vivweb01blog

  A new Covid sub-variant responsible for a surge of infections in India is giving rise to concerns that it could also lead to a significant rise in hospitalisations and deaths in the UK this autumn. Research indicates that the new variant, named Arcturus, could be significantly more infectious than previous sub-variants in the Omicron series, which are still predominant throughout Europe and the USA. Also known as Omicron sub-variant XBB.1.16, Arcturus was first identified in January and has been monitored by the World Health Organisation (WHO) since 22 March, which upgraded it to a “ variant of interest ” in mid-April. WHO reports suggest that Arcturus doesn’t so far appear to be producing symptoms any more severe than the prevalent Omicron variants.   It has only one additional mutation in the spike protein, but lab investigations so far have confirmed it does exhibit increased infectivity over the other Omicron B variants, as well as the potential for increased patho...

  I’ve often wondered what might have happened to the UK’s fortunes if David Cameron hadn’t decided to hold a referendum on EU membership in June 2016. Given his obvious desire to see us stay in EU, and the adverse public opinion on immigration and its effect on jobs in particular at the time, I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering why on earth he did…. The Background Although he had promised a referendum in the 2015 manifesto, to be held some time during the lifetime of the parliament, Cameron had plenty of wriggle room and could easily have ‘kept his powder dry’ until much later in the parliamentary term, which he had already fixed at a full 5 years. Although the precise reasons why he went so early in the parliament aren’t 100% clear, I suspect a large part of the impetus was his failure to gain significant concessions on free movement from Brussels by early 2016. A detailed examination of the issues thought to have led to his decision can be viewed here . Some commentato...

  ASDA recently joined the other majors and the discounters in reducing the price of milk and there has been much hype in the media about this.  However what has not yet been extensively reported is an important policy change on price reductions which, I suspect, they were hoping to introduce ‘by stealth’ while consumer focus was diverted elsewhere. This move will have a far greater effect on some of the prices we pay than a few pence off the price of a ‘pinta’ – read on to find out why… Some Background I recently revised an article which was first published last autumn on supermarket food. This was a time when the cost-of-living crisis was beginning to hit us all hard. The article was primarily aimed at highlighting food waste and what we could do to reduce it, thereby saving ourselves money and helping protect the environment. What emerged at the time was that many people were already finding it necessary to use food banks to feed their families adequately, and those ...

This blog was originally published in October 2022. Given the efforts currently in progress to secure a solution to the NI Protocol , I've updated it to reflect changes since then, in the hope that it may contribute to a practical solution for import compliance monitoring. ****** I’ve often wondered why Brussels are so concerned about goods intended for use in Northern Ireland straying into the Irish Republic.... After all, UK was a member of the EU until very recently, and the standards we apply to our goods within UK are still closely comparable with those applied in EU. For the most part, this is likely to remain so, despite our current national obsession with 'going it alone'. Tariffs for UK goods imported to EU are effectively 'zero-rated' under the current withdrawal agreement, so there is little financial incentive to 'smuggle' goods into Eire from NI. The proportion of goods flowing into NI from UK that is destined for Eire is also very small.Why t...

In short – it stifles incentive and enterprise..... 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 ours in UK is no exception.  The many billions gobbled up by pandemic costs and the furlough scheme in particular were but one example of the financial challenges we faced, and these 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 more robust than it actually was....and building up our debt mountain alarmingly. These policies, which were in any case out of...

In case anyone is still trying to figure out how to insert links to other items within a single blog, try this remedy. No guarantees, of course, but it worked for me.... A.       Inserting an internal cross-reference using anchor points If you are someone who occasionally authors quite long blogs as I do, it can be helpful to your readers to provide links within the blog to other paragraphs or footnotes.  I haven't so far found an option for creating internal links with the current Blogspot offering – the only option available seems to be creating links to external sites via their full URLs (I may have missed something, so please let me know if you have found one).  You can, however, insert appropriate HTML code to create internal links yourself, since Blogspot does allow access to the HTML version of your blog directly via the 'Compose/HTML' toggle switch (mid-left of the display). This may seem daunting if you haven't handled HTML code before your...

  Recent events in China have confirmed that chairman Xi’s decision to go for ‘Zero Covid or bust’ was the wrong one, as suggested in my blog ‘ China and Covid’ back in March.  The SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA-n variants are now virtually unstoppable, due to their extreme infectiousness, and any attempt to eradicate the virus entirely from a population was always doomed to failure. If there were any remaining question in the minds of our epidemiologists about the impossibility of eradicating a coronavirus with this degree of infectiousness, China’s 3-year 'experiment' has now effectively proven the case beyond reasonable doubt.... The widespread prediction earlier this year that the Chinese population would eventually rebel against perpetual lockdowns is already coming to pass – the only question is how far the population will be prepared to go to achieve its aims - and how nasty it will get. This will be determined largely by how the CCP attempts to deal with it. One thing is c...