that might allow trial without jury and the admittance of evidence from tapped telephones; a Discrimination Bill to extend the rights of disabled people, and an Equality Bill to criminalise rudeness about religious beliefs, both to be enforced by a Commission for Equality and Human Rights. The Prince of Wales wrote in a memorandum about a woman who then went to an employment tribunal: ‘What is wrong with everyone nowadays? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their actual capacities?’ Mr Charles Clarke, the Secretary of State for Education, said that Prince Charles’s views were ‘old-fashioned and out of time’. The Prince then said, at a seminar at Lambeth Palace, ‘Ambition is a good thing, and should not ever be constrained by a person’s starting-point in life.’ The managing director of the National Assessment Agency resigned after an independent review found that the organisers of this year’s chaotic English tests for 14-year-olds showed no ‘sense of collective responsibility until failure was both obvious and irreversible’. The head of the Child Support Agency resigned in the wake of the failure of a £456 million computer system. Civil disobedience was planned to meet the criminalisation of fox-hunting on February 18; the government failed in an attempt to delay the law being implemented until after the election. The Saville inquiry, into the shooting dead of 13 people by British soldiers in Londonderry in 1972, ended its sittings at a cost of £155 million. Mr Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, and the Revd Ian Paisley of the Democratic Unionists, went to London for separate talks intended to restore the Northern Ireland Assembly.