Word: whitelaw
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Prime Minister's sentiments had the full backing of Opposition Leader Michael Foot, who said that government concessions would give "sure aid to the recruitment of terrorists." Within hours of the funeral, Home Secretary William Whitelaw announced the government's other response: the intent to plug a legal loophole that had allowed Sands, a convicted felon, to stand for Parliament. Westminster wanted no repetition of the I.R.A.'s ploy when yet another by-election is called in Northern Ireland's turbulent Fermanagh and South Tyrone constituency...
Britain as a whole was swept up in a wave of shock and recrimination. In the House of Commons, Home Secretary William Whitelaw reported on a personal visit to Brixton, conducted during a lull in the rioting, and announced that a respected and nonpartisan peer, former Jurist Lord Scarman, would investigate the causes of the violence. Firebrand M.P. Enoch Powell, a Tory turned Ulster Unionist and a longtime opponent of nonwhite immigration to Britain, warned that "you have seen nothing yet." Five M.P.s demanded "a vigorous policy" of subsidized repatriation of nonwhite immigrants. The ruckus spread as far away...
Whatever the government finally decides, Home Secretary Whitelaw indicated that it would not abandon its monetarist austerity for the sake of financial subsidies to depressed areas like Brixton. Said Whitelaw: "The idea that you can buy your way out of problems in different areas I don't believe to be sound and the Americans have found it that way." Britons may now be finding out something else that the U.S. has already discovered: the road to racial harmony is long and arduous...
...hunger strikers' principal demand is for restoration of the "special category status" that prisoners convicted of politically motivated crimes were granted by the Tory government of Edward Heath in 1972. At that time, several hunger strikers, who also came close to death, persuaded William Whitelaw, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, to grant them the status of political prisoners. Whitelaw, who is now Mrs. Thatcher's Home Secretary, later said the concession had been a mistake. It was withdrawn in 1976, and as a result there is something of a double standard at Maze Prison. Those convicted...
...Defense Secretary (1964-70) and Chancellor of the Exchequer (1974-79). His bushy eyebrows, imposing girth and bare knuckle style make him a favorite target of cartoonists, who sometimes turn his teeth into fangs. "There's a Jekyll and Hyde aspect to him," says Tory Home Secretary William Whitelaw, using the caricaturists' horror-show imagery. "You sometimes get the impression that once Denis decides what is good for Britain and his party, he pursues it even if you have to lie and cheat along the way." Healey mistrusts ideology, and sees the job of government as mundanely doing...