Wes Tender

There is always the ignore button, Soggy. I recognise that you are probably still a bit sore from your party's ignominious defeat (whichever party it was) and that any counter opinions are rubbing salt in your wounds, but the reality is that the Tories are pretty well untouchable as the government for the next five years. As for the One Nation Toryism, we will just have to wait and see, won't we? I recognise that the Red Wall constituencies lent Boris their votes, but for some reason you don't think that it would be an intelligent idea for the Tories to implement the policies to try and keep them. Why would that be, Soggy?

Oi! The Keir Smarmy epithet is mine, Gavyn, and it fits him to a T. Personally I couldn't care a toss who is elected leader of the Labour Party or the Lib Dumbs, as both parties are the architects of their own downfall with the electorate and will not have much relevance as political forces for at least the next five years, perhaps even longer. By that time the UK will be thriving outside of the EU straightjacket and the Tories will have introduced One Nation policy initiatives to address the North / South divide, encouraging those Red Wall constituencies that they are the most competent party of government by the time of the next GE.

It was a turgid first half where Huddersfield lacked conviction and parked the bus and our second string team lacked the ability that comes from playing regularly with the same team mates and the desire, pace and guile to break them down. Long has the pace, of course, but didn't receive the service. A cup match against lower division opposition is an opportunity for Hassenhuttl to cast an eye over the second string and for them to make a case for their being promoted up the pecking order. Both of the 19 year old youngsters at least impressed by scoring, Vokins in particular showing the same promise up the left that he had when given a chance earlier in the season. His goal was really quite a spectacular strike and put the tie to bed close to the end of the match. Long's earlier strike was ruled offside by VAR amongst some doubts about that being the correct decision apparently. Thankfully because of Smallbone's goal early in the second half, Huddersfield were forced to be a bit more positive, cutting out the time-wasting and allowing the possibility that they would give us the extra space and opportunity to hit them on the break. But we never really seemed to avail ourselves of that opportunity until Armstrong, Cedric and Obafemi came on. It was easy to see why Vestergaard and Yoshida are behind the pecking order as CBs and why Danso doesn't feature more. Boufal should have shone against this sort of opposition, but he was in full Dele Alli mode, falling down all over the place instead of showing us the player he can be. Gunn had very little to do, as thankfully Huddersfield were a very poor team, so we got away with being sub-standard ourselves, with just enough quality to get the result. The important bottom line is that we are into the next round, kept a clean sheet and managed to have the chance of running the rule over a couple of youngsters and second string players.

I think that he must have a screw loose. The only Brussels he can help to thrive now, are those on his allotment.

I think that the penny might have finally dropped with the thick North Londoners that it is actually our song, one that we can sing not changing the word "Saints" to Spurs, United or anything else. As such, I think that they might have realised that singing it would risk us singing it at the same time, turning up the volume and the atmosphere for our players, rather than theirs.

Indeed.

Mourinho being Mourinho. Who was this idiot he refers to? It never seems to be him.

This has been a fantastic turnaround during the festive period and it seems that Hasenhuttl has hit on the right formation, tactics and the strongest starting eleven. A settled team over this period has enabled understandings to have developed between the players all over the pitch, the defence, midfield and attack. There is now an affective spine running through the team front to back. In the Spurs team, Son Heung-min might have tipped the balance their way, but their team is still filled with players of the highest quality in terms of ability. The edge we had was in terms of desire, cohesion and sheer grit. The sum of our parts was greater than the sum of theirs on the day, and frankly we outplayed them, much as we had Chelsea earlier. The style of our play reminded me very much of how we played under a former manager of both teams on the pitch, Pochettino. There was the high press, the high energy closing down and hunting in packs to regain possession when the ball was lost. Tactically, Hasenhuttl keeps up the momentum and pressure to the end of the game by replacing players who have run themselves into the ground with fresh legs of speedy substitutes who can also provide the threat of running onto balls over the top to pen the other team's defence back, but also to get back fast into defensive positions if required. Long and Obafemi are good at that, but Ings and Armstrong are the first choice to get you the lead from the start. Romeu is useful to add bite to a tiring midfield when the game needs to be seen out. Mike Dean had his usually poor refereeing performance, with the customary chants of "you don't know what you're doing" following a succession of free kicks awarded to Spurs for their players falling over if anybody breathed too hard on them, whilst ignoring many far more deserving appeals for fouls against our players. How he still maintains a place refereeing matches in the top flight is a complete mystery to me. How he ignored Alli's pathetic dives in our box on three occasions without giving him at least one yellow, was either incompetence, negligence or bias. At least he did manage to give one to Mourinho, but that was probably because the match was televised and he was playing to the gallery.

The way that it was phrased led you to misread it. I'm sure that the figure of 17.4 million (f*ck -offs) who voted to leave the EU in the referendum is fairly universally known, so it is obvious that not many would be misled by it, but well done for thinking I was trying to mislead you.

https://www.abports.co.uk/locations/fleetwood/ So this website for ABP is out of date then?

Read it again more carefully, please. A clear majority of the electorate who voted in the referendum voted for leave. Leave out the words "of the electorate" from my original statement if it helps you, but they were members of the electorate weren't they?

Fair enough, You just insult me and I'll just laugh at you. It works for me. I've read plenty of expert opinion backing up the generalisations I made, but naturally they are all idiots compared to the real experts, who are all on the remoaner side. It must rankle really badly that despite all their dire warnings, the electorate chose to ignore them. In the interest of balance, here's somebody calling a spade a spade from the Brexit side. I thought that you might like the updated version:-

Hello Gavyn. Felt the desperate need to insult somebody? Short of medication?

It doesn't illustrate your point at all. Nobody can predict the future with any certainty, but a majority of the electorate who voted in the referendum were satisfied that on the basis of our membership over the past forty seven years, we would probably be better off running our own affairs. Your argument about what people voted for works perfectly well the other way around. We voted to join a Common Market, not a Federal United States of Europe. We'll just have to wait and see how it all pans out economically, but my prediction is that beyond a couple of years, we will forge ahead and by the end of this parliamentary term, we will wonder why we didn't break free years ago. All the so-called experts who predicted an economic disaster if we left, are going to be many of the same ones who previously got egg all over their faces when they predicted the same calamity if we didn't join the Eurozone.

Get over it. Your lot, whoever it was, lost. Stop whining like a little baby.

You must have been looking at the wrong bus. It didn't say that we would be richer, it said that we wouldn't be sending £350 million a week to the EU and that we could spend it on the NHS instead. Are you richer for the money we spend on the NHS already? Not unless you are employed by them, I suspect. As for the factories closing, enough damage has been done to our manufacturing industries already by our membership of the EU. Many of our industries will receive a boost when we leave. Your families struggling to put food on their tables now, will benefit from us being able to import it at cheaper prices from the rest of the World, rather than from the EU protectionist racket for their farmers, particularly the French.

Please, please, please let it be Lady Nugee. She still hasn't the faintest idea why Labour lost, nor that it had a lot to do with the likes of her and her well publicised stance on Brexit. We should have had another referendum instead of a General Election she moans. But we had already had one and had not even implemented the result of that last one. And what would the question have been in this third one? Ah yes, it would have been some stitch up between accepting some deal that wasn't a proper Brexit, and remaining in the EU. She really is too thick to understand that there were two main reasons why Labour wasn't elected, and one was that the electorate were fed up with the those parties and MPs who had done their best to thwart the democratic decision to leave the EU. The other reason was that Corbyn and the current Labour Party were unelectable, and yet she doesn't feel the need to purge the party of Momentum. Mind you, she couldn't really say that that was her intention, as she will be relying on the votes of the Momentum mob to become leader. It is a similar conundrum to that which the party faced over Brexit, whether to support remaining in the EU to satisfy their metropolitan members, or to honour the referendum vote to leave and keep their voters happy in their traditional industrial heartlands. Labour was split down the middle, dithered and obfuscated and alienated both sides, whereas the Tories adopted a clear unambiguous position on Brexit and does not have any serious issues with any extreme element in the Party, (apart from in Gavyn's mind, that is).

No comment disputing what I said about how things will have changed by that time and the strings that the EU would attach to our rejoining? Surely you can't believe that they would be happy to let us back in on exactly the same terms? People voted to leave for myriad reasons. This "people didn't vote to be poorer" is a favourite remoaner sound bite. I suspect that for many they were happy to trade a degree of economic prosperity for an increase in our sovereignty. Anyway, no point in raking over old coals, is there? It would be years before the question arises about rejoining, if at all.

Which party did you vote for, Soggy? Does it not occur to you that far fewer people voted for them and what they stood for.

As the articles said, and you attempt to ignore, supporters of extremist parties will not be welcome in the Conservative Party. What a pity the same doesn't apply to the Labour Party and those who have joined it from the extreme left. It obviously went right over your head that my attitude towards the stories was to try to stifle a yawn towards them and to suggest that it must have been a slow news day for the lefty press to bother with it. They are non-stories. Unsavoury people latch on to all sorts of political organisations. Isn't it shocking?

What nervous tic? As I keep on having to tell you, Gavyn, I'm perfectly happy with everything since the glorious 12th. I'm just really enjoying the discomfort of the likes of you and Soggy having your little bleats about how unfair it all is. What really gets your goat, is that the political compass of people like me is far more closely aligned to that of the majority of the electorate than yours is, therefore if you don't mind, I'll ignore the usual arrogance of your little suggestion, Gavyn.

No doubt it could well have been a disaster had they prevailed with the wishy-washy BRINO, inability to walk away from a bad deal negotiating strategy. But when you say that they could soon be re-elected if it's a disaster, we would then be talking five years down the road and a campaign to rejoin the EU with them setting the agenda of us having to join the Eurozone, accept that it will be a much more federal set-up, pay billions for the privilege, join the EU army, and back in the CU and SM with everything that involves. Once we are out, we will not be going back in. More likely that the EU will collapse after we become successful and others follow us out.

*yawn* . Just as a matter of interest, when a clear majority of the electorate voted on a binary decision in a referendum to leave the EU, do you think it was democratic that the two thirds of constituencies that voted leave, were represented in Parliament by two thirds of MPs who voted to remain? Actually, who cares? That is all water under the bridge. Most of those MPs who thought that they knew better what was good for their electorates have now found out to their cost that they were the servants of their electorates, not their masters. Every single one of the so-called rebels lost their seat in the election, as well as many of those MPs in Labour's traditional industrial heartlands whose constituents were mainly leavers when the party had edged towards remaining in the EU.

The huge outcry about democracy was because the establishment elite were attempting to overturn the referendum decision. Now that they have failed comprehensively to achieve that, the arguments against Brexit being implemented are just p*ssing in the wind. This lurch to the right of the Tory Party is purely a figment of your febrile imagination, Soggy. It might appear to you that if one Party lurches to the left, then the other main party must have lurched to the right, but that is only by comparison between the two. But then again, you've never been capable of understanding that people do not suddenly become small minded racist bigots just because they voted to leave the EU, so that probably explains why you believe that the Tories have become more right wing. They haven't.

Oh look, articles from the Guardian and the Not Independent trying to stir the pot. Is that the best that you and they can do? Must be the slow news days, now that the Tories have a stonking majority. Is this the only way that they can metaphorically stamp their feet and throw their toys out of the pram, now that their total impotence to change the political landscape is beginning to penetrate their skulls.