Verbal

Given the state of the economy in 1983 it's likely that motorway building, like most public works, were funded at least substantially by government bonds - that is, debt that will be repaid by this and future generations. Schools and hospitals have been extensively been funded by another way in which governments in the UK have massaged borrowing - PFI, an exhorbitantly expensive mechanism that, like bonds, pushes the debts down the road to future generations. You may be an exception, but the vast majority of your generation has accumulated vast wealth in pensions and property - the kinds of income and asset wealth that 20-45 year olds will never come close to achieving.

We don't have unilateral free trade with other EU countries, or indeed any other country in the world. Surely you know this. So what do you make of Minford's and the PE's bland assurances that large lumps of British manufacturing and farming would be "eliminated"? Project Fear?

I see that the Policy Exchange, the Gove-founded ISIS of jihadist Brexism, is today advocating the tearing down of all UK tariffs. Their intellectual hero, Patrick Minford, has admitted that such a policy would 'eliminate' (his word) large swathes of British manufacturers, because they'd be wiped out by cheap imports but be unable to export to compensate because other countries' trade barriers would remain firmly up. And the PE themselves say "It would not necessarily be the end of the world if agriculture and manufacturing shrank further as a proportion of the economy." Oh, that's alright then. One immediate result is that voters in Leaveland - the industrial north and Midlands - would have thousands of their jobs binned - on top of the negative economic consequences of lower growth resulting from any version of Brexit, which will hit Leaveland harder than other regions. This unilateral dismemberment of the British economy so stupid that May is bound to try and adopt it.

Touch a nerve, Lord Crap? Seems the OP's question is inadvertently answered by you and the other oddity. Some are enlightened by age; some corrupted by it.

Just for a brief happy moment I thought this thread was called 'Banning old gits from posting.' Then they and their immigrant-hating crap was posted all over it. Oh well.

False. These are DExEU's impacts. You heard of them? The department responsible for getting us out of the EU. They have never, ever been 'the people' who said we'd be in recession now, whoever they might be.

So the DExEU's own impact assessment works adds up to this: Jihadist (no deal) Brexit: £158 billion loss per year. 2,800,000 fewer jobs. Trade agreement Brexit: £99 billion loss per year. 1,750,000 fewer jobs. Soft Brexit (internal market + CU): £39 billion loss per year. 700,000 fewer jobs. Staying in the EU: 0 loss per year. No impact on jobs. Madness.

Whether you agree with other posters or not, that's not what Crooks is saying. He's saying Lemina shouldn't have gone to Saints in the first place because we're 'not a proper outfit'.

So in Garth's considered opinion, Southampton are 'not a proper outfit'. Interesting - what have we done to offend him?

Yet another nasty little surprise for Brexit jihadists. It seems to have been assumed by May et al that non-EU trading partners would simply be bystanders during the 'transition period' after March 2019. Not so. Chile and South Korea are the first to demand concessions from the UK, or they may reject any rollover of EU trade agreements as they apply to the UK. So that makes it a total of 67 countries - 27 EU and 40 non-EU trading partners - that have to approve the transition period, which itself may severely weaken Britain's trading position - all a taste of things to come. Those sunny uplands are looking a long way off... https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-trade-partners-object-to-brexit-transition-roll-over/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Perfect timing. Ponzicoin is doing brilliantly.

So you'll be condemning those brave women in Iran publicly removing their headscarves and being carted off to a brutal imprisonment in Evin prison (Google it)? You'll stay silent about the protests in Iran recently over vast corruption and violence of the regime? All on the grounds that, like the Arab Spring, these acts are invariably some kind of Western-financed revolt? You do realise, do you, that the socialism that Corbyn is supposed to be in favour of is internationalism - socialists have always supported popular uprisings under dictators (you won't remember the campaigns against Pinochet, the Juntas in Argentina, Apartheid and even the Soviet empire). Except now it's ok apparently to back violent dictators like Assad and the Iranian regime - and to stay silent about Putin's crimes against his own people - out of some fatuous, unthinking view that to even criticise dictators is to be pro-western in some perverted way? Oh, and on the subject of the 'Blairite' accusation, somehow I - I suspect unlike you - managed to be on that March in February 2003. I've always detested Blair's faux-Stalinist targets culture, and I welcomed the election of Ed Miliband, whose personality wasn't up to it but whose policies have been stolen left, right and centre. You reach for the Blairite' label because you want to paint anti-war voters and pro-war, and social democrats as 'neo-liberal' (in Corbyn-speak, Victorian capitalist) enemies of the people. But let's get back on topic: can you articulate a single coherent argument as to why Corbyn took a considerable amount of money from the Iranian regime's propaganda mouthpiece while at the same time failing to condemn the brutal hangings of gay people and the imprisonment, torture and murder of any who raised their hands against the regime?

Good on the Haringey tragedy, and good on my point earlier about the Corbyn cult's view on Iran: In recent weeks, Labour could not make a simple statement in support of those protesting for freedom in Iran. It couldn’t give a straightforward condemnation of a regime that stones people to death for adultery, publicly hangs gay people, and forces women by threat of criminal punishment to wear headscarves in public. The hard left’s virulent anti-Americanism renders it ‘just not that simple’. No, with the influence and influx of ‘Stop The War’ ideologies, Labour has been dragged so deeply down the rabbit hole of anti-imperialist theories that they cannot condemn dictatorial, theocratic, repressive Iran in case it somehow strengthens, or implies support for, democratic, secular and free America. My Labour would see America is a necessary bulwark against Iran, yet the Labour we have sees Iran as a necessary bulwark against America. I cannot in all good conscience tell a single person to vote for that. I don't think this computes with fanboy and his ilk. If you vote for Labour, apparently in his book you're just as servile a fan of Corbyn as he is. The Cult of the Personality lives. I wonder if fanboy wouldn't mind actually offering, though, a coherent defence of Corbyn's taking large sums of money from - and remaining silent during the recent democratic protests against - the oppressive regime in Iran? Too much to ask? Probably.

Labour are likely to do well in the forthcoming local elections, which will be made to look so much better because of the party's utterly disastrous showing in the last round of local elections. Labour doing well in London will also owe a huge slice to Sadiq Khan, who's a hate figure among Corbyn cultists. I see you still cling to the hero worship - you never comment substantively on Labour party policy - and refuse to see any flaws whatsoever, like any good Stalinist apparatchik. For example, doesn't Corbyn's willingness to take large fees from the oppressive, misogynistic, and violently homophobic Iranian regime cause you ANY pause for thought? Not a single word of criticism for that?

One question not addressed on this thread: W(hen)TF did CBF become ITK?

Good grief. You must be new to politics. The most virulently protectionist US administration since before the second world war is promising an 'attractive' trade deal. Two questions: 1. What assumptions are you making about who will benefit from such a deal, negotiated between a strong, protectionist party and a weak one already enfeebled and cowed by the mere prospect of Brexit (down by the tune of £300 million a week according to IFS). 2. What's happened since Trump took over to other trade deals - like TTIP, TPP, NAFTA? See a pattern?

What a weird post. Brexit hasn't happened yet - as you appear to acknowledge at the end of your sentence. So it hasn't 'turned out' in any way at all. Your problem seems to be not being able to apprehend the meaning of complete sentences - even your own.

It looks like you are trying to defend Brexit. Would you therefore turn on caps lock and disable spell check?

Apologies - I meant 'membership' of customs union in Jez-speak means decision-making rights so he's fudging actual membership with his own unique take on how membership is defined.

I recognise your need to be obediently loyal to St Jez, but you're not reading him right. He defines 'membership' of the single market as decision-making rights. By that measure, Norway is not a 'member' but is actually a member (without quotation marks). Ditto the customs union. It's a semantic dance to which you're going to have to learn because this is how it's going to be from here on in. The Jihadist hard Brexiteers have lost, by the way.

It's common for away fans to outdo home fans at CC, and the acoustics do make a big difference. Sitting on the halfway line yesterday though it felt like a home game for Saints with the opposition fans locked out of the ground - couldn't hear the Hammersmith End at all. Scoring an actual goal helps of course... Fulham are an odd club though - not just because of the neutral zone but because they include in their match programmes reports of things like Saints hammering Fulham in olden times (the seventies). That and the decent food - and a suburban house planted in corner of the ground - make the whole experience pretty idiosyncratic. In a good way.

Making a 'safe' internal appointment like this might paradoxically indicate that the board don't really have a lot of faith in long-term prospects of the coaching staff - especially if something of a clear-out is required to bring in a new manager.

An asset bubble does not indicate economic well-being. You seem not to understand how an economy works.

Arteta.

Christ, the state of this place. It’s truly depressing how badly this forum has gone downhill since the referendum result. The overt racists on here have been emboldened and the covert ones feel that their incipient xenophobia is now somehow ‘legitimate’. We’ve had low points before – notably through the period when the chaotically idiotic pap was having fits of the paranoid vapours over, for example, how the grieving mother of a murdered British soldier was actually a conniving agent of the state, and how ITN was running a secret CGI department to produce ‘bloody hands’. But nothing like this. We have a once-seemingly innocuous poster lapse into echoing blatant Nazi-era Jew-baiting (with the pathetic mealy-mouthed excuse that it was just ‘a Jew’ who was supposedly controlling world events – a classic Nazi-era trope); a sad Corbynista who flat out denies the sheer plain-as-day volume of anti-Semitic behaviour of some in the Labour party (plus a deeply weird one who gets angry just at the mention of this behaviour, as though acknowledging its existence were somehow worse than actual anti-Semitism); a Britain First acolyte who’s given free rein; another poster who makes false equivalences between the migration crisis and terrorism; a Pony-like poster with a repulsive attitude towards women that would get him into serious trouble in the workplace; a couple (or more) of unhinged posters who attack every argument with factless rage; and any number of Brexiteers who behave exactly like cultists; ad nauseum. The Lounge, not coincidentally, is a dead zone. I can’t remember the last time a woman or a black or Asian poster last contributed in any sustained way. It’s simply a hostile environment for them and I don’t blame anyone for giving this place a wide berth. The lack of diversity – including of opinion – makes the Lounge irredeemable. What is oddest of all is the apparent attitude of the owner of this site. Moderation appears to have been completely withdrawn, and the lunatics are literally in charge of asylum, with the site’s own policies on racism etc having clearly been set aside. If I were he, I’d be ashamed to have this place still open – and the association of this site with Southampton football club drags down everyone’s reputation. Still, specks in the dustbin of history and all that.