Portrait of the week | 4 December 2010

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The Office for Budget Responsibility said it thought economic growth for 2010 would be 1.8 per cent, not 1.2 per cent as it had previously predicted. It expected 330,000 public sector workers to lose their jobs over the next four years, not the 490,000 it forecast in June; 1.1 million jobs would be created in the private sector. ‘The bulk of this revision results from the action we have taken to cut welfare bills rather than cut public services,’ George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the Commons. A lower 10 per cent rate of corporation tax would be levied from April 2013 on the profits of hi-tech firms from newly commercialised patents. Tax on beers stronger than 7.5 per cent is to increase from the autumn of 2011. The £400 a week housing benefit cap is to be delayed by six months to October 2011.

Snow swept the land. On high ground in Northumberland it reached 24 inches. Despite a 360,000-ton stockpile of salt, Scotland’s transport minister rejoiced at a 26,000-ton shipment from Peru that reached Leith docks. Wales saw its lowest ever November temperature of minus 18˚C, at Llysdinam. Some 850 schools remained closed for days in Scotland. Odds offered by Corals against a white Christmas at London Heathrow airport narrowed from 8 to 6-1. A North American disease deadly to trees, Phytophthora lateralis, was found on the shores of Loch Lomond.

The government set up another quango, Public Health England, to oversee national programmes such as vaccination, as part of a plan announced by Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, to relinquish the role of a nanny state in public health and, instead, nag or ‘nudge’ people by giving them vouchers for swimming and by hiding cigarettes in shops.