Should football clubs be a different case to any other business?
So if we can’t get to see another game we can now get virtual programmes?
Check this out:
https://issuu.com/middlesboroughfc/docs/eprog_borobou
OFB
File under, you couldn’t make it up....
Yes, you read that right. Chesterfield fans will be sat in a room watching their team play on TV, while the ACTUAL match takes place just yards away...but the curtains will be shut!
Love the 'cleansing the party of Blairites'. I may be wrong but didn't he enjoy eleven years of perfectly pleasant government, retired gracefully ,and watched Brown throw it away with gay abandon, and still the help of Liberals was needed to open the way to the money trough for this lot.
And when people from different households can't mix, presumably they all sit in separate corporate boxes!
Basically, you can pay a tenner to watch on a TV with the curtains closed at home, or a few hundred quid to do the same at the ground.
If anyone is willing to pay, I say good on Chesterfield!
Football clubs are a sport, repeat ad infinitum. Every town in this country has some sort of sporting facility. And to say, 'make a profit or die' is to leave the entire country a lesser place to live. The subject you are speaking about is the premiership, which ran itself so well that it became a byword for it's quality. Then, the top four at one particular time had a thought, cue blue smoke from ears. ' If we could stop the eternal changing of the guard every ten years or so? And just had us four playing eternal champions league finals, in between winning everything else, it would be good. But first, corner all the money. We are now at the stage where they have got three quarters of the money, and the roof has fallen in. The best of luck to them, it certainly could not happen to a better bunch of idiots.
Love the 'cleansing the party of Blairites'. I may be wrong but didn't he enjoy eleven years of perfectly pleasant government, retired gracefully ,and watched Brown throw it away with gay abandon, and still the help of Liberals was needed to open the way to the money trough for this lot.
Though I’m very interested, I’ve never commented on politics before on this blog. I’ll have a first attempt here though.
I wouldn’t describe Blair’s tenure as “eleven years of perfectly pleasant government”. I think the Iraq war badly tarnished would might otherwise have been a respected legacy. I appreciate that there was some questionable intel involved and that the war was supported in the HoC overall but - and this isn’t hindsight, I was very much against it at the time - it was a huge error of judgment based on insufficient justification.
On Brown, in some respects I think he was unlucky. His time was troubled by three main setbacks:
1. As mentioned, Labour’s reputation was tarnished by the Iraq war
2. He took the brunt for the global financial crash
3. He wasn’t Tony Blair. Brown simply didn’t have the personality, charisma and electability of his predecessor in a world where popularity is the most important factor.
”Starmer is currently cleansing the party of the insidious Momentum and weeding out the last of the Blairites”
Is what I actually penned. Blair abandoned traditional labour policies in order to get elected, once in power he could easily have reinstated them.
I recall “ Education Education Education “ was his mantra ( forgetting to include,for a price)
We ended up with a bunch of Labour MP’s for whom Politics was a career choice rather than a sense of public service. The traditional areas of solidarity were lost because of familiarity breeding contempt, so out of touch they didn’t see the disastrous results of the last GE coming when the average person ( outside the media Westminster Twitter bubble) knew exactly how it would play out.
Blair was of the view that if you want to change things, you have to be in power:
“Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile.”
I’d agree with him and changing fully back to the left would likely have resulted in a swift exit at the next GE.
He has some good achievements on his record: The Good Friday Agreement, the minimum wage, Sure Start, the prominent role against Milosevic in Bosnia. I think old and New Labour should be proud of that.
If Labour want to have a chance of making similar progressions any time soon, they will clearly need to be electable again, so I wouldn’t dismiss parts of Blair’s appeal.
Starmer, it seems to me, has made a reasonable start but I think the party is still divided and I’m not convinced it will be ready in time for the next election.
@andy-r during my career I’ve met a lot of politicians. Had Breakfast with Blair at Sedgefield. Lunch with Cameron at Sir Peter VardyS place at Durham and afternoon tea with Sir Michael Heseltine when he opened our new offices in Stockton. They all talked the talk but of them all and I’ve since met a lot of MPs of all parties the one who stood out for his forthright speaking was.....
BLAIR !
OFB
I don't think any UK party will be ready for the next election or will indeed fancy the grim task of dealing with the fallout from a post-Covid, post-Brexit world and will likely face the generally ignored problems of reacting to a climate emergency that requires the actual managed phasing out of oil and creation of a new energy-based infrastructure that has been committed to in the next 10-15 years.
Plus they'll need serious investment to deal with ever-frequent 'freak' weather events such as flash floods, rising sea levels and drought. Basically, whoever wins will have a huge national debt, a large deficit and a struggling economy that will need to pay for a lot of structural changes to rebuild the country.
Perhaps the traditional broad major parties have had their day and are just no longer relevant in the 21st Century - I don't see any current leaders with a coherent vision for the future and the personality to inspire support across a majority of the population. Most likely it will be yet more coalitions and collapsed minority governments until the electoral system is changed to accommodate better representative smaller parties of an increasingly fragmented electorate, who will then have to learn to work together as they do in many other countries.
I can see where Andy is coming from in believing that Labour will not be ready in time for the next election but, pitted against what is now a Government with Ministers in far higher profiled roles as a consequence of Covid and I think they could be ready in spite of rather than because of.
Raab, Hancock, Gove, Pritel, Williamson etc. and even Boris himself have been in the spotlight every single day like no Government ministers ever before. Their decisions and actions have been scrutinised, analysed and reported on daily and in great detail. To say they have looked to be wanting at times and out of their depths collectively and individually is an understatement. In "normal" times they would have been equally poor but in the background and out of the spotlight and glare.
It was Harold Wilson who said that a week is a long time in politics but in today's media frenzy 24 hours is even longer in my opinion. The next ten years will be difficult for Governments globally and whoever is in charge is going to have to be prepared for some very unpopular decisions. Throw in the seemingly wanton aggression being shown from China (seemingly immune to the second wave curiously?) at the minute and mankind's traditional historic militaristic way of culling and restoring law and order and whoever is in charge will have a poisoned chalice. If Trump triumphs it may be even sooner than later.
@Redcar Red
Whilst the individuals you mentioned may not have covered themselves in glory, I would imagine most people would be hard pressed to name their shadow counterparts on the opposition front bench. Their performance has been abysmal.
Starmer has managed to weed out the likes of McDonnell, Abbott, Burgon etc whilst moving the odious Emily Thornberry sideways. He must have been punching the air when Rebecca Long Bailey gave him the perfect opportunity to fire her.
The recent “ resigning” of several shadow front bench PPS’s was manna from heaven for him. He has a long way to go and the current dithering and being slaves to SAGE has put the government in a bad light which has kept the spotlight off Labour.
I fancy the Tories are already plotting to remove Boris once this crisis starts to wane. He can afford to wait, time is on his side.
@grovehillwallah Yes Blair became a Tory, moving to the right to get elected. As you said GHW, he could have then realigned his policies. When you think we had him in Sedgefield, Mandelson in Hartlepool plus all the normal permanent Labour MP’s that the local population would have voted for, even if they had been a monkey. Remember theHartlepool Mayor?
Blair lied through his teeth over Iraqi. And remember the sad death of the gentleman driven to commit suicide. IMO he did absolutely nothing for the North East, especially Teesside.
@pedro Sadly the fate of Dr David Kelly isn't that unique in the sleazy world of business and politics.
Only this year we had the Chinese Doctor conveniently die of Covid. Then there was the incredible run of bad luck of nine (yes nine) individuals alleged to have had sensitive information about the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, an incredible sequence of coincidences if ever there was one.
Ex American Footballer Pat Tillman who after being a pin up for the US Army became critical of US Military practices in Afghanistan and shortly afterwards was killed in a "friendly fire" incident. In the UK we had Alexander Perepilichny who had upset a few politicians back in his native Russia as well as the local Russian Mafia over money laundering in Russia and was found poisoned on a London Street.
Michael Ruppert a former Officer with the LAPD who upset the CIA and found dead with a gunshot wound in an apparent suicide. Nearer to home, we all remember what happened to Enron but many have now forgotten about the fate of John Clifford Baxter who after agreeing to testify also died by "suicide" from a gunshot wound.
Turkey of course has had a few recent events with the less than subtle demise of Jamal Khashoggi and Serena Shim when she reported that Turkish Officials were blatantly helping ISIS. Serena's car "accident" was a head on crash except the surviving driver claims that it was no accident and that they were deliberately forced off the road and that it wasn't head on. Who'd have thought a car accident could have caused so much confusion and doubt!
Then there is the mysterious "death" in custody of someone found unresponsive in his High Security New York Prison who had "Friends" in high places. Just two days before his "death" he shifted his huge wealth to the Virgin Islands and out of the reach of those seeking damages. Was he bumped off to protect others or was he unfortunately just left unguarded, and "unresponsive" rushed to a hospital, declared dead and subsequently hurriedly cremated privately. Still I suppose its less dramatic than falling overboard from a yacht.
Cynical, Moi?
Or committing suicide and locking yourself inside a holdall
Mutiny In Middlesbrough
....is a headline from the Mail Online, it also refers to Middlesbrough in the article as “ a Town in North Yorkshire “
Poor AV wouldn’t know whether to cheer or groan.