Portrait of the week: Record migration, nurses on strike and Christmas turkeys struck down

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Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, proposed in his speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet to treat China with ‘robust pragmatism’. The Chinese ambassador to Britain was summoned to the Foreign Office following the arrest and beating of a BBC journalist, Ed Lawrence, in Shanghai. Net migration reached 504,000 in the year to June – the highest recorded, the Office for National Statistics estimated. A man was arrested in Gloucestershire over the deaths of at least 27 people who drowned in the Channel in a dinghy last year. Migrants with symptoms of diphtheria would be put into isolation, ministers said, as more than 50 cases were detected. The Online Safety Bill retained a clause obliging the removal of ‘legal, but harmful’ material, if only for those under 18; some feared it could bring in censorship. The former prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss supported an amendment to the Levelling Up Bill to allow construction of onshore wind farms.

Jaguar Land Rover reduced output in Solihull and Halewood until the spring, because of a shortage in supplies of computer chips. The Royal College of Nursing announced strikes on 15 and 20 December; Great Ormond Street children’s hospital and the Royal Marsden Hospital specialising in cancer would be among those affected. Ambulance drivers planned strikes. The RMT union would hold rail strikes in December and January; regional strikes were also planned. Postmen continued with their strikes. Driving test examiners would go on strike. BT prevented strikes by offering workers another £1,500. The Conservative MPs Dehenna Davison, 29, William Wragg, 34, and Chloe Smith, 40, would not stand at the next election. Half the 1.3 million free-range turkeys produced for Christmas in Britain had been culled or had died because of avian influenza.

The census of 2021 had only 46.2