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.

The government should set a maximum price that can be charged at the pumps with penalties for any retailer profiteering. The maximum price charged would be subject to change in oil prices but the government should take control of the situation as it is affecting business and consumers heavily. 1p off a litre is just a gimmick.

That is 1 player. I forgot Frank Lampard too (drunken gloating about 9/11 at a Heathrow hotel packed with Americans) So we have : Rooney - Serial adulterer Ferdinand - Banned for drugs Gerrard - Beating up a DJ Terry - Serial adulterer Cole - Serial adulterer Wilshire - Regular pub brawls Carroll - Beat up 2 women and his club captain Lampard - Insulting American tourists after 9/11 No one expects every footballer to be faultless but to have 8 unsavoury characters in the same team takes some doing.

No doubt a lot of people will be going there today with good intentions, the vast majority, as did a lot of students last year but a minority will certainly be violent today even the police are expecting it. It will be the usual Class War/Socialist Worker rent-a-mob picking a fight with the police and smashing up banks/branches of Vodafone and giving the event all the wrong headlines. Same with the students last year, a violent minority torpedoed their own cause and lost all public sympathy for the cause thus undoing the good intentions of the majority, same will happen today and Miliband attending the event is a very bad PR move for him.

I will be hoping Wales win. Even though I am by birth English and was educated in England I can't identify with the national team, too many people of dubious character wearing the shirt - Rooney, Gerrard, Terry, Cole, Wilshire, Carroll - all of them have acted disgracefully off the field and are poor role models.

I think Cameron's lead is going to increase quite significantly this weekend There is going to be a massive riot on the streets of Central London today with left wing anarchists smashing up everything in sight, Miliband is speaking at the demo so when the riots kick off which they will then people and the right wing press will associate Miliband with the thugs and it will damage Labour in the polls. This is going to be the poll tax riots all over again -_-

There are 2 types of JSA from my understanding, there is income based and there is contribution based so once the fixed term is up for one then they will just be transferred over to the other :unsure: they would both show up in the unemployment figures. It used to be a scam of Labour to encourage people on JSA to move to incapacity benefit to manipulate the figures but that is being cracked down on now so this 10,000 drop is reliable. I have never claimed a benefit in the UK so can't with total accuracy comment on the benefit system but my understanding is that the above is the case.

The bad times have probably more or less peaked tbh, inflation will hover around 4-5% in the forseeable future and unemployment FELL last month (if you consider people claiming JSA as the benchmark which I do and JSA claimant fell by 10,000 ) so I think that things are bottoming out now and soon heading for improvement. Around 1-2million people will have bought 3DS (£200) and/or iPad 2 (£380-650) today so there is still plenty of money out there and it is being spent.

It is probably a combination of things Cameron's statesmanship over Libya The petrol price cut The UK feelgood factor - nice weather at the moment, people (not me) excited about the royal wedding, the iPad2/3DS being launched today But the fact that Labour is behind in the polls at the peak of the tough times means they have a mountain to climb when things pick up which they will

Blair was a lot further to the right than Kennedy, Miliband is very much occupying Kennedy's territory now whereas Blair wasn't Blair was reaching out to centre right voters.

One big difference you have failed to factor in. In 1993 there was a much smaller percentage of the population going to university than there is now so it was affordable to subsidise students going to uni. There must be 1-2million students in the UK at uni it is simply not economically viable to give them all grants especially in tough economic times.