Straggler

25 minutes ago, BOF said:

Haas launch tomorrow. Haas launch tomorrow!

I'm genuinely looking forward to this one.  So interested to see where they are at after last year. 

14 minutes ago, Enda said:

 

The unrestricted transfer of goods across 28 countries with no checks is helpful when a country faces supply issues.

But how could this be?  They got all the big calls right!

Third place game still to come.  Really not a fan of the third place game, total waste of time.

1 hour ago, StefanAVFC said:

But nothing was ever going to be. There wasn't a definitive Brexit to be voted for.

So true, it was part of the strategy.

"You know that idea of Brexit in your head?  Yep, that is exactly what we are going to deliver. Anyone who says we can't do it is directly insulting you and your vision."

15 million people voted for Brexit and no 2 of them can agree on what it was they voted for, including the people who are delivering it now. 

The only thing I see Brexit voters agreeing on is that it wasn't supposed to be the version we are in now.

Then there is the special breed of person who can simultaneously hold the opinion that they got all the big decisions right, but that the agreement that they themselves negotiated is unacceptable and unworkable. 

Tun

1. a large beer cask

2. a measure of capacity, usually equal to 252 wine gallons

3. a cask used during the manufacture of beer

past tense: tunned

So for you to stay tunned you must first contain a large cask of beer or 252 gallons of wine.]

Challenge accepted.

1 hour ago, StefanAVFC said:

Happy Brexit day!

How about a coordinated attack on Starmer by prominent Tories to celebrate?

 

Nominative determinism, disproven by James Cleverly in just one tweet.

You can really see why they were so keen to introduce new legislation that effectively makes protesting illegal. It's probably only a matter of time before some minister says "it's not like the public are marching in the streets over this", after making said marching against the law.

The cost of govt fraud

Quote

Theodore Agnew was the model of a modern Tory oligarch. A successful businessman, he made enough to dabble in the new politics. He did all the right things. He backed a chain of academy schools and joined a Conservative thinktank, Policy Exchange. He donated a dutiful £134,000 to the Tory party between 2007 and 2009. Part-owner of an AI consultancy called Faculty, Agnew set it to work for Johnson’s Vote Leave campaign. He received a knighthood, then a peerage, and was then offered a ministerial post in Boris Johnson’s government, at the time being advised by the former Vote Leave director, Dominic Cummings. Faculty won a fistful of government contracts worth almost £1m. All in all, Agnew could feature in an Armando Iannucci satire on Boris’s Britain.

Then this week, Agnew went bang. Even he had had enough. In February 2020, he was given the Yes Minister title of “efficiency and transformation”, and in a speech on Monday in the House of Lords he was supposed to congratulate himself on his work. He had been one of the custodians of the £47bn of public money that had been dished out to private companies and banks in bounce-back loans between 2020 and 2021. However, of this sum, Agnew reckoned £17bn had been lost and at least £5bn of those losses were to fraud, or 1p on income tax. He clearly choked on the task asked of him. And then something unprecedented took place. A Johnson minister proceeded to tell the truth and resign on the spot.

Agnew estimated that total fraud across the public sector now ran at £29bn a year, or about 5p on income tax. The bounce-back loan fraud is estimated to have cost a third of the annual revenue of the new national insurance levy of 1.25 per cent due in April.

Not that I want to change the subject, but the idea that the Tories are the fiscally responsible party of business should be in tatters.  I don't like the 5p on income tax measure, as 5p inherently sounds small.  The money lost to corruption is staggering.

Gray was investigating parties that break lockdown rules.  That was the entire remit.  The Met don't want her to mention anything they may be investigating, which is parties that broke lockdown rules.  May as well print it in black ink on black paper.  But the Met do also say that Gray need not delay in publishing it.  It's ridiculous.  Not unexpected mind.  There is a reason why Boris and pals thinks the rules don't apply to them, it's because the rules genuinely don't apply to them.

2 minutes ago, TheMelvillan said:

Percy said that he had heard about it yesterday but that it would be in the summer.

Makes me think something has gone on in the background 

Ah yes, the classic story of journalist getting some transfer gossip and deciding not to publish it because it might not happen immediately. The integrity of the man knows no end. I bet he's going to tell his girlfriend that lives in Canada and no one has ever met all about it tonight.

He looked like he was going to be great when he was at Southampton. I have to admit I had forgotten he existed since he went to Arsenal.

Please stay till the end, pmsl.

Sorry, had to put this one in too as I love the movie:

23 minutes ago, The Fun Factory said:

Every time I check in to US politics it leaves very feeling very depressed and sad. I know our climate political climate is also dreadful, but in the US I can see a possible civil war in the future. Or at least hundreds of militia groups causing chaos. The system is ungovernable, Biden is past it and Trump is still lurking in the background ready to go again in 2024.

Yep, totally feeling the same. If you were running a playbook on how to turn a democracy into an autocracy, it would look a lot like this.  The Republicans are basically fascist now, deliberately undermining their own democracy, and the Democrats are extensions of large corporations with a President who was happy to be a lame duck from day 1.  If Trump gets back in, I can see the need of a number of fairly prominent opposition leaders needing to leave the country (Ilhan Omar, AOC etc). 

Fifa president: more World Cups could save African migrants from death in the sea

Quote

The president of Fifa, Gianni Infantino, has said his plans for a World Cup every two years could stop African migrants from finding “death in the sea”, in an extraordinary address to European politicians.

Speaking at a session of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, a trans-national body dedicated to the support of human rights, Infantino said that countries outside Europe needed greater access to national football competitions to prevent drastic consequences.

Not all hero's wear capes.

Really well taken goal.  Always well in control of the ball and sent the keeper the wrong way with the finish.

12 minutes ago, Genie said:

I personally think the report is damning towards the Met also hence they need to finally do something. Damage limitation from their side. Better late than never…

100% agree.  There is only so much arse covering that Johnson and Dick can do and all of a sudden Dick has realized that she can hardly cover her own arse let alone Johnson's so has decided to let him cover his own.  The problem is that as Johnson and Dick are trying so hard to cover their own arses, they will probably end up just shafting themselves in the process.  I'm sure Johnson will be unhappy to find that Dick has gone from covering his arse to pumping him for information.  They will both look back on this and wonder how they ever came to the conclusion that Dick was ever able to cover Johnson's arse.

15 minutes ago, Genie said:

Happy fish (because there’s no point catching them any more as there’s nobody to sell them to).

Nothing happier than a fish in muck.  Hang on, that's pigs isn't it? Or are pigs the things we slaughter and incinerate? Yes, that's right, our happy British fish swim in human (British) shit and we slaughter pigs so they can be burned and this is all part of the necessary post Brexit transition.

This picture was from 2018:

Only thing that has changed is the list has grown longer.

He is a f****** snake.  The lot of them are.  The austerity Marie-Antoinette "don't let them eat cake".