vivweb01blog

  There has been much reporting in the media recently about the 'rise and rise' of Nigel Farage’s Reform party, culminating in a row between Kemi Badenoch and Farage about his claims on snowballing party membership. This, and Labour’s abysmal performance since the July election, has inevitably led to speculation about whether our UK  2-party ‘first past the post’ system is still appropriate to our electoral needs. Before we look at the likelihood of anything replacing it , or indeed what might take its place, let’s look at the current state of the parties' fortunes. Labour, as we’ve already discussed, has not lived up to its electors’ expectations, and have made a series of strategic blunders, starting with the removal of the pensioner universal winter fuel payment just a few days into their term. Their many broken promises have made the leadership team highly unpopular, especially their PM and his chancellor, who are seen as responsible for the damage done. They have m...

  In a word, no..... Why ? Before I try to answer this question, here's some relevant background info.  In less straitened times, much more competition existed in the energy supply marketplace, and some quite competitive offers were available, particularly from new suppliers wanting to increase their market share. Amongst these deals were some involving tariffs which were ‘no standing charge’ i.e. you paid a higher unit rate for your gas and electricity, and only paid for the units you used, which were all priced at this higher rate.  This benefited low users of gas and electricity, and at the time these tariffs started to appear they were hailed by environmentalists as a much fairer and greener way of charging customers, given the urgent need for us all to consume less of the fossil fuels we use to power our boilers and generate our electricity. The recent upsurge in ‘raw’ gas and electricity prices, and the desire of the power supply companies to maintain their pr...

I first published this blog in November 2022 at a time when we were nearing the 50,000 mark for small-boat illegal channel migrants arriving in UK. Although many of the arguments are still valid, I've revised the content to reflect the current change in 'mood music' with the EU and the more robust home office stance announced, in the hope that some of the suggestions may prove useful in determining future government policy. ***** 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 beco...

  Just a quick 'heads up' on a very useful tool I came across some years ago for downloading BBC programmes direct from iPlayer servers – and have used regularly ever since. As a committed user of BBC’s services for many years previously, I joined the online viewing revolution and started using iPlayer in the early 2010s. Not being particularly keen on ‘live’ streaming, and in any case having a limited broadband download allowance at the time, I took to selective downloading of anything that particularly took my interest.  As for the old VCR recordings we all remember making in the 80s and 90s, the problem was finding time to actually watch what I'd recorded. I quickly became tired of discovering that much of what I'd painstakingly downloaded from iPlayer, and had finally got round to looking at, had already expired, and was unreadable due to Digital Rights Management (DRM)-protection.  A workround was therefore a must, and fortunately one presented itself in the form...