Honey Honey

Had £1.50 in my wallet so popped into betfred stuck an accie on and have won £50 Leicester to beat Lassy Bashers, Villa to beat QPR, Brighton to beat peaky blinders, Preston to beat Bristol city, Tranmere to beat Southend, Aberdeen to beat Inverness and Bolton to beat Southend. Wonder how long it will take me to lose this money? 2 days?

Haven't watched that in ages. Great series. Saw Justin Moorhouse in stand-up last year.

Theresa May hater of freedom and incompetent home secretary get a good Brexit deal? There's more chance Chazz resurrects TFF.

Leaving them out isn't hostile, but anything that sets out to damage Gibraltar is hostile. In my opinion part of this move may be because the EU would like to push the United Kingdom out of defence and military roles in the Med. Would like to, will do or would be able to are 3 different things though.

If Gibraltar is treat in a hostile way it will be a breach of article 8 of the Lisbon treaty. Gibraltar could take the EU/Spain to the ECJ and most likely win with ease.

Hope you googled "Wiener California" to get that

Senator Wiener? Has to be a wind up article

Fair point but personally I don't believe anyone other than Sweden will leave. No one has the bottle to leave the €uro, maybe Finland, but no one in the nation's with real anti-EU sentiment will leave without another collapse first. Brexit isn't even remotely relevant to those €uro countries leaving situation and free trade is a minor issue in comparison to what they'd have to do. In addition to that trying to stress a difference between Britain and membership implies not giving anything to the concerns of the anti-EU sentiments in countries like Italy so is a questionable tactic in itself. I can see the EU taking that approach but it's not necessarily clever and would be further mismanagement In my opinion. They need to start compromising with the nation states. The lack of compromise is what pushed Britain out. Free trade has a kind of off narrative in political discourse anyhow. Firstly it assumes removing tariffs is significant, in reality tariffs are already low for most goods and floating currencies act as a cushion against tariffs which wasn't the case in the 19th and 18th century. Secondly free trade and trading blocs in general are treat as if they are how wealth is created. In Adam Smith's day free trade was a case of you grow cotton, we can't grow cotton, we've got mills and expertise, if we trade you give us cotton we give you what we can do with cotton both our economies benefit, wealth is created as otherwise neither of us would have had the products we get through trade. Fast forward to now and what happens in a lot of free trade areas is we make chocolate, it would be cheaper to make chocolate over there, we will move over there. Nothing new is added to the economy, wealth is moved not created, the cheaper consumer cost means we can buy more variety but we didn't create wealth. This has happened a lot to Britain and America largely because our financial systems were opened up and wealth was replaced by debt.

That's a funny gym where over half the members get paid to go to it. I'd love it if my gym bought me a car with other members money. Then when I rock up to the gym in my Porshe and that guy who paid for it is trying to get in without buying me more stuff I will tell him to f off, I'm using the Smith machine and only me, if you want to share you can buy me a rolex. The EU isn't supposed to be a supremacist membership club. It's supposed to be countries mutually agreeing to have a common legal system under the principle that doing so is the best form of action for wealth creation. Giving free market access to those outside, which they have done to others, is not letting someone use the facilities because there are no facilities, the benefits of membership are not free trade but the principle of a unified law. Such law enables business to operate easier. Simply being outside of that legal system in practice means all benefits are lost.

I haven't seen enough balls to know what is big or small to be perfectly honest.

There are no anti-globalists in government or any senior ones in the leave campaign. This whole we are going to trade with the world rhetoric which dominates is probably going to lead to cheaper food and a loss of exports for Ireland, France and Spain's agricultural industry and that is about it. In terms of the state of the UK economy there are more serious systemic problems. These might be addressed if the government are forced into action because of Brexit fallout, but that assumes competence where there probably isn't any. Werner's recent research suggests GDP growth in the United Kingdom over the last 30 years was not the result of trade with the continent but came from debt being used to fund productive capacity. Something which has been extremely low because we are primarly using money creation to fund the housing market and have allowed private bankers to print money and lend to whatever gets them the biggest quickest bonus which isn't small businesses and productivity. What places like Sunderland need is access to credit for productive means. Small and medium businesses in the UK notoriously can't get access to credit. I think a good place to start would be John McDonnell's proposal for regional investment banks, mimicking the German model which funnily enough the ECB are trying to destroy. Staying in the EU or leaving the EU really wasn't going to make a difference economically to poor people in Hartlepool. But they can hope that their screams were heard. Trump's isolationism beneath the surface is recognition of the reality that something is fundamentally going very wrong in international trade whereby countries are having to cheat each other to get ahead because non of them have anything unique. Big business crossing borders freely has created a situation where governments compete to entice them in. Innovation is no longer in job creating activities. It's in job destroying activity. Investment in productivity isn't coming from governments or banks anywhere near where it needs to be, It's left up to big businesses to buy up supply chains and move it around, make it cheap enough to drive consumption across the West, create mass consumers, zombies gorging on products. When Trump says China is cheating he's not far from the truth, the big US corporations are going to China to take advantage of cheap labour. The Chinese haven't invented anything, big US businesses just went in to drive their bottom line down. That doesn't mean bringing jobs back is feasible, but investment in new technology, in productivity, in innovation is where success is. Trying to beat everyone else is a questionable approach and never ending game. In North East England mines and shipyards were closed and the Thatcher government gave state welfare and goodies to Japanese mega firm Nissan to open up, which have continued and been extended by every government since. When it comes to international trade it is all about cheating. Britain as you can tell is pretty bad at cheating in manufacturing. It is very good at financial fraud however. Very good at financial corruption. Easily the biggest finance sector cheats on the planet. The only thing the UK has to lose in trade talks with the EU is it's current cheating in the city of London. The rest of the country isn't cheating. One terms are agreed maybe the government will look to find a new sector to cheat with if it needs to. Britain needs to find it's way back to innovation. Not going to happen with this banking sector which has basically turned us into a credit card mortgage junkie economy of mass consumers. Theresa May is an nanny knows best statist conservative. I don't know how much she will give to the libertarian Thatcherite's but she certainly seems to want to meddle in people's economic life so there is going to be plenty of attempts at industrial cheating under her tenure.

No doubt some want to dish out Soviet Union style punishment to threaten and coerce other ethnic groups of people into submitting to their centralised dominance. How many and how much power those people have I don't know. I'd be ashamed of that if I was pro-EU. I'd be ashamed if Westminster tried to punish Scotland to put the Welsh off. It has been found in a court of law that Ireland and a few others were deliberately and excessively punished by €urozone elites, imo those behind that should be pulled up into a human rights court. If you deliberately inflict suffering on others as they have done in the periphery you've committed a crime in my view. It is one thing to suffer at the hands of negligence and mistakes, democracy exists to correct that, It's another to deliberately be made to suffer. That is only possible when you lose power, you have no way of holding the people incharge to account and through fear you submit. You do hear politicians talking about how the deal must be worse than membership. This shows they do not even know the point of membership themselves. They don't even know the point of what they are doing. That is suspicious. Maybe they know it's not the best thing to be doing but are so fanatical they don't care. Even I can see the point of membership is the theory and idea that the merger of laws and free movements will make trade easier and open markets up. If someone was to leave they don't need to be punished, they would in theory weaken themselves by changing laws and blocking freedoms. If you have to engineer failure you are admitting you could be wrong, your ideas might be wrong and you don't want to take the risk of finding out. This is all reminiscent of the collapse of communism.

Merkels move is just part of the gamesmanship to come. The EU's primary target is to extract as much money from the British taxpayer as possible. Rejecting trade negotiations is trying to force the issue they want and preventing the UK from having a similar trade deal to Canada who don't have to pay a penny. They're going to fight to make this generation of Brits accept giving a debt burden to unborn babies to fund projects that have no ROI for the exchequer.

The real coverage begins now. The last 3 months the mainstream media have dragged out yesterday's politicians, war criminals, shysters and losers to beg this doesn't happen for the sake of their viewing figures. We can actually have meaningful coverage now. It is still to be seen if the government makes a deal which actually returns the democratic functionality of the rights which were sacrificed and weakened in the numerous treaties, or if the government just makes a deal designed to appease the here and now attitudes such as with immigration.

Try asking who is Strawberry Blonde? That is how you identify the ginger people with low self esteem and tiny balls.

Once you become a mortgage holder you become totally dependent on the state, central bank and private bank exec's rigging the market to prevent you going into negative equity. Too many people are in too deep now that the government will keep the game rigged for as long as possible to prevent electoral collapse. If you go in to the game don't take the max the bank will give you, leave yourself a cushion just in case.

When I go low, I go low!

Noooooo not Dijsselbloem That's it... This calls for only one thing... @Panflute

I pay sky high rent for a box but it was under 50% of my salary. As I age I will move to something more appropriate but right now its just about quality of life. I don't agree with paying more than 35% of your salary on housing.

Brexit has been a political disaster. Constantly rehashing the debate almost one year on is precisely why. I have watched on in despair as I have seen good centrist people move further and further into the arms of the conservative party. When you imply people are idiots or stoopid racists they don't come over to your side they go wherever they are valued. Brexit has let the bourgeois leftist cat out the bag. Tim Farron, Blairites, the Guardian, the Independent. Elitism and hatred is pouring out of the megaphone. The echo chamber is preventing self-awareness and leading to self-defeating beliefs such as that Brexiteers are bogeymen and that Brexit can be stopped. It's a gift to Theresa May who just had to do a slight centrist virtue signal to clean up. May gets to allow Farage and UKIP to be the Brexit extremists who piss borderline people off instead of her party. Whilst labour and Lib dems have remain extremists within their parties sending those borderline voters right into Mays arms.

The UK has never been a counter balance to Germany. It has been its main ally on matters of the economy and finance, acting as a dual counter balance to some of the more overbearing interferences that the less free market oriented nations come up with. I'm not sure what you mean with behave like the USA because the USA are retreating under Donald Trump whereas the UK will be doing the complete opposite under David Davis. If there is any lesson from the USA then it is the reality that the problems of the industrialised towns will not be fixed by trade deals, so they perhaps have some misguided hope right now like Obama gave those in the US. Get it wrong like Obama and risk these towns turning to someone who makes 1950s socialist speeches about tariffs.

There is a player for Vasco da Gama called Pikachu

I don't like the twist of who Mr robot is (won't say more than that for spoiler purposes). It is irritating me. Things were enjoyable until that twist. I'm on to the first episode of the 2nd season now.

Sir Balon