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The UK's Social Media Obsession – Is it Affecting Our Kids’ Mental Health ?

  The large increase in mental health referrals in the UK's younger age groups since the end of the pandemic has finally got the UK government worried…and so it should. Why ? We have at least 1 million young people in UK classified as ‘NEETs’ (i.e. Not in Education, Employment or Training), and a significant proportion of these are likely to be in this category because of mental health issues. More and more of our youngsters, including some under 5s, are also being diagnosed with some form of mental health issue, and not all of this is likely to be due to the 'over-diagnosis' phenomenon that has been hitting the headlines recently. There is an increasing tendency to blame excessive social media use for this problem; it is not only a drain on the treasury via the benefits bill, but represents lost work potential, which can't be helping our woeful national productivity figures. Perhaps more importantly, it damages the prospects, and the morale, of the young people t...
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UK Income Tax and the 2025 Budget: Did She or Didn’t She ?

  As a follow-up to the budget, and my recent pre-budget blog on the likelihood of Income Tax rises, I’ve tried to answer the simple question in the title i.e. Did Labour break their manifesto promises by raising the rate of one of the 3 main taxes – i.e. Income Tax, NI or VAT ? The short answer to this question is...Yes, they did, despite their protestations to the contrary.  Read on to find out why..... November' budget was a complex affair, and seemed almost to be designed to confuse. It was widely anticipated by industry and the general population as a "death by a thousand taxes", and certainly lived up to the prediction. Much was made of sticking to manifesto promises, almost to the point of obsession by the Party, in the weeks before the budget, to the extent that Reeves was eventually forced to 'chicken out' of her planned 2p across the board rises in direct tax on income in order to head off a widely anticipated rebellion by her 'unruly' back...
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Did the Universe Really Start with a ‘Big Bang’ ?

  A couple of years ago I attempted to answer the question ' Are we alone in the universe '.  At risk of appearing to be a 'glutton for punishment',  I thought it would be useful to follow this up by looking at an even weightier and perhaps even more topical question - 'How did the universe start and how will it end ?'. There is a lot of argument about this currently, with the principal 'Big Bang' theory (BBT), until recently taken as gospel by cosmologists, now being challenged in the light of new evidence from the JWST. More evidence suggesting the presence of 'bio-signature' gases in the atmosphere of a 'nearby' (relatively speaking!) exoplanet has also caught the media's attention and promoted discussion about our place in the universe recently, thus re-igniting the debate. Another recent development was the observations on supernovae from DESI suggesting the universe may already have started contracting again. Read on for a short...
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