Aniseed Balls

  This year the format for the Championship League Snooker competition is very inequitable. It works like this. There are twenty-five entrants, of which seven are placed in Group 1. They play a round-robin tournament and the top four then play a knockout to decide the winner of the group. The winner qualifies for the Winners Group, and the remaining other four of the top five progress to Group 2, joining three other players from the original twenty-five. The bottom two are eliminated from the competition. This whole process is repeated until Group 7, when only the winner qualifies for the Winners Group, the other six players getting eliminated. The Winners Group then contains the seven players who won a group. Again, they play a round-robin and the top four play a knockout for tournament winner. Players win money by winning frames, getting through to the play-offs, winning a group or being runner-up, and by making the highest break in a group. The rates for these are differen...

The most important part of addressing regional inequality in the UK is funding. The new UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) is due to launch in April 2022. But what the government seem keen to hide is that this is just a replacement for EU structural funding that will soon end. The EU's European Regional Development Fund and European Social Fund are allocated by looking at per capita GDP by region, and then member state governments have discretionary powers to reallocate some funds between regions. The UK used these powers to reassign some funds from England to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We also had an agreement for funds to be administered by our devolved governments. These two funds together support innovation and research, information technology, small- and medium-sized enterprises, employment-related projects and vocational skills training, including youth employment, as well as the promotion of a low-carbon economy. For the seven-year tranche of funding 2014-2020, t...