Gloucester Saint

Lost half a yard but still decent acceleration and a lot of craft/know how at PL level, which we aren’t exactly blessed with right now.

Blimey fellas, I’ll have to come down for a game soon and get the 🍺 in

That’s right. I’d been on since the start but when it moved to logging on with email, I’d changed it so long ago that it was easier to start again! Meant that I never was able to take up Turkish’s CoT offer after getting the Wilcox departure prediction right when he was hired 😉

Quite and thanks mate. I do agree with you and Duck a lot on the football generally, whereas that might not be true for all posters I agree on with non-football topics.

Thatcher was Prime Minister and still pushed for Savile’s knighthood, Steele Liberal leader and should have done better on Cyril Smith, I’d blame Thatcher less for that as Smith treated Rochdale as his personal fiefdom. Harriet Harman represented some groups she really shouldn’t have done in the 1970s. Just because Starmer was CPS Head for some of that time it doesn’t mean Al Fayed would have been a slam dunk case and the evidence was probably a lot weaker than today. Look at the Stephen Lawrence case, obvious who did it but what, only two of them prosecuted to this day. Daniel Morgan case too. Get it wrong and you are looking at a £50-100m trial against a plaintiff with bottomless pockets to buy the best lawyers on the planet. I don’t know what evidence he had presented but I’m not going on a witch-hunt by the Telegraph which was very slow on Thatcher’s 1980s errors of judgement. Thanks for the reminder about the Bursledon/Netley case I did note the poster who disappeared from here for a while and saluted his courage at the time in sharing what had happened to him and his late neighbour which was dreadful. Without giving any identities, people close to me experienced something similar historically and perpetrators are devious bastards quite often which makes justice very difficult to get. Someone living their life without re-opening a can of worms is not cowardice. I’d rather not meet up with someone to exchange insults with someone, I’ll pick my posters to socialise not be provoked to do so. Call me old fashioned, but the games I do attend this season will be old friends and family from Soton, maybe the odd poster on here who I can discuss Dibling’s step over in the previous game with, or Martin’s formation. You know, fun. I’d be happy to have a pint with say Duck or Hypo even though we disagree on non football, but I don’t voluntarily spend time with abusive, adversarial people where I’m not paid well for the hassle. That’s for the workplace. If your posting style changed, even if our views don’t agree, then the door would be open as we are Saints fans if nothing else. Buctootim’s experience doesn’t hold out much hope. Ball in your court.

See the post above I made - unlike GM you actually tend to discuss these topics rather than cut and paste then hide, even though we come from different perspectives. This country has a historic problem with dealing with and getting prosecutions on very high profile historical abuse cases. Which the libel laws are not helpful in. But when the authorities go too early and/or there’s a weak or false accusations - Sir Leon Brittain, Sir Cliff Richard seemingly, our former manager - look at the damage caused. Yes, Thatcher, Steele, Starmer would turn the clock back with hindsight if they were all still alive, but they made decisions what with they had available evidence/witnesses/resources and in the context and culture of the time. Far easier with hindsight, hindsight is never wrong.

Which doesn’t mention Starmer once you dopey old dick. You know that the bar to actually build a successful prosecution against people with that wealth, level of connections and the lawyers they can buy is extremely high right? I don’t think the fact it’s like that but always has been. A trial where you think you might win, but aren’t sure, and don't is highly embarrassing, let’s the celebrity if they are probably guilt off free with sympathy and wastes tens of millions of pounds, seeing as you hate any form of public expenditure. Look at the match-fixing arrests of the mid-90s, there was apparently a strong case against all three, and the CPS went to trial, and of course the famous Sun video. Still couldn’t secure a conviction https://www.lfchistory.net/Articles/Article/1893 If you are determined to politicise this then Thatcher kept close company of quite a few proven pedophiles - Savile, Peter Morrison, awarded Cyril Smith a gong. David Steele had to resign from the Lords over Smith. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23355531 https://news.sky.com/story/thatcher-turned-blind-eye-to-paedophile-mps-10368694 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/02/thatcher-peter-hayman-named-paedophile-archives https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11381191/Margaret-Thatcher-warned-of-paedophile-scandal-secret-documents-reveal.html https://www.dw.com/en/uk-politicians-turned-a-blind-eye-to-child-sexual-abuse-for-decades/a-52527161 Personally I don’t want to blame Thatcher or Starmer, these type of wealthy, powerful and well connected abusers are very adept at covering their tracks and manipulating others. But if you and others want to be partisan and immature then I’ll keep rubbing your nose in it. issue is as well that many of the victims are often intimidated until the accuser is deceased as we’ve seen, and the critical mass could have made a difference as the Weinstein case showed. But look at how difficult that was.

Classic GM tactics, get humiliated in one of the obnoxious threads he’s started and cut and paste in another of his threads an article out of context from the Telegraph, this time on the Huw Edwards thread. The old loony loves the attention.

Guess which newspaper GM just cut and pasted from?

Hilarious that John cites the IEA when their handpicked candidate for PM lasted what 49 days in global infamy and laughter. And he’s getting so upset by all of the responses correcting all of his old shit 🥹🥲😂

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/institute-of-economic-affairs-liz-truss-2022-accounts/ That’s ok GM, just cut back on the booze. It’s really the community in Lowford who deserve your apology

Productivity wasn’t the main issue, it was lack of trained drivers which the previous government took a positive step on by lowering the driver qualification age, otherwise it was all underpinned by overtime working to deliver a core service. Which would have cost far more. No love for either ASLEF or RMT btw whatsoever.

Have Arsenal as his freebie but fade the others away would be my advice to him. He will be held to a different standard to a Tory leader, unreasonable though it is.

I’d need to look into the figures more but as a country we urgently need to though for productivity because the congestion in towns and cities, which was never good, has become intolerable. If we didn’t have a portion of the workforce on a hybrid working model we’d be really stuffed. The built up places immediately near me - Cheltenham especially doesn’t move 7.30-9, and Gloucester little better. Slightly further afield Birmingham and Bristol are giant car parks at peak time and not much better on the weekends. Even towns on key routes are bad eg Stowe on the Wold around here. Whereas to Bristol and Birmingham via a short drive and park up at the station, it’s less than an hour door to door. Half what it is in the car and then you’ve got find parking etc. And you can work on the train, when the first don’t cut the services because of a lack of drivers and make the next service like a sardine can. Remember as a youngster sitting in hideous traffic in Southampton because Northam Bridge was closed or Itchen Bridge, or horrendous post-match congestion. No point in getting people fit for work via the NHS and not being able to get them to their workplace.

Or certainly bankrupted, I bet some loony billionaire bails him out though.

Quite possibly, I must admit that with family illnesses, renovating a house and busy period of work I’ve not followed the story as closely as I might normally. I share yours and Kraken’s concerns about the levels they are reaching, the optics are not great, and whoever is in his inner circle needs to get this across quite directly. Private Eye, which I get every fortnight, has been keeping a running tally on the football tickets which I thought was getting inappropriate/disproportionate as I’m sure many others did.

Broadly I agree and Reeves is high up there as well. Private Eye has been warning for a while about the amount of just free football tickets and now he’s PM he will need to be more circumspect. As an incoming PM everyone wants to get your ear but now it’s a bit different, especially when you’ve replaced a government widely acknowledged to be almost owned by Tufton St in particular at one point (this reduced somewhat post-Truss disaster). If you promise you be different you have to broadly keep to that. The other aspect is that at least he is declaring it all. I seem to recall this was a real issue with Boris around decelerations and following procedures.

Private Eye has been reporting on this for a while so it’s not new. I think Starmer needs to be a bit more careful around the football freebies but generally a leader of the opposition will be a major focus for donations and interest - Blair was and Cameron was - but it’s whether those donations translate in concrete shifts in policy advantaging donors. Also, the figures aren’t so meaningful without some kind of breakdown of where they are from. Also, unless it carries on and escalates over time on government, I don’t think it will present too many problems.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0022yv2?at_mid=9ugXTb4Q2f&at_campaign=The_Coming_Storm_Series_2&at_medium=display_ad&at_campaign_type=owned&at_audience_id=SS&at_product=sounds&at_brand=w13xtvmt&at_ptr_name=bbc&at_ptr_type=media&at_format=image&at_objective=consumption&at_link_title=The_Coming_Storm_Series_2&at_bbc_team=BBC

Fair to say Nic is an aficionado of the Loose Change films https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_Change Whilst slickly presented, the WTC segments have some significant flaws in terms of the knowledge of how the towers were constructed in the late 60s/early 70s, and how steel behaves when exposed to those temperatures, plus the issues with fireproofing it to modern standards (as the spray on asbestos was knocked off on impact and it only went up 40 floors and was in the process of being replaced) https://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/0112/Eagar/Eagar-0112.html

I’ve heard they can be quite restricting.

One of my university friends from a very elite public school worked in Sainsburys for beer money. On that basis he’s working class too.

Fair enough, as long as he takes Guided Missile aka John Misselbrook with him.

Now crawl back under your rock https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23355531 PS - Trump was found to be a sexual abuser. And you support him fervently https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/01/29/donald-trump-rape-e-jean-carroll/72295009007/