This is favour for a favour government and as such it is both unfair and potentially corrupt.
If Tony Blair and his team are going to favour one set of commercial interests (his main business cronies already seem very visible) over another, he’s going to find the good will that business as whole presently has for the new administration dissolving before his eyes.The function of government is to create a framework of public policy for society, individuals and businesses to operate in. The latest estimates put Ecstasy consumption at around one million doses every weekend.
Publishing is tuned to a similar frequency. Scotland Yard argues that officers must be able to move easily in the new equipment.A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “The MetVest is the best equipment available. We have tested it to our own very high and rigorous standards based on our own detailed risk analysis and we are confident it will be effective against the vast majority of knife attacks which our officers are likely to face.”Mr Bleetman has also examined 500 stabbings in Glasgow and found that armour has “blind spots” where parts of the body are not fully protected. The picture quality was similar to the VHS video standard.Since the trial more advanced forms of digital compression have emerged, though BT would still need to spend billions of pounds to provide a national service. An interactive trial in Colchester and Ipswich last year, involving 2,500 homes, offered feature films and home shopping services by compressing television signals into digital information. Steve Wagner, group managing director of NTL said he had already written to Mr Smith and hoped to be involved in the any discussions with BT.

“Chris Smith’s proposed talks would, I hope, also include members of the cable industry.”Other cable groups also doubted BT’s commitment to extend its fibre network. Graham Wallace, chief executive of Cable & Wireless Communications, accused BT of wanting to destabilise the cable companies. “It’s an enormous threat if BT were to talk to customers about delivering broadcast services but they haven’t got close to doing that. They are making a lot of noise about it though.”Analysts said removing the broadcasting ban early could prejudice the cable company’s investment plans.

Mathew Horsman, from stockbrokers Henderson Crossthwaite, said the move would be ill-advised: “It would clearly be unfair to the cable operators who based their business plans on the assumption that BT would be kept out of the market until 2001. Any earlier date would jeopardise the build-out of cable.”BT can point with some justification to technological changes which have dramatically increased the amount of information it can send down its local copper wire network, a form of technology which dates back to the turn of the century. No one expects the development to be a single superhighway,” said a spokesman.Under the present rules BT is prevented from broadcasting live entertainment down its core phone network until at least 2001, when the ban would be reviewed. Labour’s policy, modelled on recommendations from a Commons select committee report three years ago, said the ban could disappear from 1998, seven years after the start of each cable franchise.Several cable operators were yesterday disappointed, though not surprised, by Mr Smith’s latest overture.

In an interview earlier this week with The Independent he clearly signalled he anticipated BT developing “a broadband communications network throughout the country” going far beyond the original pledge to lay cables to schools. BT has previously claimed it would cost pounds 15bn to extend the superhighway to homes.The company said yesterday it was no longer considering extending its fibre network beyond local telephone exchanges to homes, where low capacity copper wire was mostly used, claiming the issue had been transformed by new technology.”The idea of suddenly laying fibre across the whole country, which would mean going back to the pounds 15bn investment concept, just ain’t on any more. The comments came after the new National Heritage Secretary, Chris Smith, insisted that Labour was as committed as ever to its controversial “deal” with BT, where it would consider an early end to the broadcasting ban if the company fulfilled its pledge to provide schools, hospitals and libraries with free high-capacity fibre-optic cable connections.
Mr Smith also said he expected BT to move to extend the information superhighway across the UK. British Telecom yesterday ruled out investing pounds 15bn to build a national information superhighway if the Government announced an early end to restrictions banning the phones giant from broadcasting entertainment down its local network. Against that, Michael Lewis of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell tentatively suggested French national holidays may be distorting the polls..

The received wisdom is that a victory for the socialists could delay EMU as the Germans would not accede to their terms, but the picture is far from clear cut.On the plus side for the early integrationists, the polls are still showing a wafer-thin majority for the Gaullists, while Graham Bishop of Salomon Brothers pointed to signs of fragmentation on the left after the Communists appeared to harden their stance on EMU. “If it helps the European brotherhood, then that helps make EMU more likely, but if a centre left government [is returned in France] then it becomes irrelevant.”
Martin Brookes of Goldman Sachs was one of several who pointed out that Mr Brown’s move to cut the political bonds of the Bank of England was not yet sufficient to satisfy the requirements of the Maastricht Treaty.With the consensus still that the UK will not join in the first wave in 1999, the attention of our pundits remains firmly focused on France, where opinion polls suggest the gap between right and left has narrowed to almost nothing. Yesterday she was asked for the last time whether she would change her mind. Mrs Chan replied she had “nothing to add” to previous statements.The committee chairman, Ip Kowk-him, said he could not accept the public interest case advanced by Mrs Chan and was supported by other legislators. He said there were two alternatives facing the committee; they could invoke their powers to ask the Attorney General to initiate contempt proceedings against Mrs Chan, or would criticise her refusal to furnish information in their report.The committee had offered to accept an edited version of the report to exclude material which might compromise the ICAC operations. However, this approach was also rebuffed.The saga of the investigation into Mr Leung’s departure has been marked by government prevarication and what it now admits was telling a “narrow interpretation of the truth” in claiming the former director resigned from his post for “personal reasons”.It has since been revealed that Mr Leung was involved in unauthorised business dealings and suspicion still remains that he may have been involved in other improper activities with political implications.. Labour’s historic decision to give the Bank of England effective control over interest rates may have made waves in Britain this week, but it seems to have done nothing to improve the likeliehood of economic and monetary union going ahead on time.