Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to reveal in the next budget a sharp increase in taxes on sports betting. Unsurprisingly, betting giants are threatening to close their shops, claiming the tax will force them to make thousands of redundancies. The CEO of BetFred said the change would lead them to close all 1,300 betting shops in the UK. Entain, which owns Ladbrokes and Coral, also says it would close swathes of its 2,300 shops.
Artificial intelligence seems to be growing ever more prevalent in society. Programs like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and others are being increasingly used for everyday tasks, from planning holidays to checking grammar, but a darker side is threatening families.
Recently the Government floated the idea of increasing Sunday trading hours – supposedly this was meant to help keep large businesses sweet because there was going to be a tax hike. However, thanks to people speaking out against it, the Government has indicated it was only ‘flying a kite’ to gauge people’s opinions, and that it wasn’t seriously thinking about it.
All of us at the Institute were deeply saddened to learn of the passing last month of Lesley Scott, who worked tirelessly alongside us as part of the NO2NP campaign.
An article in The New Statesman this week was entitled ‘Let them die: the case for assisted dying’. Its author, political journalist Oli Dugmore, best known as editor of men’s website JOE.co.uk, gave an astonishingly one-sided take of the issue of assisted suicide, which failed to engage with any concerns and simply declared that legalisation is in everyone’s best interests.
Today is World Suicide Prevention Day — a global reminder that every life matters, and that those in despair deserve to be given hope, help and care.
