The Spectator

Portrait of the Week – 27 November 2004

A speedy round-up of the week's news

issue 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.’

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