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Banks should erect a protective ring-fence round their high-street operations, the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards recommended, and moreover it should be ‘electrified’. The metaphor meant that regulators should have the power to break up banks that misbehaved. The ten members of the commission included the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Revd Justin Welby, and ‘Nigella’s Dad’, as one paper put it, Lord Lawson of Blaby. Mark Carney, the next governor of the Bank of England, suggested that economic growth should be a target, rather than inflation. The government had to borrow £17.5 billion in November, £1.2 billion more than a year earlier, although some economists had predicted borrowing would fall to about £16 billion. Gerry Anderson, the creator of Thunderbirds, died, aged 83. Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, the composer, died, aged 76.
David Cameron, the Prime Minister, on the eve of a visit to British forces in Afghanistan, said that their numbers would be cut from 9,000 to 5,200 in 2013. The Duchess of Cambridge presented Bradley Wiggins, the bicyclist, with the BBC sports personality of the year award. The Duke of Cambridge spent Christmas with his wife’s family in Berkshire. The Queen attended a meeting of the Cabinet, which gave her some place mats to mark her jubilee and named as Queen Elizabeth Land an area of British Antarctic Territory twice the size of Britain. In her Christmas broadcast, the Queen said that ‘God sent his only Son “to serve, not to be served”.’ Lady Thatcher spent time in hospital undergoing a bladder operation. Floods swept the land from Cornwall to Aberdeen.
Government ministers said it was unlikely to be able to find a majority to repeal the Hunting Act. A controversy revived over what Andrew Mitchell, the former chief whip, said to police who forbade him to use the main gates from Downing Street for his bicycle on 19 September. A serving Metropolitan police constable was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in a public office, and was suspended over an allegedly false account of the incident. A 23-year-old man was arrested four days later. Video footage was released showing no members of the public within earshot. The government rejected a scheme by Dover Harbour Board for the privatisation of the port. The ramshackle annex built in front of King’s Cross station, London, in 1973 was demolished on Christmas Day. On Boxing Day, Underground train drivers went on strike.
Abroad
In a referendum in Egypt, 64 per cent of those who voted backed a constitution that made Sharia the main source of legislation; turnout was 33 per cent. Iran’s Bandar Abbas power plant, on the Straits of Hormuz, was attacked by the Stuxnet computer worm. The Pope pardoned his butler, who had been jailed for 18 months for stealing documents from him supposedly to expose corruption in the Vatican. China opened the world’s longest high-speed rail route, running 1,428 miles from Beijing to Guangzhou.
In Syria, more than 90 were said to have been killed by a government air attack on a baker’s in Halfaya, a town recently captured by rebels. Lt Gen. Abulaziz al-Shalal, the commander of Syria’s military police, defected from the government side. The United States sent two batteries of Patriot missiles to the Turkish border, and 400 men to operate them. Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special envoy on Syria, met President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and was invited to Russia for talks. North Korean missiles now have a range of 10,000km, according to the South Korean defence ministry’s analysis of fragments from its test launch on 12 December.
Americans discussed gun laws after the shooting of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut, by Adam Lanza, aged 20, who shot his mother dead on the way to the school and himself at the end of the crime. President Barack Obama asked Vice-President Joe Biden to look into the massacre and come up with proposals by January. Mr Obama nominated Senator John Kerry to succeed Hillary Clinton as the next secretary of state. Susan Rice, the United States ambassador to the UN, had withdrawn her name from consideration amid controversy dating from her suggestion that the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi on September 11 (in which the US ambassador was killed) had developed out of protests against an anti-Islamic film, although it transpired to have been a planned attack by al-Qa’eda. The world did not end on 21 December, as some had blamed the Mayans for predicting. –CSH
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