Rayvin

I forgot this admittedly, but I'm not sure what difference it makes..? Unless you're saying that their 'reason' is a lie and that they actually just want to show off their anti-racism credentials. I'd be tempted to argue that this is more the fault of the far right than it is of the Royal Mail - they're the ones who poisoned the flag. Maybe the rest of us need to claim it back, but I feel like more non-racists are more aligned with the Union Jack than they are with St George's Cross.

I think they've made the right call personally. If they've done it before, and they're allowing people to have flags in actual post offices, then the right of the culture war won't be able to meaningfully make it stick.

If this is true then he's still primarily focused on reducing the debt. I don't see why he wouldn't just say that but there we go. I assume this takeover is properly dead anyway...

A decade of evidence concerning how Ashley runs the club, sure. Is there a decade of evidence of him taking money out? I can recall one occasion, i think. All I'm saying is that if the money isn't "leaving the club" it must be going somewhere. Why would it not be released to Benitez? If it is leaving the club then fine, Ashley is lying to buy himself time and it is paying off the debt. But even so, i dont understand why he wouldn't just say that.

No arguments from me

As with all things, I only try and make judgements based on the evidence I have. And my post broadly supports Alex's one in the sense that he can see an argument for minimal spending on season one after relegation but not in season 2. All I've said is that it seems Ashley is holding the season 2 money back until the end of the coming season. Which is the same as noting that he isn't spending it now, and that he could do so. Has HF done any analysis on the accounts for that season yet, I miss his input into these things frankly.

In which case where is the money going? It can't surely be going back to Ashley otherwise he's just setting himself up for obviously being called a liar in a couple of years time when the accounts are released. Is the club just going to sit on it?

Aye but isn't a lot of that going straight into paying off the relegation season? The accounts released on that were grim. It's disappointing though, I agree. It's as if Ashley has looked at it and decided that we can't spend the money we know we will get for the coming season, and that it only becomes available at the end.

I think they might need hundreds of thousands though mate. I'd love to see Scotland leave since it would be a backdoor to Europe and tbh I would just move there anyway - but 10s of thousands won't do it.

I guess if the club doesn't have the money, it doesn't have the money. Honestly don't see the point in stressing about it now, Ashley is clearly not going to put anymore money in. On the plus side, we should get £20m+ for Mitro which I guess pushes this back to the same sort of figure as last summer. Maybe we can move on another couple of players also.

They're not going to get another vote until Brexit is well out of the way, probably in decades. Well, not unless we start seeing mass marches. Problem is, Scotland doesn't actually have that many people.

She must fucking hate Johnson though

Awesome, good for you.

Boris was loving that A rare zinger from Corbyn.

How is it even a betrayal? After the world cup is the best time for him to go, they have two years for someone else to come in and prepare for the Euros.

Savage.

Ok I'll give it a look but yeah, that seems a sensible position. So obviously, we're going to go for the non-sensible option as a society.

Well sure, but that's different to picking a side and then accepting you were wrong about it. I'm not saying you should do that by the way, I'm just noting that CT and myself have to effectively turn around and say that yeah, what we thought was best, was wrong. That's the thing people can't do.

I didn't - any chance of a basic summary of her position? I can't get iPlayer thanks to TV licensing

I'm struggling to see how it isn't hate speech. Is it? Or do we just accept that hate speech can only work from the 'powerful' to the 'oppressed'. I'm staggered that the Washington Post published it also - they're giving a platform to people who sound like Tommy Robinson, but with a different target.

Surprising defence of Trump by Monbiot: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/13/trump-nafta-g7-sunset-clause-trade-agreement The only point I would pick a hole in for his article is that I doubt whether Trump wanted a sunset clause in NAFTA for the reasons Monbiot is ascribing to him. But in fairness, the effect is the same I guess.

I'm not sure you've read it right... I'm not saying that I think this, I'm saying that clearly, SOME people think this. And that those people will struggle to think this once this Korean nonsense is exposed.

This is the thing that I find depressing with politics in this country. The Tories have been in power for long enough now that you couldn't really argue that the current 'plight' of the nation is anyone else's fault. And yet the day we will never see people like CT call the government out over its failings because no one in the UK has enough balls to admit they were wrong about anything. I once thought that Corbyn would make a good leader of the Labour party on the grounds that he was listening to people and wasn't a cardboard cutout of a human being like many of the Blairites. I have since decided that while the latter point is true, I was sadly wrong about the former - he is ineffectual domestically and actively damaging on Europe. While I still have some hope that he might be able to ride the wave again in another election, I'm no longer sure that I would actually want him in power if he's going to sleepwalk us out of the EU anyway. So there, CT - I was wrong about many of the things I hoped for with Corbyn. See? It didn't kill me. Not that he's the only one on here incapable of doing this, of course

If it is as it looks, surely no one can argue that Trump actually makes good deals. This has the potential to make him look exactly as out of his depth as he is.

Because meeting them validates the regime. http://time.com/5192579/trump-meets-kim-jong-un-north-korea/ It’s not that previous presidents didn’t have the option of meeting with the head of the hermit kingdom. “North Korea has been seeking a summit with an American president for more than twenty years,” Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Middlebury Institute of International studies tweeted Thursday night. “It has literally been a top foreign policy goal of Pyongyang since Kim Jong Il invited Bill Clinton.”