Portrait of the week | 20 March 2010

A European Commission report warned that Britain would not meet the 2014-2015 deadline for reducing the budget deficit to below 3 per cent of domestic output. Mr Liam Byrne, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said: ‘We think the EU has got the judgment wrong.’ British Airways cabin crew belonging to the union Unite announced strikes for three days from 20 March and four days from 27 March. Lord Adonis, the Transport Secretary, called the strike ‘totally unjustifiable’. Mr Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, then spoke out against it on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour: ‘It is the wrong time, it is unjustified, it is deplorable, we shouldn’t have a strike.’ The parliamentary Northern Ireland affairs committee said that a new investigation must discover whether government intelligence was withheld from detectives seeking the Omagh bombers, who killed 29 people in 1998. The Pope will make a speech in Westminster Hall in the Houses of Parliament during his visit from 16-19 September. A worshipper at St Paul’s church in Brighton called on the Health and Safety Executive to rule on the use of incense there. ‘The first time they burned incense I collapsed,’ said Ronald Caseby, aged 73.

Baroness Stern, a crossbench peer, in her review of criminal justice and rape, called for ‘an end to the widespread use of misleading rape conviction data — in particular the 6 per cent conviction rate figure’ which ‘can make victims feel it is not worth reporting’, although 58 per cent of cases taken to court end in conviction. But Mrs Vera Baird, the Solicitor General, said that she had ‘reservations about ceasing to refer to the widely used 6 per cent figure’. Ashok Kumar, the Labour MP for Middlesbrough South, was found dead, from natural causes, police suggested; he was 53.