Society

The arts cuts have arrived. The biggest loser is English National Opera whose annual award of £12.6 million will be replaced by a grant of £17 million, over three years, to cover the costs of a move from London to a regional centre, probably Manchester. ENO boss Stuart Murphy has complained that it’s unfair to confiscate money from a company that admits under-21s for free. But while it’s kind of him to give unsold seats to youngsters, it probably doesn’t justify an annual award of millions. In theatreland the prestigious Donmar Warehouse has lost every penny of its subsidy. And the National Theatre is to forfeit £850,000 but retains the

The Bishop of Oxford, Steven Croft, has come out in favour of gay marriage – the first senior bishop to do so. He has apologised to gay Christians that the Church has dragged its feet, and that his own views have been slow to change.  He is right to call for change. But I don’t think he needs to apologise that the change has taken, or rather is still taking, a long time to come. I think that the Church has been right to approach the issue super-cautiously. Gradualism is sometimes good. The orthodoxy says otherwise: ‘justice delayed is justice denied’. But in this case, such rhetoric is impatient and

Some rare cheer: millennials are divorcing less than their parents. This might be cause for celebration if the long-term prognosis for marriage wasn’t so poor. Last year, divorces spiked by ten per cent: 113,505 couples broke up in 2021, compared to 103,592 divorces in 2020, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. Divorce laws allowing couples to avoid pinning the blame on each other and backlogs caused by the pandemic are likely to be to blame for the rise in breakups.  Tucked away inside these numbers, however, is a graph that contains a glimmer of good news: millennials are divorcing a lot less after ten years of marriage