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The Labour government announced a ‘Plan for Change’ that it refused to call a reset. Sir Chris Wormald was named Cabinet Secretary. In his Guildhall speech at the Lord Mayor’s banquet, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said that ‘the idea that we must choose between our allies, that somehow we’re with either America or Europe, is plain wrong’. He said ‘we must continue to back Ukraine’ against Vladimir Putin as something ‘deeply in our self-interest’. With the arrival of another 122 people on 1 December, more than 20,000 had crossed the Channel in small boats since Labour entered office. A group of about 60 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum-seekers were brought to Britain from Diego Garcia, one of the Chagos Islands, which the British government is trying to give to Mauritius. The 3,235 foreign offenders freed from jail in the year to March 2022 each committed a further three crimes on average – a total of 10,012 offences, according to the Ministry of Justice. The Office for National Statistics said that, with 484,000 more working-age adults in Britain than it had previously assumed, productivity had fallen by 0.9 per cent in the second quarter of the year, not the 0.3 per cent previously estimated.
The Commons voted for assisted suicide by giving a second reading by 330 to 275 to the Terminally Ill (End of Life) Bill introduced by Kim Leadbeater. Only 23 Conservative MPs voted for the bill; Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, and Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, voted against. Louise Haigh resigned as transport secretary after it emerged that she had pleaded guilty in 2014, shortly before becoming an MP, to incorrectly telling the police that a work mobile had been stolen; she also had dyed red hair.
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