vivweb01blog

In short – it stifles incentive and enterprise, thus reducing our nation's productivity and its capacity to generate wealth..... Let me try to explain.... The Covid pandemic, Brexit, and more recently the worldwide ‘cost of living crisis’ have undoubtedly put a huge strain on many western economies since the start of the decade, and the UK is no exception.  The many billions gobbled up by pandemic costs and the UK's furlough scheme in particular were but one example of the financial challenges we faced, and the debt incurred will still have to be paid for somehow.  Raising taxes was a logical response during the first years of the pandemic in an attempt to pay down some of our mounting debt. Maintenance of ultra-low interest rates and effectively ‘printing money’ via quantitative easing was another means adopted to try and soften the immediate economic blow in the late 2010s, but unfortunately had the effect of making the economy appear far more robust than it actually was...

I first published this blog in November 2022 and revised it in December 2024. I've revisited it now (Nov '25) to coincide with the surprisingly radical reforms suggested by the new Home Secretary and provided some comments on prospects of sucess. ***** This is a particularly controversial topic, and has been foremost in our minds in UK since Putin’s Ukraine invasion and its migratory aftermath.  There are no hard and fast solutions to what is now effectively a global problem, but I'll attempt to provide some suggestions, and will focus primarily on our own issues with controlling illegal migration to the UK. The many crises and disasters occurring in other parts of the world are continuing to drive further migration ‘waves’ and will continue to do so over the coming years as resources become exhausted in some areas of the world and our species' population continues to increase unabated. This is a worldwise phenomenon, driven by the stark inequalities between 1st and ...

 Editor's Note: I've reproduced this article from a guide I put together recently for my website on what to do if your remote dies on you, or gets damaged or lost. You can download this as a .pdf version, which also contains some additional useful illustrations. It's available via this link . ---------------------------------------- Introduction One of the most essential, and also potentially annoying, modern inventions is the infra-red remote control. Virtually every electronic device we use nowadays comes with a dedicated remote of some sort, and a lot of the more recent models have been designed so that they won’t work at all without it. Many of us have already suffered the consequences of this clever move on the part of the manufacturers after we’ve either a) lost the remote for our TV or b) one of the kids has broken it or c) the dog has taken a bite out of it (or the cat's been sick on it - moggies are never blameless!). The resulting lack of a working re...