vivweb01blog

  I first published this blog in late 2023 when the realisation that vaping was harmful to teenage lungs was becoming more widespread, and the authorities were finally waking up to the fact that they needed to do something.  All the evidence that has emerged since then has tended to confirm our suspicions - i.e. that long-term vaping does impair lung function, and is likely to be doing so irreversibly. We should thus only be permitting the use of vapes strictly as an aid to stop smoking, and only for as long as is necessary to 'kick the habit'. If we fail to restrict availability, and don't manage to convince our kids as to the dangers, we will be condemning a whole generation to breathing problems in their middle and later years, with a serious burden placed on our perpetually overstretched NHS as a result. And it's not just the UK either, the problem seems to have spread worldwide , with 100 million plus now vape-addicted, no less than 15 million of them teenagers. Th...

Making long term predictions about political outcomes nationally is a risky process indeed. In some ways it’s comparable to weather forecasting – the earth’s atmosphere is a chaotic system and trying to predict its behaviour locally more than 2 or 3 days ahead with any degree of accuracy still presents us with many uncertainties, despite all our advances in predictive technology (including even AI!). And we’ve all seen recently how long a week is in politics nowadays, let alone a month, or indeed 3 years - chaos seems to reign there, also. Although 2029 is thus a very long way ahead from a political point of view, and Labour's leadership and cabinet teams will be focused on more immediate policy decisions, their advance planners will already be thinking hard, and I suspect with some trepidation, about their electoral prospects…and not solely for the next general election. After the hammering both major parties took in the May 2025 local elections, largely at the hands of Fa...