Portrait of the Week – 21 September 2002

The House of Commons was recalled for a day’s debate on 24 September on the approaching war against Iraq, but no substantive vote will be allowed. Dr George Carey, in his last address as Archbishop of Canterbury to the Anglican Consultative Council, warned that unilateral action ‘by dioceses and individual bishops’ over homosexuality was driving the Anglican Church ‘towards serious fragmentation and the real possibility of two (or, more likely, many more) distinct Anglican bodies emerging’. Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, said that children of immigrant parents should talk to their mothers at home ‘in English as well as in their historic mother tongue’. The government mounted a multimillion-pound campaign to publicise the new child tax credit, which comes into force next April and will affect all families with incomes of up to £58,000. Two Cambridgeshire policemen were charged with offences relating to indecent Internet images of children; one of the men had been liaison officer to the family of the murdered schoolgirl Jessica Chapman.