Jon the Hat

They very very rarely tell us if it is disciplinary.

Are you sure it isn't a high horse? Are you looking down? Or sort of running around with a stick between your legs? The truth is we don't know whether players are injured actually injured or "injured - can't be arsed or pissed off the manager this week.

None, he has no track record here, but I am hoping he is smart enough to realise he has a mess on his hands once he spends some time in the interim role. EDIT or indeed is Lazy enough not to want to do it permanently.

Top could also put in place a top class CEO, and give them carte blanche to run the club properly. Selling is a nice to have at this point, but we need a leader to develop the right culture, from Director of Football to the manager, coaches and players.

And Conservatism more recently also quite liberal socially, less church morality reliant, more legalising gay marriage and so on. It is depressing how far right everyone has suddenly gone.

I do care if he’s sick, he doesn’t need this shower of shit to deal with.

On a similar subject, imo one of the most stupid, shortsighted government decisions of recent times is the ending of surestart centres, which seemed to centre around the idea that becuase they had a lot of middle class people involved somehow where not helping anyone, or where not cost effective. Insanity. This week I am trying not to think too much about the vast waste of energy going into this grooming inquiry, which while it might help us learn one or two things 14 years after the scandal broke, is very obviously being used as a reason not to take immediate and obvious action to protect kids from predators in known high risk areas. If ever an area needed to quick action and people to be brave enough to try some things, this is it, but instead we spend years more arguing about the inquiry while kids are being abused.

I don't think it is as stupid as it sounds. Kids who are not hungry won't get to school early for free food. They are not going to cater for every child, just those who come. Putting application barriers up also stops people accessing services, as well as costing a fortune. In this case, enabling schools to manage the delivery and balance with need is going to be by far the most cost-effective way of getting kids ready to learn. It might also get kids who don't go to school regularly into the habit of going to breakfast and staying which can only be a good thing. If a few better of kids want to join, that is a price worth paying. In my experience, better of parents funnel quite a lot of money into schools anyway, through donation, fund raising, paying for everything they are asked to pay for (many can't or don't).

Lib dems have always had strong local election game. Good for them. Reform I think will do less well come the general election than the polls suggest. Lets be honest, hardly anyone pays attention to council elections, so if you can get 5-10% of the locality to get angry enough to vote reform you can win a lot of seats.

Great to see people voting to keep Reform out. I can see the Lib Dems doing well out of this come the next election.

Who did you go with to install? I am thinking about this myself early next year.

Blue Sky! Must have escaped form down here!

Most ordinary people have a private pension these days though, and this is why companies are owned by these funds, because the sums are huge and growing. Yes you are right though that we are in a world where work is becoming less valuable, and technology and investment earns ever more and that is a problem. We need to find ways to have a bigger share of the earnings.

The second point I agree with, but on your first point, shareholders these days are mostly either pension funds or other investment companies, so again the benefit is widely spread when businesses do well. CEO pay - like Footballers pay it is stupid mostly, but in terms of impact on anyone, they share it with us through income tax at very high rates! Brilliant.

@ozleicester You get what I mean though? On one side we have the right telling the masses that immigrants are the cause of all their problems, and on the other hand, the left telling us the Rich are not paying enough tax and that is the problem. The truth is neither of those things are the real problem, which is a structural lack of growth to support our growing needs.

I think the logic of CEO pay being split between salary and bonuses tied to growth in value of the business (which most are) makes sense, as they are more directly responsible for the key decision which deliver shareholder returns, however the levels are nuts for some of these companies. Totally and utterly nuts. This article is confusing the two things I think.

I think there is a reasonable middle ground - e.g. in Western Australia we were sheltered from energy price hikes the rest of Australia had because the government required state gas supply to take precedence over export sales on the open market, with some sort of price restriction, so we pay a lot less that spot or futures prices. In the eastern states they did not. So it can be private and still protect the country's energy needs.

That is certainly one way of bankrupting the country!

I am a huge fan of Terry's books and other writings, and as you say they were very clever, thoughtful and wise in their addressing of life. I've not read Potter to be honest, but the films (which I enjoyed) made the vast majority of the money and have been responsible for literally hundreds of millions in taxes all over the world, so I don't think you can compare their contribution economically, which was where we started.

They are paying literally half the bills. 36,000 people paying more in total that the bottom 27,000,000. It is scary.

Sadly the great Terry Pratchett is no longer with us, but I am sure he paid his taxes too, but not probably at the same level as the brilliant J.K. Rowling.

Honestly, I think it is nonsense. The rich are no more the problem to the man in the street than the immigrants.

Plenty moving to Dubai recently who pays tens of millions in tax. The issue we have is that we have attracted a lot of mobile wealth in the past 30 years, and while we could attract more to help the economy, we seem to be trying to do the opposite, for political reasons, and this this likely to cost us all more in the medium term. Inequality is completely irrelevant between you and me and the mega rich. What matters is the inequality between the upper / middle class and the poor.

0.1% of the tax paying population is paying over half the income tax in the country. And people think we don't need to be very very careful about millionaires leaving. 36,000 people. People who built businesses, created wonderful things like Harry potter. They pay a vast amount of tax on their vast incomes. The funny thing is, people like James Dyson get vilified for moving some production out of the country but pays over 100 million pounds a year in tax, from a business he literally built himself. Honestly this will end in some very rich people leaving and a massive whole opening up in the economy.