Valley Pub

Football is tribal it is unlike any other sport so it is fully understandable a lot of English people washing their hands of the national team. How easy is it for say a Spurs fan to cheer on Arsenal players playing for England ? how easy is it for an Everton fan to cheer when Andy Carroll or Gerrard scores for England ? football is unique in that and the answer is bloody hard. There is not the tribal rivalry in cricket so everyone cheers on the England team.

Nice one :) With regards what you edited it to I don't see myself as a right winger, I would say I am centre right. I certainly haven't posted any extreme views. I have some very strong views on law and order, am economically centre right and am socially centrist so when added together that makes me slightly right of centre and certainly not an extremist.

If that is how you feel then it is probably best for the both of us if you do indeed add me to your ignore list.

I have just seen your profile, it states you are 42. I would least have imagined that you would have the maturity at aged 42 to have tolerance and acceptance of alternative opinions to your own without dummy spitting it really is most undignified seeing a grown middle aged man acting in such a manner.

I don't buy The Sun for politics I buy it because The Sun has by far the best sports coverage of any national newspaper. I buy it on a Saturday for the football and F1 gossip, on a Monday for the football results and on a Tuesday to get the report on the Monday night game on Sky tv, if your assumption is I buy The Sun to form my political opinions your assumption is so incorrect, I rarely even read beyond the sports pages.

LOL true :lol: :blush: but aside from those with vested interests I think most people will have agreed that students should have to pay something towards their education. And those with the vested interest in fees being scrapped would be the first to moan if the local hospital closed through lack of funds or no police officer could attend when they got burgled as the local station had closed. The money to pay for free education would have had to have come from somewhere.

The students wanted fees scrapped altogether not just rises scrapped which is why Clegg was branded a traitor as he wanted free uni education for all, I fully believe that the public would sympathise with the fee increases but scrapping fees altogether would surely not gain much public support bar students and their parents :unsure:

The public are fickle, 1 poxy penny off fuel and a couple of speeches about how nasty Colonel Gadaffi is and the government are ahead in the polls again.

500,000 is still less than half that attended the Gulf War protest. No one wants cuts but they are a necessary evil to get the debt back on track and in my opinion they will succeed so while the cuts aren't nice they are necessary and I think people realise that. Yes Labour pulled away but do you have any evidence that this was because of the student fees ? or could it have been a general thing and the fact it happened at the same time as the student issue was just a co-incidence ? (cuts, bankers bonuses, MP's expenses etc making the government unpopular) I don't buy the Daily Mail only paper I buy is The Sun and even then no more than 2 or 3 times a week (admittedly I read the Daily Mail website but I read many).

250,000 or so attended the rally today, over a million attended the anti Iraq war demo, clearly 3-4 times as many people care about Iraq than care about the cuts.

England till September, I am a hot weather/summer person. Surely the public at large realise that spending £40bn on students over 3 years is ludicrous and if they support it I would be fascinated to find out where they think the money would come from. 1,500,000 x 27,000 is over 40 billion

I don't think the public at large opposed the tuition fee hike, if they did at first they certainly didn't oppose it after the riots. I am not anti student one bit but subsidising 1-2m people to go to university was and is simply unaffordable and that was why I was in favour of keeping fees and I think the public at large was of the opinion that it was unaffordable too. I could see where the students were coming from but having free further education for 1-2million people would cost billions and the money simply wasn't and isn't there and the public realised that. By my calculations paying the fees of 1.5m students over 3 years would cost over £40 BILLION over that time

It depends on the public mood, the public mood was strongly against the poll tax, the public mood was strongly against students, the public mood seems to be that the cuts while unpleasant are necessary to get the public finances in order. I don't detect great backlash against the cuts so any violence will backfire on the left.

The right wing media will be full of 'Left Wing Thugs On The Rampage In London" in the papers tomorrow. Any violence today and Labour will be on the receiving end of the backlash, people will blame 'lefties' whether the blame is deserved or not.

But will the news and newspaper headlines be about the peaceful 95% or the violent 5% ? we both know the answer to that. People remember the student protests purely for the violence when it was probably 5% of students being violent and the violent minority is what will be remembered after today not the cause or the well meaning majority. Miliband has been badly advised with regards to attending this event.