Creative Midfielder

Yes, astonishingly stupid - it so tempting to say that you couldn't make this kind of stuff up were it not for the fact that Brexiteers manage to prove that they can on such a ridiculously regular basis Mind you, I thought the usual Brexitty claim was that the 'French don't play by the rules', but I guess the country can easily change depending upon the particular variety of Brexitty nonsense is being spouted. Perhaps the reality is that when Brexiteers are spouting nonsense about EU countries, their knowledge generally and especially of geography is so poor they just pluck the name of the first EU country that comes to mind. After all, they're pretty much the same all these EU countries aren't they and apparently just about to become a part of a single European super-state, so why should us Brits even bother to try and remember the individual countries' name nowadays, never mind whether they've got a coastline or not!

Have to agree - that is Webber's legacy. TBF he did some good with the training ground etc but on the pitch he leaves us with a much weaker squad than we had when he arrived which is truly appalling, and indeed hard to compute, when we've won two Championship titles and had a fair injection of Premiership cash during his tenure.

100% - haven't this corrupt, incompetent bunch of liars still got 40 new hospitals to build?? I guess that £290m could at least have knocked one off the list! Interesting question, 'when might real Conservative voters wake up from the nightmare of this shower' and I wouldn't pretend to know the answer to that. I think we tend to assume that it is slowly happening, and maybe it is, but the opinion polls suggest they still have around 25% support. I find it genuinely scarey that anything like a quarter of voters would even consider voting for a party that for over a decade has produced a succession of the worst govenments that this country has ever seen - IMO that is is a very stark illustration (not that we need another one) of why this country is already in very deep sh*t and has precious little prospect of emerging from it.

I'd agree with all that and add that in most cities and towns there is now plenty of scope to convert office space (& maybe even some retail as well) back to apartments - demand for office space has dipped pretty sharply since the pandemic and certainly isn't going to recover, if anything the need for offices is likely to decline further in the future.

Another very fair point It seems a very reasonable working assumption that Charles really dislikes Sunak, and for very good reasons. Much like the rest of us in fact

Very fair point, and another good reason why he probably takes a very dim view of Sunak's recent marbles hissy fit.

Good on him, never been a fan of the the Royal Family and still aren't but always had a certain amount of respect for Charles - the only one as far as I can see who has a good brain and is prepared to put it to use in doing his bit to improve the country rather than trying to perpetuate the status quo indefinitely. Suspect he is taking this particular opportunity, not just with respect to the marbles, but to show his contempt for Sunak generally and especially for his backtracking and deceit about our climate crisis plan - sorry that should read 'our lack of a climate crisis plan'.

Yes, shame Sir James didn't include the 'h'-word in his summing up but I guess he just took it as read and still nice to end the week with some good news for a change. This really was a ludicrous case to bring from the very start and Dyson should consider himself lucky not to have it dismissed as being vexatious - he really must be incredibly thin-skinned to take offence at even mild criticism like that. Presumably he is feeling rather sore both about the way Brexit has turned out but probably much more so about how things have gone rather t*ts up businesswise for him since his rather foolish flit to Singapore. But whatever his motivation, trying to take it out on the Daily Mirror is pretty pathetic and hopefully quite costly for him.

Interesting, especially when you look at the detail which underpins the headline. Its only an opinion poll, of course, but it seems reflective of quite a number of indications over the last couple of years of the direction of travel in public opinion re Brexit. I don't suppose it has helped the Brexiteers' cause that the Tory government(s) that have delivered our failed Brexit have also performed so woefully in every other policy area as well. But equally I don't think the growing desire to rejoin either the EU or SM is going to diminish in any way by the sort of tinkiering at the margins that Starmer is talking about, so hopefully the pressure will increase on him to adopt a grown up policy on the EU (and some other areas as well ) Seem to think that I read something about Ed Davey also coming under pressure to beef up their policy further as well which woukld be nice and put even more pressure on Starmer to man up.

Now I really have heard it all - LYB complaining about other people being uncompromising If we hadn't established quite a while ago that you have a sense of humour bypass then it might have been an attempt at irony but apparently it was a serious comment. And here's a serious comment for you - when you accuse people of being reliably and uncompromisingly against our own country you are as usual completely wrong. We may be reliably against our country's government but that is a completely different thing to being against our country, especially at a time when we've had 13 years of corrupt and incompetent Tory government reliably inflicting damage on our country. What I'd like to know is what drives you & BB to so reliably, and rather desperately, defend them?

TBF, given what we hear from some of the posters on here it doesn't require much imagination. And let's not forget that we have the practical experience of the worst series of governments that this country has ever experienced and which in 13 horrible years have never knowingly done the right or decent thing to do.

Indeed, so awkward that Truss bypassed them altogether and that worked out really well!

Absolutely spot on, I can't think of a more inappropriately named politician than Cleverly, the guy is as thick as p"gsh"t. But unfortunately, he is par for the course and it is genuinely scary that our last three Home Secretaries, Patel, Braverman & Cleverly have all been totally unfit for any ministerial office never mind one of the very top jobs - actually I think Grant Schapps might have been Home Secretary for a couple of days somewhere in that sequence but that just makes it worse! No wonder with people like that in charge that the whole country is moving towards becoming a 's******e', and let's not forget that most of our rivers and coastal waters have already achieved that status.

I'm really surprised that this doesn't get aired much more frequently - the gig economy has for a long time been a far bigger factor in forcing wages (and job security) down than immigration, whether from the EU or non-EU.

That isn't the real question - as you yourself said the much smaller number of asylum seekers isn't included in the 700,000 figure. The real question is why is our corrupt and utterly incompetent government which promised to control/significantly reduce immigration are handing out 700,000 visas a year and yet still failing to bring in the skilled immigrants that our economy is desperately short of. Seems crystal clear now that whilst we were EU members FOM delivered far fewer immigrants but with a much better skill mix for the needs of our economy, so this current Tory government created shambles is actually a double whammy. They thought 'stopping the boats' would provide a very convenient distraction from the real problems of their own making but since they've demonstrated utter incompetence in that as well they are going to have to find another yet dead cat from somewhere