blandy

No help needed. Er, anyway, hope all this current viral nastiness gets contained. We don't want the nasty thing spreading, and other gravy lovers being laid low by germ like organisms.

Labour list

The gravy goes on the chips.....mostly. It’s superior surf n’turf (due to the improved moisture content provided by said gravy).

Redeemed. Despite the gravy errors of your ways.

I don’t know you and we’ve never met. Goodbye.

No. Stop with that. We can never be friends. It’s yum

It's not the first time. He was doing it when the thing first surfaced. The bloke is a disgrace.

Yeah, that's probably true. I'm old enough to remember Southgate as a player here, and he was absolutely not arrogant. But yes single minded and determined and stubborn - as you say they sort of need to be, to be good. I think if he were arrogant, he wouldn't have watched Jack play so many times this season - he'd just have been like "No, I'm not picking him and I'm therefore not going to bother going to watch Villa". But I guess we're of the same view, as you say.

It's not taking Jack to know what a poor session looks like. That's not how it is. It's brilliant that as Deano says he's asking questions - "why" was that session like that. But for example a relatively light, unchallenging session may be put on because of a sequence of games, or because of the readings from the monitors they wear - risk of over work and resulting injury. Or maybe where some players lack confidence after a bad run, then the session is made "easy" to re-build confidence. But some players, Jack included will not themselves need their personal confidence building. If Deano is answering the questions with the reasons and Jack is gaining knowledge, then that's great. It's good that he's keen to want challenging sessions and to get better. I'm pretty sure that JT and Deano are both pretty well aware of what a good session looks like through both training and experience.

This is nonsense, IMO. He's the complete opposite of arrogant. He is stubborn, though, I'll give you that. He's a properly good bloke. I think the thing with him picking (or not) Jack likely stems from when JG was with the U-21s and was a bit, er, wayward, with some of his activities. So Southgate knows this and has needed to see 3 things. 1 a change of approach from Jack - that's happened. He's a model pro now. 2. Performance in the Premier League. This too has now happened. Now they both happened by much earlier this season (and before in the case of attitude. But the third thing is 3. A gap - basically there are a number of really good midfielders who have done pretty well for England. Given a manager needs to show some loyalty to have the respect of the players and to foster good team spirit he can't really just keep picking whoever is the current hot name and jettisoning someone who has had a bad game. Me personally, like every other Villa fan, I think he more than needs to be picked for what he will bring to the national team, but I can understand why he hasn't been so far. I don't really agree with the judgement Southgate's made, but I can see why he has. Jack will get picked, because Southgate is not going to cut off his nose to spite his face, and because he's absolutely not the arrogant type. The one from Leicester - Madison, too. They'll both get in soon and both deserve to. Who will they replace? No-one's playing badly. Even Barclay has been scoring goals for England, Alli is back on form, that West Ham lad is the defensive one. Henderson's been excellent, Stirling too....it's extremely hard to get in in midfield just because of the quality of all the players. But with Kane injured there may be a chancellor a new attacking midfielder to get in the squad in place of a striker.

In addition to the other suggestions maybe Peter Oborne (various media outlets)? Trouble is there are two types - there's the sane ones and there's the mad ones. Probably best not to go near the mad, throbby, ones - either in writing or real life.

That's true. "I'd have picked a different team", or I'd have picked player A instead of player B and here's why...." is kind of a good talking point for a message-board. whereas "Either he is lying and something has happened, or deano doesn't know how to pick the best players" is kind of (without evidence or back up) accusing him of being either a liar or incompetent with no basis, which is going to lead not to discussion, but to argument.

Yes, and I'd tie it to this from one of the tweets in the thread Now from personal reading and looking and stuff, I'd say (for me) they are/were incompetent in reality, not just through perception of extremism. I've said multiple times I liked about half their policies, and thought about a quarter were quite daft, so as a net liker of their policies, a mix of incompetence (much of which is not massively reported, but has leaked out since and a bit before the election), a truly dire leader and surrounding team, and then zealotry from a significant section of their members and supporters which actively hounded people away from supporting or considering voting for them, and as you say, or at least imply, a Brexity fudge that made no sense on the biggest issue, they were doomed and have been for a good period now. If they elect another Corbynite, the same will happen next time and the effing tories will win again. They've got to get the effwits, (see @bickster's example above) completely out of the party or at least any influence on it. I see also that the leader candidates are now falling over themselves (with one exception) to 'fess up about the way the party handled anti-semitism and admit they got dealing with the problem wrong, and that there is/was a problem. That's a start. It's not me saying more left wing people couldn't win, but that you can't have a set of people setting the direction who formed their opinions in the early 70s on everything and then if challenged on them get all pissy. They need to be able to provide valid arguments, and address challenges to their orthodoxy and views and listen and adapt and persuade and engage, not get the hump and let their accolytes start with the trolling and abuse while turning a blind eye themselves.

That's right, I think, at least the first part - the matchwinners in the sides. The "it would be different if..." part I look at slightly differently, but only a bit - I think we've too many who are inconsistent - they're pretty much all capable of playing a game well in the Prem, at the necessary standard, but they're hampered by lack of experience, or unfamiliarity with the nature of the football to do it consistently - so Trez, or Ghazi, or Konsa or whoever will play OK one game and then be off the next - so there's too many too inconsistent. It's not that they need to be match-winners, as such, but that they need to be consistently "OK" at Prem levels. Add that to the ones who are consistent - the ones you mention, and we'd be fine. It's been individual poor games, and errors from players that have cost us as a side. All players have off days, but too many of ours do it too regularly through essentially not being used to the pace and intensity of it, and the need to not switch off, even for a moment. There are lot of talented players in lower leagues, but the thing that stops them being Prem players is the ability to consistently reproduce high levels of performance. It's not skill lacking, or pace, or whatever, in most cases, it's a kind of mentality that they just can't do it so often. With my "fix" we wouldn't challenge at the top, but we'd be fine. Injuries haven't helped to be fair, too. This season was always going to be tough, given the circs, and play-off winners always struggle more than perhaps (generally) automatic promoted sides, statistically. I think if we do stay up, then next seaso na number of the players will be much better for the experience of a year in the Prem.

I'm going on things like Gov't transport spending per Capita, where the North (the area whose towns LN is talking about) gets and got far less than the south. Factor on to that that what the North does get is biased towards cities and people in towns and villages suffer with some pretty dire transport compared to the south. Also in terms of the refugees example I mentioned And so on. I understand your comments and it's far from a universal single "well these cities get this and those towns don't" type situation, but given what LN has raised, facts do back up what she's saying about a lot of towns being left behind. By the way there's aspects that the gov't is powerless to change - the world is different, and businesses, students, workers etc. want to move to cities for very good reasons. But Gov't needs to not just forget about the places which have been hollowed out, let alone dump asylum seekers there, where there are already inadequate facilities and infrastructure.

It needs a bit of that - I mean in your example Warrington and St Helens, you're right, but the one that's not doing so well needs focusing on and helping. There are loads of St Helens type examples. These places desperately need some TLC. They need a degree of freedom as well - everything in the UK is control freaked by London, some cities now have a mayor with a bit of power, some have alleged help from "Northern Powerhouse" or Midlands Engine, though much of it is just waffle. But what there is is concentrated on cities, again. You're right that Us and Them is not the answer, but like I say, she's got a diagnosis right-ish, but as you say, not really any clue about the cure.

I dunno, I'm no Nandy fan either, but she's sort of right about Towns, to an extent. Not the solution, but a problem. It's the case that London gets disproportionately too much money and attention, and has been for ages. So everyone else was left out. Then cities like Manchester, Leeds, Brum etc. started to get attention and funding....so it was more towns that suffered. Add to that if you invest in a City, it pulls in people to work there from around and further away, meaning people leaving the towns, either all day, or for good. So the transport links, which in the North are often awful become highlighted for the day workers as a real problem - "London gets billions for cross rail and we have to commute in ancient rickety diesel trains. And because people (usually the young and able and bright) have left towns to go to wherever, the towns are left with the elderly, the unwell, the jobless..... And on top of that they can become dumping grounds for refugees etc. where there are already overstretched, underfunded hossies and schools etc. And the people there blame the refugeees and immigrants, and the EU for the problems. Neither Labour nor Tories have helped them, they've ignored them. Their votes are taken for granted by Labour (or were). I think she's right-ish, but hasn't got any answers.

It's interesting, this little to and fro. She talked about "setting up an international commission to look at examples of how nationalism had been beaten by socialism" and then mentioned Quebec and Catalonia as examples of how nations had in her view "beaten nationalists with social justice". All a bit (a lot) bonkers in my view, but I didn't take from it that she supported the Spanish state or what it has actually done in every regard. I suppose you could infer that, but you'd also have to look at Quebec and Canada to really deduce whether she is a bit facisty or whatever. I rather suspect she's not remotely so, more that she's a bit ignorant of Catalonia/Spain and some of the more draconian steps taken - as Peter says, garbled thoughts - and would have been better off not revealing that ignorance. In terms of leadership of Labour I don't think she's likely to win and I don't think she'd be very good at it anyway. But in terms of not being a clone, it's good that there are folk like her in Labour. When different people put different ideas forward (even daft ones) it's better than a situation where everyone agrees with whatever they imagine the dear leader thinks on any given matter, or what is a nice radical position to take and and telling anyone who differs from that spoken or unspoken ideal to naff off to the tories.

Isn't it the bugs that have the resistance, rather than the human?

And Gammon.

It's basically Tory, now. A few massive powerful richos syphoning off all the weath, and every one else **** ed

Well, he's clearly not. His own party MPs have rather made that clear. The bloke is one of the effwits I was talking about. It's abundantly clear. Sometimes, even most times, people's views of politicians are formed from witnessing their performances in interviews and debates and so on. And those views are widely held. Gardner's a case in point. Sure people may have their view skewed by the media, by their personal political stance, or by other things - friends, family, prejudices etc. but most often someone who appears to be an incapable idiot is seen as exactly that - it's not party political - Liz Truss, Richard Burgeon, Mark Francois, Leadsom, Corbyn and an endless stream of others - they are all irredeemably too dim to be allowed anywhere near leadership roles, whatever their other charachterisitics. Then there's the clever fools, like Gove. People see this.

Yeah, I suppose if all politicans started refusing to answer what they saw as daft questions aimed at here today gone tomorrow headlines we might get better information. But on the other hand any reasonably bright person ought to be able to deal with idiotic questions relatively easily and in the process highlight the stupidity. On this specific question, it's not (IMO) that daft a question. The context of Labour just having been horsed in an election, where the Tories were split, have largely wrecked the place over the last 9 and a half years, have created the Brexit mess and so on and yet still won massively is one in which it's absolutely fair and right to ask Labour leader candidates whether the problem they have was caused by their previous leader and/or how good a leader was he in the opinion of the candidate. Shorthanded, that's "can you give him marks out of 10?". The question, as you pointed out, exposed (in your twitters view) 3 of the candidates as (paraphrasing) effwits. At a slight tangent, we could almost turn round your sage advice, in a way - I mean there are far too many imbeciles with jobs as politicians and it's essentially pointless (the media) trying to get any sense from them, so the media are often left with little choice but to ask very simpleton questions of the effwits. It's like a mutual stupidity conspiracy, the media-politican thing. And it's been handed an extra dimension in recent times by the new approach of Trump and Johnson of just blatantly lying. At least we used to get to see that either a politican either couldn't fog a mirror, or was intellectually capable.

2 correct (or OK) answers Lewis and Starmer. Even I wouldn't give Corbz a 0 and I can't stand the bloke as a politician (leader), he's absolutely dreadful and proven so, now. 0 and 10 are ludicrous. Starmer's is an intelligent answer and Lewis is also OK by me (I'd score him about 2 or 3), but Lewis resigned his post because he disagreed with Corbz, and the score he gave recognises that and their disagreements, but doesn't slaughter him. It's essentially an honest answer reflecting a kind of reality. Starmer's could be used by a Tory to say "he wouldn't even say what he thought..." or "avoided answering" - not fair, but that's the way boliticians mostly are.

Yeah, possibly. I can only speak personally but who Len McLuskey or whoever "recommended" I voted for made not the slightest difference. I suspect that's the same for most Union members and for that matter local party members. But yeah, it's nice for him I suppose and he seems a capable sort and probably the one of the best 2 options to be leader.