stevegrant

The train gives excellent value for money, IMO, as long as you make the same journey every bloody day. My monthly season ticket to work in London is just under £400, which works out at about £18 return per day (the daily peak return price is just under £60). Clearly that'll be going up fairly soon, but even so, I know that every time I get on the train at Southampton Central, I'm guaranteed a seat and I don't have to worry about traffic, concentrating for 2 hours on the roads and of course the exhorbitant cost of petrol. The train works out at about 11p per mile to Waterloo. Driving my car would cost about £25-30 for the same journey.

No grey clouds over Wandsworth Common today :cool: It depends on the job status. As a permanent employee, you are only entitled to claim expenses for business mileage, which is basically any miles travelled in addition to the daily commute. As a contractor, as you technically work for yourself, your home address is your place of work and you travel to client sites for your work. Expenses for those journeys can be claimed. I would presume that MPs are classed as permanent employees, but I can't be sure of that.

But presumably the consequences of the first option could also be dire and long-lasting as the nation as a whole and people individually get into even worse debt because of this attempt to artificially stimulate the economy.

Failing to buy a ticket in advance and then not going to the game worked quite well for everyone on Saturday. I suggest you do that again

These two events are not necessarily linked. Two years ago, when Lowe left the first time, everyone shouted from the rooftops saying "the thousands staying away will return when Lowe leaves - we'll all be down St Mary's buying season tickets". The next season, despite making the play-offs, our average attendance was LOWER. Who's to say it would be any different at all this time around?

I think "unqualified" simply means that they have not felt the need to "qualify" their report with any additional information or opinion. I seem to remember it was the same situation last year.

I totally agree that the club could/should be looking at other potential revenue streams (perhaps they are already? I've no idea), but on the flipside, I'm sure many would argue that we've tried that already in the past with not a great deal of success or positive feedback. I remember many people complaining that money (relatively small sums compared to our income at the time) was being invested in non-footballing projects aimed at providing alternative revenue streams rather than being pumped into the playing squad, despite those amounts not really being enough to improve the team. Swings, roundabouts, etc.

Where does it state that they're unaudited? All I've found is: which suggests they have been audited.

The PLC status is entirely irrelevant here. We have debts (to Norwich Union, Barclays Bank and a number of partial payments on transfer fees to other clubs) which have to be serviced, regardless of whether we're a PLC or not. In times like the present, where expenditure is almost outweighing income by 2:1, selling players is the only realistic option. (Note: a takeover in the current financial climate and with the club's debts is not a realistic option) In an ideal world, we'd be able to sell the bigger earners like Rasiak, Saganowski, John, etc which would put us in a stronger position to keep hold of the more promising youngsters. Unfortunately, no clubs appear to be interested in actually buying those players. Saganowski has made a career out of performing well at clubs to begin with and then tailing off pretty dramatically, so any club who had done their research would only want him for a year or so. John and Rasiak are proven goalscorers, but most Championship clubs would understandably baulk at paying their wages for more than a year. Clubs who are looking at our players are far more likely to be looking at the younger players as they will be perceived as providing better value. While they might be a bit more expensive in terms of transfer fees, they won't command overinflated salaries and they'll probably have a good sell-on value in a few years' time as well.

I'm nothing to do with the Trust, and haven't been for the best part of a year. The results were submitted late on Friday afternoon (after the LSE had closed for the weekend, I believe), so the first possible release time was first thing this morning, which was when it was published. The LSE don't hold back reports once they've been submitted, they get published as soon as they can. The loan note holder is Norwich Union, the mortgage lender.

I posted on Friday afternoon that the results had been signed off by the auditors and were likely to be released this morning. Last time I checked, Friday came before Saturday, and therefore before the Reading game.

I've always wondered about Harris' continued involvement in the search for football investment. Surely there's a massive conflict of interests as he's now publicly looking for buyers for Newcastle, Everton and Pompey. If he only finds one potential buyer, who does he recommend they go to? The one who pays him the biggest commission?

£95m debts :shock:

I'm led to believe they were signed off on a going concern basis, which is something of a relief, I guess.

For information, the annual accounts were signed off by the auditors today. They should be filed at Companies House either over the weekend or early next week.

To be fair, he is employed by Channel 9, so it's not all that surprising! Nicholas was excellent when he was presenting the England test matches on 4, but he's still not a patch on Gower.

Without an indepth knowledge of how mobile telecommunications work, but with an "appreciation" of how such technology *might* function, that sounds like the biggest load of complete bóllócks I've ever heard. Mobile telephone masts, to my knowledge, may reach some sort of bandwidth threshold every now and again, but it will only be at times when users are absolutely hammering the network in that area (e.g. between 23:00 on New Years' Eve and 01:30 on New Years' Day). However, these will be network-wide problems, and as such you'd be able to see very similar problems with another mobile on the same network in the same location. As Baj has highlighted, there can be no "backlog" in terms of network availability. Mobile telephony doesn't work on the call-centre principle of being put on hold until there's enough operators (bandwidth) available for you to use. There may occasionally be a backlog of data, e.g. SMS/MMS/GPRS e-mail, etc, but of actual network access? I wouldn't have thought so.

A ridiculously dominant performance considering the number of non-first choice players in the side, although it should be noted that Germany were a bit below full strength as well. I don't get this whole "Carson howler" nonsense. It was entirely John Terry's fault (and he admitted as much in the post-match interview, credit where it's due). Fortunately he came up trumps despite potentially being offside and probably climbing all over the German defender for the winner. As good a performance as it was, it's still nowhere near 1/9/2001

Well the main reason for having two separate boards (i.e. SLH plc and SFC Ltd) was because of an FA/PL rule that the football club itself had to have its own board, and that chairman would attend meetings etc. Southampton Football Club Limited is the member organisation as far as the Football League are concerned. However, I would take the comment in that article with a mountain of salt - I really can't envisage the relevant governing bodies (PL in WHU's case and FL in ours) accepting that the debt accrued by the holding company isn't directly linked to the football club.

I'm struggling to think of any occasion where a top-flight team has gone into administration, so as you say there's no precedent. However, I'd be very surprised if the standard 10-point admin entry penalty wasn't applied to the Premier League. With the amount of money floating around in that league, it really takes a hell of a lot of financial mismanagement for them to be forced into administration. In terms of the link between football club and holding company, I don't see any way that West Ham would be able to claim that the debt of the holding company ISN'T linked to the football club. I haven't heard anything about it actually happening to West Ham, and if it did I would have expected it to come after the January transfer window and their inevitable fire sale.

Totally agree. £76 a week at the national minimum wage for people aged 22 and over of £5.73 per hour means that those on "Jobseekers" Allowance would have to work at least 14 hours per week (more if you include NI and PAYE deductions) in order to receive the same amount of money. If you fancied a relatively easy life and were given the option of either a) being given some money for doing nothing or b) being given some money in exchange for working for at least 14 hours per week, which one are you going to choose? It's a no-brainer. It's not even as if there aren't any available jobs. I've just had a quick look at CWjobs, which is one of the main recruitment websites for the IT industry, and they are currently listing more than 15,000 available jobs, and that's just in one industry. Obviously the finance and construction sectors have taken a bit of a bashing in recent months, but there are still jobs available in those sectors so long as people are willing to accept that their financial worth to companies in those sectors isn't what it used to be right now.

Presumably because many of the 1.85m recorded unemployed would rather sit on their arse all day for however much they get in benefits these days than earn a little bit more but have to work their arses off for it. There also seems to almost be an arrogance about us as a nation that some jobs are "below" us, and as a result these roles invariably get filled by foreigners who are just happy to have a job and be paid for the privilege.

I think that's a bit harsh. I'm far from a BNP sympathiser, but you only have to look at the leaked list of members to see that there is plenty of independent and intelligent thought within its membership. Whether it's rational or not is another matter. The stereotypical "skinhead oik", as Nick Griffin described it, probably isn't interested in the actual politics (i.e. winning seats in councils and parliaments), and as such they're more likely to be members of organisations such as the National Front than the BNP. There's also the quite legitimate argument that a hell of a lot of people in this country are fed up with Labour and Conservative governments who have promised a hell of a lot and failed to deliver on lots of their manifesto pledges, and as such are looking for alternatives. In the current climate of job losses and global and national recession, it's perfectly understandable that some people would choose a party like the BNP who appear to have a very clear policy on something that affects many British peoples' chances of getting a job, i.e. immigration levels. It's quite a simple equation, if there are fewer people in this country who are eligible to work, there is a higher chance of somebody getting a job.

I don't really pay too much attention to the BNP and its policies, but I think I saw somewhere that one of their main viewpoints is that the Human Rights Act is essentially a load of ********... mildly amusing that they're quite happy to use that act to defend themselves, I agree

We'll have a chat about this and some of the other suggestions that have been made. It's not that we're not reading them all!