1976_Child

I was under strict instructions from Sir Fergie to steal some good turf and take it to Wembley.

****ing chav. I shop at Waitrose.

agree. the rain at the derby game was probably the reason it didn't get nasty. I too had to drive back in just my caks. Thank God I didn't break down. Would of looked frickin odd trying to change a wheel with only a pair of skimpy 'Y' fronts on.

+100

I agree. Weird. But the entire atmosphere in the Northam turned very sour when the rozzers brought on their dogs. Talk about how to antagonize passionate fans who have just seen their club relegated. There was no reason to have the dogs on the pitch. Useless policing, made the situation much worse. And then as we were leaving, peacefully and with out incident, the police were standing their videoing us. What ****ing right do they have to film me going about my lawful business. Oh, and this **** sucking fascist government has actually made it illegal for us to film them!! Couldn't make it up. Shame on the police. And as for all the old grannies on here whingeing about the pitch invasion, perhaps if you had actually gone on to the pitch as well you would have seen most people taking pictures of the stadium, applauding and 'celebrating' the end of the season. The yoof who squared up to the Burnley lot were not the brightest and best that Saints fan base has to offer, for sure, but keep things in perspective FFS. Calling them scum is just as childish as lobbing a half-empty coke bottle at each other. Oh, and the flare DID originate from the Burnley fans.

The police were out of their stupid minds bringing dogs on to the pitch. The whole atmosphere in the northam turned very bitter. How dare the police treat us in that way. Snarling, ferocious dogs lined up against us. Christ this country is turning into a fascist state before our eyes. Unbelievable. I have no respect left for the police.

My Daddy was fighting the IRA in Belfast and my Mummy was struggling to earn a decent wage as a junior nurse to keep me and my brother fed during the late 70s/ early 80s. Its just too ****ing easy to have a pop isn't it matey... ****. Further Edit: No doubt I shouldn't re-respond to your cretinous post but **** you any way. My parents worked their ****ing hides off for me. No ****ing 'Tory Boy silver spoon' for me. So **** you. Idiot.

this government is not just pretty damned crap they are the worst most hideously corrupt, incompetent, spiteful, vindictive, sinister utterly treacherous shower of sh!te that has ever been in power in this country at any time since the dawn of time. The Damian McBride affair optimizes the New Labour project. Frankly, I wish there was an alternative to the Tories but realistically there isn't, so I must be honest: I would rather Cameron was in power than the current fascist, greedy, corrupt swine. He certainly could be no worse. Perhaps not a whole bunch better, but it would not be possible to be worse.

Are you a proper old fashioned socialist of the immediate post-war era or a modern-day lay-about nuLabour kind? The first kind would NEVER allow fit young men to lie around on benefits. They believed in hard work and sweat, not hand outs. To them the idea of the welfare state was a safety net, not a career choice. They also had very puritanical attitudes to debt and the 'buy now, pay later' society. Nothing needs to be said about the modern day 'socialist'. They believe that an ever shrinking private sector should continually feed, house and provide health care for a growing base of indolent, lazy slobs who didn't bother in school and feel that the world owes them a living. I suspect that you are a proper socialist of the first kind, and I can totally respect that. I prefer a more decentralized local form of government and as such could never support a political ideology which continual seeks to accrue more and more power and control into the center.

good find. but I am certain that the PFI is NOT on this red book. Admittedly I have only had 24 hours but I can't find it, and no commentators have picked up on it. Also the ONS recently criticized the treasury on precisely this issue.

and your point? I'm not sure I tried to land it on the present mob. I just pointed out that it is not included on the balance sheet of the country is all. I totally agree that PFI is morally reprehensible. Especially when the Ministers who sign off on the deals then end up on the board of the company running the bloody project. (and both tory and labour are guilty there)

sorry, then who should we blame for the mess the country is in? Obviously in your fantasy make-believe world the government of the day (or in Labour's case, 12 years) are not in any way responsible for the policy decisions they make? Yeah. That's right. Blame it on the Tories. They are the real culprits. Have you not realised yet that the Tories lost power in 1997???? (I'm no Tory apologist by the way, but to even try and blame them for this mess is just mentally ill)

******. sorry mate, you have obviously swallowed the nuLabour lies and spin with out even chewing. The government's figure of national debt does not include many off-balance sheet items such as PFI underwriting and the bank asset insurance scheme. If companies hid £500 billion of liabilities from their accounts they would be prosecuted. And even if our national debt was lower than other countries that neither makes it morally right, economically right or that we are in a 'stronger' position. By the way, the IMF completely disagrees with Darling's growth forecasts. Give me one economist who agrees with him. None does. The ultimate debt burden is heading north very rapidly and our children will be paying it off for ages. It is morally reprehensible to put the next generation into so much debt with out even asking them and then also expect them to work their back-sides off and have a lower standard of living so that they can pay for our past consumption and also pay the boomers retirement cheques.

yup

Actually I think they are doing everything right to cause a MUCH bigger problem in the future. We have all become so used to everything ticking along nicely. I don't just mean the last 10 years, I mean since the end of the war. The one true constant in the history of human civilization is that things never stay the same for ever. Our 'wealth' and standard of living has been built upon two very false assumptions: first, that there will always be an infinite supply of cheap energy and second, that there we 'westerners' will always be able to consume at the expense of the less well off and that we can do so on credit. Neither of these two things has been around for longer than a century (and in the case of oil, really only 30 years of mass transit and aviation). Don't be so sure that things will always be the same! In the case of global growth, when Darling flippantly says that the global economy will double in 20 years what he is in effect saying is that consumption of raw materials, food and energy will double. There is no growth without there being consumption somewhere. Even if you are talking about growing the service sector there is real consumption. So, it has taken human kind 4,000 years to reach the level of economic activity as we have today (measured in the number of person-to-person transactions) and we are going to DOUBLE it in just 20 years???? The biggest deficit the West has is a leadership deficit and primarily it is that the current crop of 'leaders' we have do not have the faintest idea of how powerful a force is the exponential function. Our whole world view is predicated on enjoying exponential growth while predicting linear consumption of resources. It is lunacy.

Great analysis, but a load of old bumkum. Perhaps if we didn't expect the government to do everything for us - including wiping our back-sides then we would not need such levels of debt. Debt is never a good thing. Savings are. We have way too much of the former and absolutely none of the latter. All the scenarios you lay out above will happen sooner or later when there is no one left to buy the bonds. There is only so much that China and the Sovereign wealth funds can soak up before they say no more thank you. And every western nation is now writing tonnes of bonds. The world is suddenly awash with bonds and no one in the will be buying. Believe me, in order to even have a hope of moving 220 billion of gilts this year the treasury will need to offer higher interest. They will certainly need to if the ratings agencies cut the AAA rating - which is very possible. Oh, and how ironic that the treasury will dispense with the auction system and instead move the bonds through a syndication process with -yes, you guessed it - the investment banks! Good luck Britain, things are going to get a lot more ugly before they get better. And then there is the spectre of inflation just around the corner. How tempting it would be to just inflate our way out of debt... just ask the Argentinians (and don't even get me started on the way the chancellor casually tossed out that he expected the global economy to DOUBLE in twenty years!!!! Mentalist. That is not sustainable at all)

You are kidding right? Our deficit - 12% of GDP - is the HIGHEST in the developed world. You need to take those rose-tinted specs off mate. Britain is structurally unsound. Oh and if you believe Darling's projected growth forecasts - on which all his borrowing figures are based - then you need therapy. There is not a snowball's chance of the economy growing at 3.5% the year after next. He reckons we will be growing at the end of this year. The IMF reckons not. They say we will continue to shrink next year by 0.4%. Darling reckons we will grow at 1.25%. It is all utter fantasy. Oh, and also the borrowing figures do not include any PFI, bank-bailout asset protection money (which could potentially be 500 billion from just RBS and HBOS) or the mother of all calamities which is the rapidly changing demographics of the country. The state pension pot is almost completely empty. The country has historically low savings, house prices are still chronically over valued (only having retraced half of the bubble) and credit cards are maxed out. Almost all the 'growth' over the last decade came from the City and the consumer. The City is never going to get back to the way it was and the consumer is broke. Doesn't matter how much the government want us all to start buying useless crap we don't need, we aren't going to because we are skint. No my Labour-loving friend, the country is not in good shape.

If I could go back in time it would be to the time when I took this really fat chick back to my bed, got her naked and went for a muff-dive. I would ask her to take a shower first. It stank like a rotting skunk. I threw up.

Spot on. No one is better off. The state of the nation's finances have never, ever been as bad as they are now. We are royally screwed. Not that the trough-feeders in the Labour party care. And then Brown wants to pay all those lousy waste of space MPs just to turn up to their job. On top of their salary. Being an MP is the most cushy job going. Once you are elected you are guaranteed a lavish salary and pensions until the next election and never have to worry about a thing. A-holes the lot of them.

... if so be a darling and nip round to the Treasury and write them a cheque. not sure I can face any more taxes. Labour have bankrupted the country again. What a surprise.

i think that actually only about 24m is the mortgage. the rest is normal run of the mill borrowing and liabilities

I'm in for life mate.... literally

Cloud and silver lining and all that but now I really want Brighton to stay up. At least then there will be one home away game next season. I'm getting a tad bored of the south coast train line and its gazillion stops. Up the Albion.

Right, so what we now need to do is take a leaf out of Leicester's book and bounce right back. God, after the budget yesterday and then this.. Is there any good news around at the moment. SOUTHAMPTON TILL I DIE - DON'T CARE WHICH LEAGUE WE ARE IN, I'LL ALWAYS BE PROUD TO WEAR THE RED AND WHITE.

Answer: 1. Ok, sure, but now we don't 'pen' people into the Northam end, thank God. 2. Was not comparing like-for-like in death tolls, as you prescribe. I was making the point that we still (rightly) remember that they died. The auxiliary to our present society of the dead in WW1 was peace ( until old mustachio took over), and the point I was making was that the events at Wednesday did drastically make football safer.. 3. Sure, the 'Diana' effect is nauseating if too-oft repeated. But given our community, and given the scale of the event, and given that it is still in peoples minds it would not have been out of place.. Any way, here's to all us football fans every where.