Portrait of the Week – 9 July 2005

The G8 leaders (of the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada and Russia) assembled in Gleneagles to discuss Africa, climate change and that sort of thing. The Live 8 concert for 200,000 in Hyde Park, intended to attract attention to poverty in Africa, passed off without incident. About 225,000 people walked through Edinburgh in a similar cause. The next day police arrested 100 in violent clashes with anarchists. Around Gleneagles 3,000 police, some from England, gathered; there was fighting in Stirling and nearby Auchterarder was overwhelmed. London was chosen as the venue for the Olympic Games in 2012. The government admitted that about half a million illegal immigrants lived in Britain, quite apart from the hundreds of thousands whose applications for asylum had been rejected, but who had not been expelled. Public support for identity cards has fallen to 45 per cent, according to an internet opinion poll by YouGov for the Daily Telegraph.