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Since 2018-19 especially, it seems to me that countless billions have been squandered by both the Tories and now Labour....
I'd love to see an exact figure and how and to what extent it has affected increasing the national debt.
I don't agree with the conspiracy theorists that it's deliberate design to bankrupt Britain, I think it's simply we have a political elite who are grossly incompetent, fiscally irresponsible and have no idea how a balance sheet works. They are selfish criminal narcissists masquerading as MPs and Ministers.
We really should be storming the Bastille incandescent with rage but it all gets brushed under the carpet after every scandal and everyone goes back to sitting on their 'aris avidly watching The Traitors where art imitates life...
I feel a word in the ear of my mate Rupert might get things moving. Watch this space.
Plaid and their supporters really are thicker than a Whale Omelette....
TENS OF MILLIONS!?
Let's see what that might look like eh Llinos Medi-cation?
Imagine your native language nearly becoming extinct in the mid C20th, so you spend decades vandalising and spraying roadsigns, firebombing estate agents and holiday cottages and being outwardly and unashamedly hostile to your English neighbours whether they're holiday makers or retirees, driving them away from your ethnic homeland with open hostility back over the border or Severn bridge...imagine that...?
Finally, after 30-40 years, like the petulant spoilt children you are your tantrums are caved into and indulged beyond your widlest dreams by a devolved pro-Iaith government and the language starts to flourish again, the arts have a Cymric renaissance, Welsh is compulsory in schools again, bilingualism is a must for public sector jobs, Cool Cymru is everywhere and Mr Urdd is strutting about everywhere with a massive red white and green boner with pure Welsh dragon fire bursting from his funicular fundament...!
"Iesu Grist, Rydym wedi ein Hachub! Arglwydd Mawr Bois Bach !"
But then, that's not enough for the rampant leftist idealogues in the Plaid ranks is it ?... Trots first and a Cymro/Cymraes second, they wilfully ignore the utter car crash of mass immigration elsewhere in the UK, and so Wales is reborn in its new found confidence as a Nation of Sanctuary for all comers ("except for them Saes bustards like obviously innit ?- ych a fi mun ! ") despite not having a fiscal pot to piss in ourselves...
So in a suicidal 'Darwin Awards move' of biblical proportions the floodgates are opened to all and sundry....
Fast forward and the year is 2075 - Llinos the Twp is long dead...but Welsh is almost unheard of in Wales, in fact you hardly hear English spoken anywhere on the streets since the principality became a Caliphate after the Islamic Revolution of 2049... but Pashtun, Gujerati, Urdu and Bengali are widely spoken and observed everywhere alongside Sudanese, Somalian and Eritrean....including all multilingual roadsigns, street signs and at public transport hubs (each sign now 5 times the size it was in 2026 of course, but thankfully the manadtory 20mph speed limits introduced over 50 years ago ensures we now have plenty of time to read them properly..) Uber are now Wales's largest company with a turnover of £126billion a year and their busiest time of year is around the national festival in May - The Eid-Steddfod - when they ferry millions of citizens to the festival site to watch the many stonings and beheadings for apostasy and speeches by radical celebrity Imams. Nearly every church and chapel is now a Mosque. The Welsh Medium schools have long gone and are all Madrassahs now. On the plus side however there are an extra 600 million sheep in Wales grazing to feed the exploding population and it's thirst for a nice bit of grass-fed halal mutton. The former Areas of Oustanding Natural Beauty like Gower and the Beacons have been turned over to pasture alongside newly constructed Islamic themed towns and villages each with it's own 10,000 seater super-mosque to accomodate the masses. The biggest one in the Caliphate of Wales is at the foot of Pen-y-Fan on the site of the former Storey Arms and is popular with hikers, sheep-farmers and those using the rugged terrain for ISIS training purposes. When dogs were finally banned by the former Senedd (now called Majlis al-Nuwaab Cardiff) for being haram in 2053 everyone stopped using the great outdoors to walk them in so the land was made available for taxpayer-funded development....
It's all been a right roaring success for the people of Wales so it has, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise..
Yes they've done some fantastic re-issues and compilations...60s garage, psychedelia, mod revival, punk and new wave and 80s/90s Indie to name but a few
I agree on the family silver thing, I raged about it for years to anyone who was bored enough to listen. Like most of us on here I grew up in the shadow of the miners strike and loathed 'Thatch' ( @ Ben Elton remember him ? ;) - calling her policies towards the industrial heartlands of the UK "economic apartheid" There was no courting of the Red Wall in those days. Investment and wealth for Tory boroughs jack f-g shit for Labour ones.
In my naive youth worshipping at the church of liberal egalitarianism I always saw Mrs T, Tebbit and Lawson as unfairly punching down and Toilet trader Tony as gloriously punching upwards (yeah sorry about that unfortunate mental image )...I initially welcomed Blair into power in '97 until I saw him for the snake he was. Thankfully I only voted for him once and have never voted Labour again.
These days with the benefit of experience and hindsight it's gone the full 360 on those two...
Both as I see it, classic examples of methodological individualism and the Austrian school but very different in terms of the motivational drivers behind the personalities...
Mrs T would be horrified and incensed at the state of the UK in 2026, while Blair of course is rolling around in it like the rest of the grifting Nu-Labour mob, grabbing and swallowing all they can consume or destroy like a pig in sh/t...."look upon my works and weep"
I found Economics boring as hell at school and dropped it like a hot turd.
I know feck all really but I'm always eager to learn from those that work in the financial sector and I try to read a bit where I can. I've come to find it a fascinating subject in later life and appreciate it for the complex science it is that touches and influences everything we do whether we like it or not.
Anyway I've gone on off on one as usual but yes....we are reaping the whirlwind of 30-40 years of largely unregulated privatisation and chronic underinvestment...
Factor in Milliband's batshit pursuit of Net Zero and it's no wonder we all feel poorer when the utility bills come knocking...
A dull game for 40 mins that came to life via an own goal.
WBA played very well second half and just seemed to click...thought they were going to get the 3rd if any team was
That's the Championship for you though - so many of my EPL supporting mates love watching this League as it p/sses all over the top flight for entertainment value and is a much more level field and they also love the fact there's no VAR....
Not my words but I thought this post on Twitter/X summed the national mood regarding conscription up perfectly...
"There is a vast difference between a real threat and a manufactured one—and an even greater difference between what the public understands by those terms and what politicians deliberately pretend they mean. People will defend their country when it is genuinely under threat. What they will not do anymore is die on foreign soil for agendas that are hidden, dishonest, and conveniently rebranded as “national interest.” This government lectures the public about security while allowing real dangers to walk in by the thousand every single week. That alone strips them of any moral authority to demand sacrifice from anyone. Get your own house in order first. The era of obedient cannon fodder is over. Trust is gone—and politicians destroyed it themselves. If they had done their jobs properly, there would be no credible threat to point at. And the truth is, there isn’t one now. What we are being sold is fear: fear engineered to justify power, to funnel public money into endless conflict, and to enrich elites with fingers deep in the weapons industry. This isn’t defence—it’s exploitation. And people can see it."
Great speech by R J but I think he may come to regret jumping ship so quickly
He should have continued as an indepedent for a while and spoken to Rupert Lowe as he's got more in common with his ideals than Farage who will throw him under a bus at the first sign he's getting too popular...
Remember it well. We lost the plot at Hudds. Trunds missed the Sheffield game - then had a poor game by his standards at home against Gillingham on his return which we won 2-0 despite a number of the players not performing to their best. We felt one or two of them were saving themselves perhaps for the Ipswich tie in the FA Cup Sure enough Jackett benched Trunds and Painter for the game at Ipswich only bringing him on after they'd scored. Going home we felt had LT10 started we could have won as Ipswich were not all that but we also lacked any spark or creativity. Fun Fact - Pawel Abbott played in the Hudds, Gills and Ipswich games but for two different teams !!
Yes I worked in retail a few times - long hours, thankless senior management and throbbing sweaty feet at the end of every shift...
Poor pay structure and even when you rose up a rung ot two to supervisor/team leader the little extra you got didn't compensate for the extra workload and aggro. If some drunk nutter came in off the street swing a bottle of Buckie about or there was shoplifting going on it was you that had to sort it out all for an extra few bob an hour...
I'm always nice to shop staff as they put up with a lot worse and more of it these days
A young person's job...Besides I'd doubt I'd last a week these days before my joints flared up..
Firstly, Many Happy Returns, Buona Fortuna and hope you are relaxing with a nice glass of red....!
Yes, I think a lot of us think and feel this and increasingly so as we drift into the autumn of our lives. Even as a young man these closing lines from F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby resonated with me:
"The orgastic future that year by year recedes before us...tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.....So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
I think one of the paradoxes of modern life is that we are programmed and conditioned to chase and hunt down dreams to have a comfortable existence but rarely stop to take stock of what we have at any given time and enjoy it in the moment. I find I can only really appreciate the good times after they have passed and I've always been slightly envious of those that can graft and push the envelope but were always fully immersed in their leisure time at weekends with a smile on their face. In the thankfully few jobs I disliked, the ghost of Monday morning was often rattling it's chains by Satuday evening, Sunday if I was lucky.
We have more leisure time and creature comforts than our ancestors who, for most of us were lttle more than indebted wage slaves toiiling in unimaginable conditions but contentment and happiness still often eludes us. The human condition eh ? It's kept philosophers in employment for millenia...
Speaking of leisure I think a Welshman summed it up perfectly :
Leisure - William Henry Davies
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty's glance, And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.
Another vid about the ICE and the challenges they face. It's worth a watch but sadly it's not anything like Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" which will no doubt be a great disappointment to the usual, navel gazing, handwringing apologists for societal chaos and disorder on here.... :)
If you said about 15 years ago that then economic basket cases like Portugal and Greece would be among the top places for emigrating investors to relocate to and the UK the worst in 2025 they would have thought you a nutjob.
They bore their collective pain, learnt painful political & economic lessons and have emerged stronger for it. Sadly I think with the muppet show we have in charge the real pain is yet to come and we haven't hit the bottom of the curve yet as this depressing article in the Telegraph illustrates...
I think Hull has an unfair rep as a city - It's a decent away day and been there many times...
There's loads of pubs in the old town and city centre for all tastes but since they moved to the KC/MKM stadium we always take a cab up (you can walk it if you're not pushed for time) to top end of Princes Avenue north of the ground get dropped off at Garbutts and work our way down where there are lots of bars and places to eat - always reminds me a bit of a larger version of Uplands and likewise has a lot of students and young folk there. Pave is my go to drinking hole with a large range of foreign and UK beers but there are plenty of others and a couple of new ones - sadly the El Toro tapas bar has closed a shame as that ticked the beer and scran box for me...
From the bottom end there's The Zoological and over the road the Botanic pub on the corner is - or at least was - a busy community-run home fans pub packed full of Hull rugby and football memorabilia but it looks like they're not allowing any kind of away fans in anymore. Shame.
It's then a relatively short stroll to the away end...down Derringham onto Argyle St and take the footpath over the railway opposite Londesbrough..
The days of Boothferry and the Silver Cod are long gone where you had to run the gauntlet of the locals and have your wits about you all day long ....but you still should exercise caution around the ground before and after the match.
Hull fans in the main are decent down to earth Yorkshire folk and like a chat about footy over a beer but sadly like many of those with a reputation from the 80s/90s there's still an element lurking around outside the ground that target away fans ,even in recent years. Cover colours, head down, radio silence - the usual precautions...
Don't let that put you off though you'll be fine elsewhere and have a top - if long old - day out if you're sensible.
Just looked at trains and even advance non-flexi tix on specified trains are £122 and I'm a lot nearer to Hull than Swansea !! Absolute p-take the prices these days.
Fair play if you're making the long trek from Swansea.....Enjoy !
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