Wes Tender

"Remoaner"? If it rankles, then don't respond. I think it is perfectly fitting epithet for all those on here who four and a half years after they lost the referendum vote, still persist in sobbing their little hearts out about how unfair it all is. Just as you are doing here. Should the UK leave the EU? A question inviting a response, yes or no, and in a referendum, the majority response will be acted upon. The UK should leave the EU. An opinion statement inferring that it would be an advisable course of action. The UK will leave the EU. A statement of the course of events. But if you still have difficulty in understanding the difference, I'm sorry for you.

Your comprehension of the English language is a bit weak if you don't recognise the difference in context between the use of "should" as part of a question and "should "as part of a statement. I don't recall the remoaner media ever changing the phrasing to "Will the UK remain a member of the EU or leave the EU?" at least not until after we had already voted to leave.

Oh dear, you are suffering from a surfeit of remoaner misguided opinions on what we Brexiteers want, aren't you? We don't want the advantages of EU membership, whatever they might be, because the costs and responsibilities of having that membership were deemed to be too high and too detrimental to our independence as a sovereign nation. A similar FTA to that agreed by the EU with Canada, S.Korea and Japan will be perfectly sufficient, thank you. As for the tripe about us wishing to pollute the environment and treat employees badly, our standards in such matters are usually higher than they are in the EU and there is no reason for them to fall. Regarding trade competition, of course we want to be totally free to be able to pursue our own policies to be more competitive than the EU. You don't appear to realise that this is precisely the fear that the EU have, that we will be a serious competitor on their own doorstep, which is why they are trying to hamstring us into their restrictive regulatory regime. Naturally another reason for leaving the EU is that we will be able to set our own taxation rates. You seem somehow to think that will involve allowing the rich to pay little or no tax, something that the clever ones are perfectly capable of doing currently in the EU.

*yawn* At least you have skirted around the full phrase that he said, that a trade deal with the EU should be the easiest in history. Of course, all of the remoaner media changed that from should to would/will, which anybody with half a brain would recognise isn't the same thing. As we had already been part of the EEC and then the EU for nearing 50 years, then of course it ought to have been a simpler matter to organise a FTA with the EU than it would have been for them organising one with a third country from scratch. But Fox ought to have realised that the EU would act like a jilted lover, throw a strop, attempt to punish us for having the audacity to leave their cosy little cartel and feel the need to demonstrate to other member states that it wasn't going to be easy leaving the EU.

I' m pleased if it was, in preference to a deliberate Maradona. But next time, he will keep his arms down and appeal after the threat has passed, or acknowledge that if Brighton had scored, the run up to the goal would be checked by VAR.

Looking back at the highlights on J W-P's handball, was it the case that he thought that Welbeck had hand-balled it and raised his arm to appeal? Otherwise it looks a really unnatural positioning of his arm unless it was deliberate, but he must know with VAR that he couldn't get away with that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WI9lJchSp4

A dour workmanlike performance all round. Brighton are a good team defensively and solid, but lack the goal scorer up top. Perhaps we were lucky to have got the penalty, but had it not been given, Ward-Prowse could have advanced his credentials by making it three in a row. Hasenhuttl made the right substitutions and tactical changes at half time and we looked better for it, winning the fifty fifty balls more often and improving our forward momentum, with Ings increasing the threat in the box and generally putting himself about well. We had a good spell for the last twenty minutes and after the penalty goal, we passed the ball around well denying Brighton possession apart from the odd slip up giving them the ball, but they didn't use it well mostly. 5th in the league after eleven games and no team having opened up a large gap at the top is an incredible achievement. And we broke the Monday night jinx too.

Yes, as you say, Brighton have done well tactically and we need to get more width into our play and move the ball quicker, or some better diagonal balls over the midfield.

What was Ward-Prowse thinking about giving away a really stupid handball like that? We look off the pace for some reason and aren't commanding the midfield, lacking the width, not closing down quickly enough and moving the ball really slowly.Our best chances are coming from dead ball situations and thankfully one has produced an equaliser, with a quite magnificent header from Vestergaard. With Djenepo on a yellow and not doing much otherwise, maybe time to bring on Redmond for the second half and get him to partner Bertrand more effectively. Walcott hasn't been firing on all cylinders either, so Ings on for him 10 minutes in?

I really won't get too bothered about criticism about the misinterpretation of policies by an individual when I have to endure it on a daily basis from the mainstream media of this country on current affairs issues, particularly involving Brexit, government's policies, immigration, law and order, the Chinese virus, etc. I just find myself in broad agreement with most of his opinions on this and also on the BLM Marxist organisation, in the same way that you probably agree with media opinions about the misrepresented stuff on that list of mine. But he is right to point out how ridiculous it is that we have had to endure all this ruckus started by events in the USA months ago, as if campaigns over here will make one jot of difference to how the USA police operate and when we scarcely have any comparable concerns about how our police work. The longer it goes on, the more fed up people are becoming about it

It's simple enough, the FA should just send out a message that the point has been made and that the virtue signalling kneeeling by the players should cease forthwith. There was nothing wrong with their original campaign "Kick out racism" and fans were aware that racist behaviour would mean the offending fan/s being banned. Time to go back to that.

For the thousandth time back, it doesn't seem the have penetrated that the "taking the knee" gesture is associated by most people with the BLM organisation. If you don't believe me, just watch the Christmas edition of BBC wokeness programming, The Vicar of Dibley, when the eponymous Vicar puts up a BLM poster on the Church notices board and takes a knee, (although she probably needed a crane to lift her up to her feet again).

You'll feel free to itemise the parts of the BLM movement's manifesto that you think O'Neill attempts to misinterpret, and refute them, won't you? When it became clear that BLM was a Marxist organisation pledged to defund the Police and overthrow the capitalist system among other things, I read their aims and objectives on their website and saw little to disabuse myself of my original conclusions about it.

I look forward to fans from all football clubs booing this ridiculous virtue signalling nonsense.

Sums up the whole sorry charade perfectly. The Woke brigade have taken things too far and there will soon be an increasing backlash against it.

I agree with the opinions expressed that "Kick racism out" was a perfectly acceptable slogan to be displayed around grounds and signalling a club's policy that encompassed retribution towards fans that behaved in an unacceptable manner via racist chants and gestures. However, if fans choose to show their dissent towards this ridiculous gesture of "taking a knee" by booing it, they can argue that it is an expression of opinion against a Marxist political movement whose aim is to defund the police and destroy capitalism. The FA have badly misjudged this situation and if they wished to virtue-signal their wokeness by suggesting that all clubs undergo this ridiculous gesture connected to BLM before every match, they should have had the sense to have dropped it before stadiums were allowed to admit fans, as it was clearly going to be the case that it would cause dissent. In the same vein, but in a different environment, I understand that the BBC in their flagship Christmas Day entertainment, are featuring a new episode of "The Vicar of Dibley", wherein they have the eponymous Dawn French Vicar giving a sermon on black lives matter, and "taking a knee". Needless to say, I will not be wasting my time watching this woke lefty crap. And then the supposedly unbiased BBc wonder why there is a growing campaign to have them defunded with viewers deserting them in droves. Of course, the big-eared crisp salesman had to stick his oar into this Millwall booing BLM episode too, but although he is one of the BBC's top paid presenters, apparently he is immune from criticism or rebuke from the BBC for expressing his political views on social media, as he isn't directly an employee.

Two flies in the ointment. Firstly Boris has pledged that the Internal Market Bill will return to the House next week and that the amendments passed in the HOL will be overturned. The EU has said that if this legislation goes ahead, the trade deal is off. Secondly, the little Napoleon Macron, has stated that unless the French continue to get unimpeded access to our coastal waters fish stocks, they will veto the trade deal. I expect that Macron is also behind this hypocritical nonsense of wanting to tie us to rules prohibiting us from granting state subsidies to our industries, whilst allowing the EU to subsidise theirs, as well as the additional ludicrous new demands the little twerp is making over fisheries. David Davis might well be right in his conjecture that if a trade deal is agreed, there could be a freeze on customs arrangements for a short period allowing that deal to be ratified. But this should not be interpreted as an extension of the Implementation Period. That ends on 31st December and if no trade deal has been agreed by that date, we are out on WTO terms, or Australian terms, or whatever it will be called. The EU appears to believe that after a few months of initial organisational difficulties, we will implore them to give us a deal on their terms, but they will be bitterly disappointed. We should then tell them if they are prepared to offer a Canada/Japan/S.Korea style without caveats over fisheries/level playing field/governance, then we will be happy to discuss it. If they aren't prepared to offer that, then we will take full advantage of our freedom to give our economy the maximum competitive advantage via state subsidies, investment and taxation, so that they will come to rue the day that they tried to hamstring us during these negotiations.

It is only the closest part of France that is 22 miles away. Lots of EU produce has to travel much further across the continent, but 22 miles does sound nice and cosy. But I agree that it makes sense to increase our trade with the dynamic newer trade blocs growing around the world, whilst the EU is a declining force in comparison. But of course we are not shunning trade with the EU, that will continue whether we have a FTA with them or not.

Of course we have rejected the SM/CU exactly because of the so-called four freedoms. If we leave without a deal, which after all the shenanigans the EU is trying to pull in these negotiations is my preferred option now, we will just have to wait and see what the implications of that will be. Naturally I'm inclined to think that they will be less serious than the project fear mongers attempt to make out, with under 10% of businesses exporting to the EU. Regarding services, you don't hear much about that because it will do just fine. Again the remoaner agenda attempts to trumpet any little snippet of stories of financiers and banks moving out of London to Frankfurt or Paris. Much of that hasn't come to pass, and there are equally as many instances of traffic going in the other direction from the EU to London, which again the remoaner media are a bit reticent to report. Thank God that we left when we did, before the Chinese virus bit hard on our economy and the EU's. Can you imagine how much they would have expected us to pay into the EU virus slush fund?

Just as there are noises being made suggesting that a deal can be arranged today, or if not Monday, up pops Macron leading others to place some totally unacceptable 11th hour new conditions on the deal, much of it to do with fisheries. I don't know whether it is true or not, but I read that when the trade talks commenced originally, the EU position was that the fisheries agreement should extend to a period of 50 years! Then from wanting a status quo situation to what they had under the CFP, to catch a majority of our fish in our waters, they have recently offered to return 15/18 percent of their catch to us. Boris in turn has reduced our demands to 60% from 80%, but it seems that the gap is still too wide for Macron, who doesn't appear to realise that without a deal, the EU will be entitled to claim a big fat zero fish quota from our coastal waters. It seems that the EU position, led by Macron, is to allow the talks to fail before the 31st December deadline, wait for a short time to pass on WTO terms, and then re-commence them when we come crawling back to them cap in hand, willing to accede to their every whim in order to get a FTA. If ever a cunning plan was doomed to failure, this is it. Macron has badly misjudged the British character. We will not return to the talks unless they beg us too, and on condition that they accede to our red lines, or else we will be entirely happy to have the normal access to their market that any third country does under WTO terms. This situation will almost certainly cause very bad damage to our relationship with the EU, particularly the French. but they and the EU will be the bigger losers. Regarding your point about customs checks, paperwork, border delays, etc, as they export more to us than we do to them, it follows logically that the impact of those problems will fall more heavily on them, will it not? Have their politicians grasped the implications of that do you think?

There were large parts of the game where we had control with good passages of passing and movement. It was later in the match when we got tired and United brought on players of World class with fresh legs that the midfield became sloppy and the tables turned in their favour.

Maybe we were a little lucky to have a clean sheet, but no way were we lucky to be two up. The first was an excellent header by Bednarek and the second from Ward-Prowse would have beaten any goalkeeper in the world. For all of United's quality in attack, their defence was pretty poor.

Sickening. I would have fancied us to win that had Ings been fit. In the end, it was the quality in depth that the ultimate glory team has that made the difference.

Typical stream commentary whenever a glory team is playing us, particularly United; when they were on top the commentary was all them. Naturally our goal was against the run of play, fair enough, but then gradually it grew more to praise how we were playing and how we were gaining more possession and looking more dangerous. Then when Ward-Prowse struck his incredible free kick, and we were playing really well after our confidence boost, it became a case of saying that get a goal back and United could be back in it. Also out came the statistics about how many times we/them have gone on to win/come back to win/draw from a two goal deficit. If we manage to hold on to a win, or increase our goals, it will normally said that United played poorly, rather than we played well, but the way that we have played recently is changing the punditry towards what a difficult team we have become to defeat.