What happened
The Bank of England has lowered its main interest rate by 0.25%, taking it to its lowest level in almost three years, following a narrowly split decision among policymakers. The Monetary Policy Committee voted five to four to reduce rates from 4% to 3.75%, citing softer economic momentum and growing concern about the jobs market. While the bank expects borrowing costs to keep easing over time, it cautioned that future cuts would be harder to agree on. Inflation is now forecast to return closer to the 2% target earlier than previously expected, although the bank said economic output was likely to stagnate through the end of the year.

Who said what
“With every cut we make, how much further we go becomes a closer call,” said BoE Governor Andrew Bailey.

The good news is that “lower rates mean lower mortgage repayments”, said Karl Matchett in The Independent. However, if you have money in a savings account “it’s the other side of the see-saw: rates going down mean you’ll earn less interest”.

What next?
Bailey said he welcomed signs that price pressures were easing faster than anticipated after a recent spike, but declined to give guidance on the timing of further moves.

What happened
The Duke of Marlborough, Charles James Spencer-Churchill, has been charged with three counts of non-fatal intentional strangulation of his now-estranged wife Edla Marlborough over incidents that allegedly occurred between 2022 and last year.

Who said what
Spencer-Churchill married his second wife Edla (both pictured above) in 2002, but they separated last year. They have two children. Court records show that the three attacks were alleged to have taken place in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, the location of the family seat, Blenheim Palace. The Blenheim Palace Heritage Foundation, which owns and manages the property, said it was “unable to comment” on matters relating to “the duke’s personal conduct and private life”, and that were “subject to live, criminal proceedings”.

Spencer-Churchill, who inherited his dukedom in 2014 on the death of his father, is a “first cousin, three times removed, of Sir Winston Churchill and a distant relative of the late Princess Diana through the Spencer family”, said the BBC.

What next?
Spencer-Churchill was “unable to attend” Oxford Magistrates’ Court yesterday. District Judge Kamlesh Rana adjourned the case until a plea hearing scheduled at High Wycombe Magistrates’ Court on 5 January.

Russia’s demographic decline, turbocharged by the war in Ukraine, has given birth to “one of the world’s most extreme natalism campaigns”, according to The Atlantic.

The country’s fertility rate was 1.4 births per woman in 2023, according to the most recent UN statistics. That’s well below the 2.1 replacement rate and 20% lower than in 2015. And since then an estimated quarter of a million Russian men have been killed in Ukraine. “Last year deaths outpaced births by more than half a million,” added The Atlantic.

The state has been trying everything to encourage Russian women to have more children, from awarding pregnancy payouts and increasing maternal support, to denying access to abortions and stigmatising childlessness. The Ministry of Education is considering ways to create “conditions for romantic relations” in schools and pink banners around Moscow ask women: “Still haven’t given birth?”

Russia is employing all kinds of restrictions to halt its shrinking population of young men, including outlawing LGBTQ activism. But the post-Soviet cohort is already small and hundreds of thousands of men have either been killed in Ukraine or fled abroad to avoid military service. “You’ve got a much-diminished pool of potential fathers in a diminished pool of potential mothers,” Jenny Mathers, a Russian politics lecturer at the University of Aberystwyth, told The Independent.

Russia also handled the Covid-19 pandemic disastrously. “Or rather, we didn’t handle it at all,” a demographer told exiled Russian journalists, according to news site Meduza. “Russia ended up among the top 10 countries in the world for excess mortality.”