shurlock

Not listed by the BBC as such. http://m.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/40541648

Sounds like Nawaz has a lot of emotional baggage and has found a new outlet for his anti-establishment views. He speaks some sense but then undermines it with the absurdum ad reductio. A lot of moderate Muslim friends simply have no time for this publicity-seeker who knows how to press the right buttons (as well as make a few quid). He blew his chance as a government advisor as his work has been increasingly discredited. But hey he's a brown Muslim with a rip roaring back-story - he must be the real deal.

He's hardly established though - its not as if he's head and shoulders better than the rest of our squad. The flipside is that he'd potentially block the progression of our youngsters - for example, are we giving up Hojbjerg who many also viewed as a top prospect.

Risk-based approaches are great on paper but problematic in practice – they require high-quality, reliable data and a strong understanding of how complex systems work. Time and time again, attempts to model these risks, a precondition for effective risk-based regulation, have proven far more difficult than the optimists and the trojan deregulators claim.

Many businesses do, though - many that are far bigger, more successful and more important to the economy than yours.

Meltdown alert

The kippers don't understand basic trade - the more comprehensive the trade agreement, whether with the EU or another country, the more restrictions you have to accept on your sovereignty.

Suspect we're not bringing another CB in, if VVD stays. You'd hope we would, not only because Stephens and Yoshida are not as good as Fonte when he was at his peak as a no.2 CB; but also because it would give any incoming CB a year to adjust before taking over the reins from VVD.

Special pleading by a producer diddums In general, risk-based regulation sounds great -improved proportionality, flexibility, efficient use of resources, innovation and legitimacy what's not to like; but the experience of it, in practice, has been very different.

Do you knock ones off, thinking about her too?

The trendline is a smoothed or moving average of the 'actual figures'- those figures are q.volatile but they were getting smaller. Bar the fall in the late 1960s, they was nothing the three drops in the 1950s.

Not sure I follow. Yes the UK still lagged France Germany and Italy in 1973. However, the trendline was going up - that is, the gap with those countries was closing . Simple extrapolation suggests that the UK would have overtaken them at some point. The question is whether that would have happened sooner or later in the absence of joining the EEC. My views are pretty well-known on the subject. Coincidence and smoke and mirrors abound everywhere; the big bucks are in demonstrating causality. Some fascinating stuff has been written on the subject, especially on demonstrating the gains from trade and the effects of distance. http://www.nber.org/papers/w15557

Of course, that doesn't answer the counterfactual as to what would have happened if the UK hadn't joined the EEC in 1973 - after all, real GDP per capita was trending upwards before entry. Nor does it disentangle the effects of membership from other structural variables and policy inteventions -say Thatcher's supply-side reforms in the 1980s that positively affected growth. Nonetheless studies that try to control for these effects suggest that the EU has causally or directly benefitted the UK, even if it hasn't permanently boosted the UK’s growth rate.

Your history is almost as bad as your maths, Trident. The UK joined what was then the European Economic Community (not the EU) in 1973 as the sick man of Europe. It was banging on the doors to join the EEC.

For the record, two world wars and one world cup, pal.

Exactly. We have a relatively easy start, though by the same token, an unspectacular one from a TV scheduling perspective.

Micky Evans.

Nothing like Glasgow.

A few that haven't been named (or I don't think they have): Dowie Harding Jan Paul Saeijs Van Gobbel Viafara

#meatandpotatoesbrigade

He's never looked remotely good enough at this level. Yes he's busy and can be a nuisance but he's very limited on the ball. Never understood the fascination with him on here from the meat-and-potatoes brigade (Derry, Wade Garrett etc).

Will do him good. A bang average player, whatever Uncle Les says about him being the next Paul Scholes.