Verbal

Let's get this done in the right order. You go first. You were the one who claimed - I quote - "there are no white working class people left in London." What's your statistical evidence for this? Let's deal in hard facts rather than in feral emotions about how uncomfortable you might be in the presence of non-white faces. And let's get this out of the way fast so that we can return to the topic of the present crisis.

This is not only nonsense; it's part of the drumbeat I hear repeatedly from the knuckle-dragging dregs of the BNP and other scumbag white supremacists in London. There is a strong working class presence in London, facilitated not least by London's still dense social housing, despite the ravages of right-to-buy, etc. Black and other ethnic minorities are not driving out whites. Working class people have been shifted out of London by various government policy decisions since the 1960s (from slum clearance and 'London overspill estates' in satellite towns - one of which I grew up on - to right-to-buy, the spare room tax and welfare caps). But they remain, and in sufficient numbers to help keep London, for example, a solidly Labour town.

That's okay though, isn't it? Greater London today still has a lower population than it did in 1939 (the lowest point in the city's population drift to the suburbs and provinces was as recently as 1981). The city may seem crowded but it's been much more so up until the second world war. The other reason it's not such a bad idea is that even after Thatcher's right-to-buy, London has a stock of social housing that's unrivalled anywhere else in the country - a legacy not just of council housing, but a significant housing association presence as well as big pre-council-stock social housing trusts like Guinness, Peabody and Sutton. For now at least, with the Sutton Trust you can even live just off the king's Road in affordable-rent housing. I'm with Ludwig on the stats generally. And you've identified the reason he's right: London. Aside from the dubiousness of calling England a 'country', if you take London out of the density equation England's density overall falls dramatically. London massively distorts the numbers. Which is kind of what you'd expect, because London, is (and always has been) such a huge city. Take a closer look at the Tavistock link that Ludwig supplied. It's pretty authoritative. And your point about no one wanting to go to Scotland seems at variance with, for example, Glasgow's substantial population of recent refugees from war zones, including Syria and Iraq.

Well I never. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3212837/Internet-troll-52-posted-sick-claims-Lee-Rigby-s-murder-conspiracy-spared-jail-harassing-soldier-s-family.html

Odd that in an article asking the question Who is Corbyn? it doesn't mention his upbringing in a 7-bedroom Shropshire manor house on the Duke of Sutherland's estate. It also makes uncritical reference to the 'leading economists' letter. I can't believe Gould, of all people, doesn't know that that 'leading economists' tag is sailing close to being blatantly untrue.

I smell a rat. Having now seen the letter and the list of signatories, I instantly recognise two of them as nowhere near economists at all, let alone 'leading' ones. John Roberts is a sociologist at Brunel who publishes on subjects like fetishism, and Hilary Wainwright is a well-known socialist feminist whose background is also in sociology and who presently edits Red Pepper. I'll have a look at the rest, but this list of signatories looks way off. Besides, the main point of the letter is to quibble with the 'barrage of media coverage' - a favourite theme in academia where resentment of the media is endemic - that Corbynomics is 'extremist'. No evidence is offered for this claim of a 'barrage', but in any case, not all of these signatories is even a supporter of Corbyn (they don't say who is and who isn't). It's all a bit feeble. Here's a link to the actual letter: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/23/jeremy-corbyns-opposition-to-austerity-is-actually-mainstream-economics

What is the point of quoting an article about a letter, in which there is no sign of the actual letter? I'd like to see what is being said by these 'prominent' economists, and who the signatories are, yet despite the fact that the letter appeared in a sister paper to the Guardian there's nothing, no links, no names except for Blanchflower (a usual suspect if there was one).

Here's the 1997 Labour Party manifesto. Could you list all the things that make it 'Tory-lite'? http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab97.htm

The appeal of Corbyn lies in his no-nonsense, clear-headed, straightforward presentation. On Radio 4 this week he was asked, Yes or No, whether he wanted to be prime minister. His answer: I can see his supporters’ point. 89 words where one would do make him the soul of brevity. He never did utter the word Yes.

Yeah, I'm starting to think it isn't worth the bother. Not aimed at anyone on here, but my experience of debating with Corbynites is it's like arguing with the friggin' Moonies.

He's gone completely ferkakta.

A better question is: how much inequality is too much? There are some good data on this including some economic analyses of the 1929 crash (by Joe Stiglitz and others) which plot the rise of inequality leading up to it and its decline afterwards. The over-accumulation of wealth by an ever smaller number creates enormous problems. Consumption itself is not enough; wealth has to be protected in ever more risky, yet, at the time, seemingly sure-fire ways (stoking the stock market bubble before 1929 and the derivatives bubble in 2008). This leads Stiglitz to conclude that there is an answer to this question. And the bad news is, even after the fallout of the great recession, we're still around the 1929 levels of the kind of unequal toxicity that brings us all down, the wealthy included. As you commute into London ever day, you'll see evidence of that all around you. So do I. I walk to my coffee shop each morning through what's always been a working class neighbourhood where no house costs less than £1million. What does that tell you?

I think you mean Bernie Sanders. Corbyn is no Sanders. If we had someone here of Sanders' political skills and well crafted populism, he or she would be a real threat to the Tories. Instead, we have Corbyn, a bumbling Tribunite dinosaur whom the Tories are laughingly pleading us to elect, and for whom the Telegraph are running a mock election campaign, encouraging its readers to pay their £3 and vote him in. The really sad thing is that Corbyn has a much better chance of political leadership than Sanders (to put it mildly). Here are a few snippets of Sanders on the stump: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-quotes_55a909f1e4b0c5f0322d0a59? Compare and contrast Corbyn, wittering dim-wittedly on about the 'relevance of Karl Marx' and how communism 'is only a financial system'. One saying for which Marx is usually credited (about the Bonaparte and Napoleon III) goes: history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. The tragedy was Michael Foot, a deeply literate man out of his political depth at a time when Thatcherism needed powerful opponents. The farce is Jeremy Corbyn, who doesn't even qualify as an opponent (!) to the Bullingdon Boys' tearing down of any notion of 'the public good' in favour of a ruthless ramping up of already mounting inequalities - of wealth, opportunity and access. There is rich ground here for a centre-left party - one that probably folds in the slowly resurgent Liberal Democrats - that builds a political platform that will attract a vast swathe of British voters who are not died-in-the-wool Tories. The idea that Corbyn is the one to build that platform would be funny if it weren't so desperate.

He won't win, Lord T - don't trouble your ukippy little head with that thought.

Sad indeed. I got a clearer picture from the data and reading through some of the individual cases about how this mass killing works and why it's so ethnically skewed. It's not that individual US police officers are overtly racist, in the sense that they see a black man and feel an urgent need to shoot him. It's rather that their training is all about 'officer safety', and, deep down, they feel more threatened by a black man (and, occasionally, woman) than a white individual. Reading through the 'found innocent' tags, I noticed this innocence was based almost always on the claim of perceived threat. Of course, if you're brought up in a culture where black men are historically viewed, even by 'science' (such as eugenics and IQ testing), as more dangerous and/or more stupid, then it's a response with deep roots in racism but not with an overtly racist motive. This 'officer safety' principle has shifted somewhat in recent years, and in a way that has probably exacerbated the problem. As part of my day job, I did a close study of the minute-by-minute events during the Columbine High School massacre that took place in 1999. When the two shooters started killing school students, there was actually a police officer on the premises, and he returned fire. But he did so from outside the building, while almost all of the shooting was inside. When the city police arrived they also returned fire for a few brief moments, but again from outside building. In fact, all the cops were grouped around windows of the library, where the worst of the massacre happened (the shooters went around executing pupils who had taken refuge under the library desks). All the time this mass execution was happening, the police steadfastly refused to enter the building on the grounds of 'officer safety'. Having been to the school itself, I can tell you that the cops were virtually within whispering distance of the killers as they went about blasting the heads of their schoolmates. But they didn't enter the building - and then only as a SWAT team - until a full hour after the shooting had ended (and after the killers committed suicide). This response - or lack of it - caused outrage. Consequently, the rules of engagement were changed, and cops in most states were told, effectively, they had to put themselves between the shooters and the shot-at 'civilians'. And as a result of that, cops were making snap judgements which invariably counted in some of the deep-seated racial biases - even among some black cops facing black assailants - that are part of the US's historical DNA. The result is that trail of tears contained in the Guardian's database.

Here's the go-to reference - the only comprehensive one I've found - for police shootings in the US. The death toll is horrifying. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database

I have no idea why MLG invokes such unpleasant reactions. This site would be a lot worse without him.

Are you being serious? It's hard to credit that anyone would need help in understanding what the confederate flag means. The confederate flag is, not entirely surprisingly, the flag of the confederacy, two of whose central purposes were, according to the Mississippi declaration of secession, to promote white supremacy and preserve slavery. Under this flag, the confederacy's cornerstone "rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery - subordination to the superior race - is his natural and normal condition." After the landmark Brown v Board of Education ruling by the US supreme court, which outlawed segregated education in the former slave states, white-supremacist southerners used the confederate flag to intimidate civil rights activists. White gangs carried the confederate flag when they threw rocks at the University of Alabama's first black student Autherine Lucy. And mobs 'protecting' segregationist schools wore confederate flags in Little Rock, Arkansas, New Orleans, Birmingham and Austin, Texas. South Carolina itself, where the murder of black churchgoers took place, has been the epicentre of a campaign by black state residents since 1972, on the grounds that it remains a powerful symbol of white supremacy and violent intimidation of blacks. It is a flag of anti-black terrorism - just as ugly as the Nazi swastika and a far more enduring a symbol of hate. Dylann Roof was not the first to drape himself in it to consecrate his crimes and he won't be the last. And that's the flag that Sarnia Saint was gigglingly waving the other day. Aside from anything else, what he did is explicitly against the rules of this site - and it should not be tolerated. I don't want that ****wit coming back her after the next murder of a black person and smirking at the number of bullets he or she has had to take in order to give Sarnia his jollies.

That's the case now more than ever. The Second Amendment is a white rights issue in the US. It is as repulsive in its enactment and interpretation as was the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which stipulated that slaves were 3/5th human. The NRA is completely dominated by whites, and uses the language of the slave-South to advance its cause, hollering about the 'threats' of the 'bad guys' (code for: black guys). It was depressingly familiar, then, to hear Dylann Roof, the cretinous murdered of black churchgoers in Charleston, use exactly the language of the NRA - and the KKK - is justifying his actions. He was defending (whom?) against 'violent' black people who threatened his existence. 'Negroes,' he said, 'have lower IQs, lower impulse control, and higher testosterone levels in generals [sic]. These three things alone are a recipe for violent behaviour.' By the NRA's definition, Roof, before these murders, would have been one of the 'good guys' - and the NRA would have defended to the last white man Roof's right to carry his murder weapon - locked and loaded. Note, incidentally, that Roof says all the above while picturing himself wrapped in the confederate flag. The same confederate flag that our resident racist scumbag used as his avatar - finding it a giggle, yet again, to revel in the murders of black people in general. I've never called for the banning of anyone on this site. But I'd welcome the banning of the sick individual posting as Sarnia Saint. Using the white-supremacist confederate flag - which has become the symbol cloaking the racist murder of innocent black churchgoers - is about as perverted as you could get.

Oh please. Journalists are many things but they're not such delicate flowers. Besides, there's a hierarchy of journos, in football reporting as in anything else; if you're 'in comms' you should know that. On topic, I hope to hell this signing happens.

I work in communications. That's not true. Besides, Crook would do well to laugh along with everyone else.

A British-born Canadian racist scumbag. He's finally come out of the closet.

That's the point. I'm a great admirer of RK - but even the best will struggle to repeat that trick year on year, especially when no matter how well you think you've chosen replacements you can't quite be sure they'll adapt quickly enough. Or whether they'll match up to what we've lost. And I doubt it's much incentive for RK himself to stay, having the rebuild every 12 months. So my perfectly rational choice is to start panicking.

All of this will turn out to be true, I'm sure. However, I'm a little surprised that we haven't had a bigger meltdown on here this year than last. Last year we lost a back-up right back, a CB who'd just gone through a poor-ish second half of the season, a striker whose age meant we were looking to supplement anyway, and Lallana. This year we've lost, or look like losing, our first-choice international right back, first-choice international centre back, and first-choice international DM. We also have our first-choice (by miles) international goalkeeper and our first-choice international left back out with injury for at least the start of the season. Where's the wailing?

Jesus Christ! What just happened on that EU thread over there?