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UK Student loans, and more particularly the repayment of them, is a hot topic in the news at the moment.  The student body is clamouring for more favourable terms, given Reeves' recent threshold freeze, the burgeoning cost of living and rises in student fees. There are particular concerns about the affordability of the legacy (i.e. Plan 2) scheme which still applies to all loans taken out before August 2023. The majority of outstanding loan balances currently fall under this plan, and the terms of this loan scheme has resulted in crippling interest rates due to the built-in 3% surcharge above RPI, and the recent and quite prolonged spike in inflation, which resulted in interest rates well over 10%, at a time when most loan balances were still high.  The government is under pressure to act on this, and many are even starting to question whether a university education is really still 'value for money' in the 2020s, given the high cost, and the poor quality of some of the ...

Update 15.2.26 : This year marks a relatively rare coincidence of key events in two of the great Abrahamic religions - Christianity and Islam.  Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, and Lent, the Christian festival leading up to Easter, are important periods in the religious calendars which traditionally both involve  period of personal abstinence and reflection. It's no coincidence that the start of both of these periods are dependent on our only astronomical satellite, the Moon, which is by far the brightest object in the night sky and was thus an important determinant in the adoption of the early religious calendars. In the Christian calendar, the date of Easter is determined by the Paschal full moon and falles on the first Sunday thereafter each year. The 'drift' in the lunar calendar as compared with the Gregorian is responsible for its calendar variability, and causes the timing of Easter to vary over a period of over about a month from year to year (March 21-April 25). Le...

The NHS is 75 years old, and one of our most prized institutions. As you'll see from the analysis below, it is now  sorely in need of medical assistance   itself . How can we save it from its terminal decline ? Editors note: This blog was first published in August 2022 - in view of the steady deterioration in the service since then, which has now reached crisis point, not least because of the ongoing industrial action, I've  updated it to reflect the changes. The Election result has finally introduced some real soul-searching amongst politicians as to why the current funding and organisational model of the NHS is failing...unfortunately this is likely to be a tough nut to crack without a radical change in its funding model - which any Labour government will find difficult to square with its ideology. We shouldn't therefore expect much progress in this direction, despite Labour's large majority. Nevertheless, I stand by the original recommendation of a radical funding mo...