 | Forum Thread | Playing out from the back at 10:12 9 Aug 2025
Maybe it was just the nature of the game but we didn't attempt to play out from the back much last night. In any event, with Woolfy not in the team, we just don't seem to be as well geared up to play that way. The issue though is that playing out from the back enables us to gain possession and put a few passes together, something that we largely failed to do for much of the game last night, which only played into Birmingham's hands. [Post edited 9 Aug 10:12]
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 | Forum Thread | Ignorance about immigration at 12:19 8 Aug 2025
I have been away for a few days and was surprised no one had picked up on this. "Support for hard-line anti-immigration policies linked to ignorance about migration figures, poll suggests YouGov has released detailed polling on attitudes to immigration that shows a clear link between having hard-line anti-immigrant views and being ignorant about the level of illegal immigration into the UK. YouGov’s Matthew Smith says: "Almost half of Britons (47%) think there are more migrants staying in the UK illegally rather than legally … [and] crucially, this view is held by 72% of those who want to see mass removals. However, these perceptions appear to be wide of the mark. Estimates of the population of illegal migrants living in the UK range from 120,000 to 1.3 million, with Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf recently putting the figure at 1.2 million. Regardless of which figure from this range is chosen, it does not come close to the number of migrants living in the UK legally, with 2021/2022 census data putting the entire foreign-born population of the UK at 10.7 million." It is well known that many people massively over-estimate the extent to which irregular migration contributes to the overall net migration figures, which reached a record high of 900,000 in the year ending June 2023. The confusion is partly explained by the huge media and political attention given to people arriving in the UK on small boats. But the annual small boat arrival figure has never been higher than the 46,000 total it reached in 2022 – although it is on course to pass that this year. The YouGov polling suggests that, while cutting migration numbers significantly but still allowing some migrants into the country is the policy with most support (very broadly, this is also what Labour and the Tories advocate), almost half of voters either strongly (26%) or somewhat (19%) support “admitting no more new migrants and requiring large numbers of migrants who came to the UK in recent years to leave”. YouGov describes this as “extraordinary”. Advocating for migrants who settled in the UK for years to leave is a policy that has not been supported by anyone in mainstream politics for decade, and even now it is a cause that is principally being championed by people who are unashamedly racist. But the YouGov polling also found that almost half of respondents thought there were more immigrants staying in the UK illegally than legally, and that only 19% said that there was “much more” legal than illegal immigration (which is almost certainly the correct answer, even allowing for the very highest estimates of the level of unauthorised migration). And YouGov established that people saying, wrongly, that there is “much more” illegal migration than legal migration are much more likely to be in the group saying large numbers of recent migrants should be returned. [Post edited 8 Aug 12:24]
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 | Forum Thread | No Other Land at 21:23 29 Jul 2025
I watched this excellent documentary on the West Bank and was very angered and saddened by today's news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/palestinian-awdah-hathaleen-oscar- "Awdah Hathaleen, a Palestinian activist and journalist who helped make the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, has been killed during an attack by Israeli settlers in the south Hebron hills, prompting a wave of condemnation of what was described as state impunity for Israeli settler violence. " EDIT: I have just realised that this has been mentioned on the thread about recognising Palestine but feel it does no harm to have its own thread. [Post edited 29 Jul 21:29]
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 | Forum Thread | Digital membership card: what's that all about? at 16:47 24 Jul 2025
Just received an email from the club saying I can add my digital membership card to my photo gallery. I was wondering what the point is, given my membership is already linked to my ticket account. Maybe it's so I can show it to people but will they be interested? And is this what I paid £4 for? Of course, maybe someone with more insight than me can point out the errors of my way. [Post edited 24 Jul 16:49]
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 | Forum Thread | UK aid cuts: nobody seems to care at 08:44 20 Jul 2025
https://observer.co.uk/news/science-technology/article/uk-body-tackling-antimicr The government is scrapping a programme that helps tackle antimicrobial resistance in the developing world because of cuts to the aid budget. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is seen as one of the top global public health and development threats, with the World Health Organization estimating that bacterial AMR was directly responsible for 1.27 million global deaths in 2019. Branded a “silent pandemic” by the United Nations, experts have repeatedly warned that the threat posed by AMR transcends borders. The £265m Fleming Fund supports the surveillance of AMR in 25 countries across Africa and Asia. However, it emerged last week that the fund has been quietly shelved. |
 | Forum Thread | Gaza Rivera at 06:53 7 Jul 2025
The following story is on the front page of today's FT but that is paywalled. Coming from the former so-called Middle East Peace Envoy, is there nothing Blair won't do for money? Or perhaps more likely it's evidence of support for such a plan. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/tony-blair-institute-linked-gaza-plan-condemn "Initially, TBI denied any involvement, with a spokesperson telling the FT: "Your story is categorically wrong... TBI was not involved in the preparation of the deck.” However, after the FT presented evidence of a 12-person message group that included TBI staff, BCG consultants, and Israeli organisers, the institute acknowledged its staff had been aware of and present during related discussions. "We have never said TBI knew nothing about what this group was working on," the spokesperson clarified. TBI claims it was in a "listening mode" and that its internal paper was one of many analyses of postwar scenarios being explored." Interestingly, the article has a link to the following article, which suggests Blair is far from independent when it comes to Israel. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/tony-blair-patron-jewish-nation-fund-erases-w [Post edited 7 Jul 7:12]
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 | Forum Thread | Disability cuts at 15:07 26 Jun 2025
Powerful piece by Frances Ryan, recently named as one Vogue's 25 women "defining Britain". https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/26/labour-party-disabled-peop "In 2015, fresh from the coalition pact, the Liberal Democrats were punished by the electorate for helping the Conservatives push through sweeping public spending cuts. Come the next general election, the accusation will not be that Starmer’s Labour cosied up to the Tories for power, but that they embodied them: their cruelty, their austerity and, ultimately, their failure. In the event the rebel amendment wins or Downing Street is forced to pull the vote or water down plans to save face, it cannot undo the fact that the government wished to enact these cuts in the first place. If the bill does go ahead, the division lobby will shine a light not simply on the chasms in the Labour party, but between compassion and careerism, bravery and betrayal. Forget the MPs who rebel over cutting disabled people’s benefits – remember those who don’t. This is Labour’s poll tax. Its tuition fees. Its Partygate. Just as the Iraq war was for Tony Blair, disability cuts is the moral stain that will mark Starmer’s government and the party for years to come. Severely disabled and ill people are going to be starved, isolated and degraded as a result of this policy. No Labour MP who backs it should be forgiven." [Post edited 26 Jun 15:43]
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 | Forum Thread | AI at 08:01 10 Jun 2025
Following on from Sam Coates' revelation that ChatGPT was completely mispresenting one of his podcasts, this seems a rather worrying finding. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/09/apple-artificial-intelligence We appear to be rushing headlong into AI without really knowing whether it is wise or whether there are adequate safeguards in place. We also seem to be cavalier about its impact on things like jobs. And we seem completely dismissive of concerns about the vast amounts of energy and land needed for data centres. [Post edited 10 Jun 8:06]
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 | Forum Thread | What did you do in the war, daddy? at 19:01 2 Jun 2025
With the Lib Dem defence spokesman predicting war with Russia within 10 years, and Starmer saying "Every part of society, every citizen of this country, has a role to play because we have to recognise that things have changed.", I'm aiming for the Private Godfrey role. |
 | Forum Thread | No Other Land at 12:47 11 May 2025
For anyone who saw the Louis Theroux documentary, this is even more powerful and is well worth a watch. https://www.channel4.com/programmes/no-other-land Channel 4 describes it as an Oscar-winning documentary offering a powerful view of destruction in the West Bank and the unlikely friendship between a Palestinian filmmaker and an Israeli journalist The film could not find a U.S. distributor after being picked up for distribution in 24 countries and winning the Oscar, a situation that has been compared to soft censorship. After its release, two of the Palestinian directors were attacked by Israeli settlers. And one was arrested by the IDF after being attacked. Over 800 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences signed an open letter criticizing the Academy for not publicly supporting Ballal after his arrest. The letter reads, "The targeting of Ballal is not just an attack on one filmmaker—it is an attack on all those who dare to bear witness and tell inconvenient truths."[ [Post edited 11 May 12:52]
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 | Forum Thread | Enciso, Hutchinson and Szmodics at 21:42 4 May 2025
Following yesterday's game, what might have been if all three of them had kept fit after Christmas? |
 | Forum Thread | The minerals deal ain't what it seems at 07:59 1 May 2025
I was alerted to this by a Democratic senator on the World Service saying there was very little economic benefit to the US in the agreement because the minerals would have been exploited before now if that were the case. Of course, Trump will sell it as a triumph, and the good thing is that it may make him more sympathetic to Ukraine. But maybe Ukraine has pulled the wool over Trump's eyes because it was them that originally suggested such a deal. Digging a a bit further I came across the following. https://carnegieendowment.org/europe/strategic-europe/2025/04/ukraines-not-so-cr "A narrative has emerged that Ukraine’s mineral wealth is a prize that can drastically change the energy security and global power balance for whichever great power possess it. This is mostly fantasy and, for any power other than Europe, Ukraine’s mineral wealth is pretty much insignificant. There is nothing that Ukraine has, that can’t be obtained in greater quantities and quality elsewhere on Earth. Before delving into what Ukraine does and doesn’t have, it is important to distinguish between resources and reserves. Resources are what is present in the ground, while reserves are deposits for which there is confidence that commercially viable quantities of a mineral can be extracted. Given that on average it takes sixteen years for a deposit to go from exploration to extraction, twelve of which are devoted to determining deposit viability, the difference between resources and reserves is critical. Taken together, in the short to mid-term of five to fifteen years, Ukraine’s minerals will not fundamentally alter the global critical minerals landscape." https://spectrum.ieee.org/ukraine-rare-earth-minerals "Ukraine Doesn’t Actually Have Minable Rare Earths To begin with, the contentious 28 February Oval Office meeting can’t be understood without a crucial piece of context: there are no deposits of rare-earth ore in Ukraine known to be minable in an economically viable way. And that would be true even if full-scale warfare were not raging in the country’s east, where a great deal of its mineral resources are concentrated. Ukraine is believed to have four areas with substantial deposits of rare earth ores, according to Erik Jonsson, senior geologist with the Geological Survey of Sweden. “There are four slightly bigger deposits: Yastrubetske, Novopoltavske, Azovske, and Mazurivske. All but one of them seem to be now within or near the zone that the Russians control, as far as I can tell,” says Jonsson. “And when it comes to resources in those deposits, I mean, we have numbers; yes, that’s nice. But we have no real, detailed, outline of how those numbers were arrived at.” The numbers are believed to come from Soviet surveys dating as far back as the 1960s. “The rare-earth deposits don’t look that relevant,” Jonsson concludes. “I mean, I wouldn’t go for them.” Two of the deposits are dominated by a mineral called britholite, he notes, which is not desirable because it has not been processed for rare earths, which means that almost nothing exists in the way of process chemistry and equipment. “If you want critical minerals, Ukraine ain’t the place to look for them,” declares Jack Lifton, executive chairman of the Critical Minerals Institute. “It’s a fantasy. There’s no point to any of this. There’s some other agenda going on here. I can’t believe that anybody in Washington actually believes that it makes sense to get rare earths in Ukraine.” Even without a war to contend with, it would take at least 15 years to build a mine to begin extracting rare-earth ore on a large scale, Lifton notes. And according to the terms of the draft critical materials deal, private companies would have to invest huge sums, likely a billion dollars or more, to develop rare-earths mines in Ukraine. It’s a possibility that Lifton, an IEEE member and former metals trader, dismisses as absurd. He notes that a multinational mining company, Rio Tinto Group, has spent close to US $3 billion on potential mine sites in Arizona and Alaska and still does not have the necessary licenses and permits from the U.S. Government to begin building a mine in either place. EDIT: given the previous article, this from the BBC website could be said to be rather misleading. "The US has announced an economic partnership with Ukraine following negotiations over a deal that would give Washington access to Kyiv's rare earth minerals." [Post edited 1 May 8:21]
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 | Forum Thread | Davis a possible target at 15:26 23 Apr 2025
I know he has got a lot of stick on here (not from me), but the following suggests that he is a possible target along with Delap. https://www.theguardian.com/football/who-scored-blog/2025/apr/23/relegated-playe It states that no defender has made more key passes than Davis (54) in the Premier League this season which is some going in a team often on the defensive and with limited possession. For those who didn't know (and I was one of them), a key pass is the final pass from a player to their teammate who then attempts a shot on goal without scoring. This is where the stats appear, and interesting to note that he is 10th out of all players in the Premier League and ahead of Trent-Alexander who is on 51. https://theanalyst.com/competition/premier-league/stats [Post edited 23 Apr 15:40]
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 | Forum Thread | Home form at 09:27 21 Apr 2025
Whilst we've clearly been badly impacted by injuries, one thing that has been really disappointing has been our home form, especially in the second half and since Christmas. Since Christmas, we should have won at Fulham and could have won at Chelsea and Man Utd. We also did credibly at Palace and Villa, and in the cup at Forest. But we have been poor at home. Indeed, having been at them all, the contrast in the last four games between Bournemouth and Chelsea away and Arsenal and Wolves at home couldn't be greater. [Post edited 21 Apr 10:20]
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