Portrait of the week: Labour’s ‘plan for change’, falling productivity and 20,000 wolves in the EU

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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.