Pressure to axe soccer ID plan: The week that was January 3 to 9, 1989.

Right-wing rebel James Pawson, MP for Rugby, who was leading the Tory opposition to the Bill, claimed it was “crackers” and unworkable. He said there was considerable opposition on both left and right of the party.

MPs were concerned that the scheme would lead to congestion and trouble at the turnstiles at football stadia, and that smaller clubs could be bankrupted by the cost of introducing the ID card scheme.

Analysts announced that the North-South economic divide would persist until the end of the century, but the line between the prosperous southern half of the country and slower growth in the North was shifting upwards, with the Midlands taking over as the region of highest development.

In the report from research body Cambridge Econometrics, Yorkshire and Humberside were judged to have experienced strong growth in private services, notably in the financial and business sectors.

In foreign news, US defence officials said that 13 American warships heading for the Mediterranean were on routine deployment – but they refused to rule out an attack against an alleged chemical weapons plant in Libya.

Libya’s official news agency said the US was using allegations about chemical weapons as a pretext to attack the radical North African nation and kill its leader, Colonel Gaddafi.

Later in the week, Libya called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, following the shooting down of two of its jet fighters by US Navy aircraft. Security chiefs in Tripoli said the MiG 23 planes had been unarmed and on a routine reconnaissance flight.

The White House said the jets were blasted after they threatened US F14s in international airspace 70 miles north of the Libyan coastal town of Tobruk.

Back in the UK, Home Office minister Tim Renton confirmed that Britain was to accept a further 1,000 Vietnamese refugees from Hong Kong. The offer carried the proviso that other countries such as Canada and Australia accepted similar numbers.

Around two million people had fled from the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and Mr Renton said the new intake would include both relatives of Vietnamese people already resident here, and others who could quickly become self-sufficient.

He added that the Britain had played a major part in international efforts to resettle genuine refugees. Since 1979 it had accepted 20,000 Vietnamese; in 1956 it took 20,000 Hungarians, in 1968 2,000 Czechs and in the 1970s 3,000 Chileans.

Birdwatchers no longer had to travel the world in search of the exotic, as it was increasingly likely to turn up on their doorstep, according to a new bird survey of the British Isles.

Britain’s list of more than 520 bird species was set to rise after 1988 saw the appearance of 10 rare newcomers from distant climes.

The migrants included a Moussier’s redstart, usually found in sun-baked South Africa; a Daurian redstart, whose normal ‘patch’ extended from central Asia to the Sea of Japan; a northern mockingbird from the US, and a Pallas’s rosefinch, usually seen in central or eastern Asia.

Editor of British Bird magazine Dr Tim Sharrock said it had been an extraordinary year, with the most unlikely spectacle a mottled swift – normally at home in tropical West Africa, but spotted weathering the autumnal chills of Spurn Point, Humberside.