vivweb01blog

I last published in April on the whys and wherefores of our ‘broken’ immigration system .  By that stage the government had realised that 'Stopping the Boats' was a make or break problem for them, and was just starting to get focused on more active deterrence measures. The PM is now sporting it as one of his 5 principal objectives. However, since then their increasingly fraught campaign has, perhaps predictably, come up against many obstacles and delays, mainly due to unwelcome human intervention. As the Bard might have put it, “..One barge-load does not a solution bring….”, particularly if the new 'clients' are disembarked within a week of taking up residence because of 'health concerns'.  In the absence of either of our major political parties coming up with any really effective solution, and to avoid becoming even more of a laughing stock for the people smugglers, we should perhaps consider some more off the wall suggestions. One of the more inventive one

  The short answer to this question, I’m afraid, has to be:   Yes. Read on to find out why...... Introduction ‘Vaping’ is the administration of vaporised nicotine solution by inhalation. This form of nicotine intake has been growing in popularity for a number of years since it was first introduced as an aid to smoking cessation. Tobacco smoking was recognised as a major cause of death in the late 20 th century, but due to vested interests in the tobacco industry ( and the associated government revenues from taxation on tobacco products) serious attempts to limit the practice did not emerge until the late 1990s with anti-smoking campaigns and ultimately the banning of smoking in public places in the early 2000s by statute.  Smoking is still widely practised, however, and the use of vaping as a smoking cessation aid remains valuable and necessary from a health perspective. There is little doubt that the well-established harmful effects of smoking far outweigh the risks of vap

  As predicted, SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t finished with us yet…. After a lull in the flow of ‘Variants if Concern’, we now have another Delta to Omicron-style evolutionary jump in the form of BA.2.86. The main concern with this particular variant is that it has lots of spike protein amino-acid mutations. First, just how different is it to past and present variants ? Relative to Omicron BA.2 (its putative ancestor) the BA.2.86 Spike Protein has 34 mutations: 29 substitutions, 4 deletions, 1 insertion. Relative to Omicron XBB.1.5 (more recent strain recommended for vaccine development) it has 36 mutations: 32 substitutions, 3 deletions, 1 insertion. Relative to the early Wuhan-Hu-1, it has a whopping 58 mutations: 52 substitutions, 5 deletions, 1 insertion. The key point here is that the number of spike amino acid mutations in the BA.2.86 variant relative to BA.2 and XBB.1.5 is comparable to the number of mutations in first Omicron strains relative to Wuhan-Hu-1. Although it’s early

I first published this mini-review in July of last year - since the employment situation has worsened significantly since then, I've recently updated it to reflect recent developments and the prospects for our economic recovery.  It's important for the sake of our economy and our children's futures that we address our poor productivity as a nation. We can only hope to do this if we make maximum use of our home-grown talent. It's important that we now include more of our older workers in our workforce, whether they have retired or not, and we can only tempt them out of their 'economic inactivity' by providing strong incentives. The following article will I hope provide some practical suggestions on how we might do this. UK Government has, somewhat belatedly, declared this as a priority - time will tell whether they (or indeed their successors!) are prepared to put their (i.e. our) money and resources where their mouths are... -------------------------------------

There is little doubt that more and more of us are struggling to keep ourselves and our families fed at present. This unhappy situation has arisen because of a ‘perfect storm’ of adverse circumstances and events that have hit us all over the past couple of years, and which shows little sign of abating.  The pandemic is widely seen as the principal source of our recent decline in fortunes, but in reality our population demographics, Brexit, the Ukraine war, mistaken monetary policies and a decade of austerity introduced by the coalition government after the 2008 financial crisis, have all contributed. Food banks have been a lifeline for some of the least fortunate in society for many years.  Until relatively recently, however, the numbers really needing to use them were relatively small. Over the past year, however, the added financial pressure of sudden-onset and rampant inflation, and the rush by BofE  to raise interest rates in a vain attempt to restrain it, have pushed many more