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The Tories look set to lose both June 23rd by-elections – politicalbetting.com

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  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,402

    MattW said:

    tlg86 said:

    Octordle in 11; I’m quite pleased with that.

    Daily Octordle #129
    5️⃣🔟
    7️⃣3️⃣
    9️⃣8️⃣
    🕚4️⃣
    octordle.com

    Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo. They haven't.

    Here's my wordle. Octordle takes too long.

    Wordle 348 3/6

    ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
    🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    Today's Worldle is trivially easy.
    Yesterday's was the first I've failed on for ages.
    Its almost impossible to fail at wordle. Thats like not reaching the sand in long jump
    Yeah. That's what makes it so successful. I've failed twice.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,838
    edited June 2022

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good

    Pride, misty eyed patriotism, bemusement, hatred, vitriol, boredom, irrelevance, pageant and swans in equal measure
    I remember when Mrs Phillips had her first (?) baby. One of my fellow students asked me to have a drink to celebrate. I didn't have the heart to explain that I was a Scottish republican ... anyway we had a very pleasant drink. But that's my sum total of toasts to royalty.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,647
    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    MattW said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Eabhal said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Good morning from Old Tbilisi, and a happy Jubilee to everyone, monarchist, anarchist, Fascist, communist….. even republican

    To veer slightly off topic, I recall there were some people on here dismissing the Stade de France story as “a scuffle at a football game, will be forgotten in two days”. i said that was not the case, it is indeed not the case. From the Spectator


    “The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths.

    “What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.”

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-liverpool-fans-sexually-assaulted-at-the-stade-de-france-

    There's rugby and kickball internationals at the SdF, so a complete coin toss which was going on last Saturday, no?

    No.

    Hooligans gonna hooligan, Paris police gonna do what they do best, and life being the harsh struggle against unfair odds, rounded off by a cheap funeral, that it is, Liverpool fans no matter how saintly gonna have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
    Your normal lazy, low-watt, misinformed take on what is now a huge story - in France

    You’re also wrong about the footie/rugby thing. It turns out there have been similar problems at Stade de France at rugby matches too. They have just never been reported as they have been on a smaller scale, and rugby is less salient than soccer
    Huge story in France that the banlieus are bandit country? I should get a job at Le Monde, I could have told them that 25 years ago
    It's pretty unfortunate because it brings to the fore issues France/Macron would rather just ignore. Juxtaposed with what should have been a French triumph.

    Echoes of the 2011 riots?
    Exactly. it’s a big story by itself - thousands of people attacked, dozens of children molested, etc etc - but it throws uncomfortable light on an even bigger story, which Macron is desperate not to talk about


    Remember that the Interior Minister’s FIRST version of events was that the problems all came from “thousands of British fans trying to get in without tickets and violating stewards”

    A complete load of astonishing bollocks from beginning to end.


    He also tried to support this ludicrous version of events by saying “most of the people arrested are English”.

    However since then French journalists have dug into the truth and revealed that most people arrested are “Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian” etc.

    His response to this, last night, when it was pointed out at a press conference? “It is nauseous [ie racist] to talk about the nationality of suspects”. Even tho he was quite happy to call them “English” when it suited him. Incroyable

    It looks like his career is going to be truncated, he will be the sacrificial lamb to propitiate the angry gods. However Macron won’t sack him immediately because, elections
    Yeah it's fucking carnage out there though. Have a guess before looking at the death and injury count over the last 4 years in gilets jaunes carry ons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fatalities_and_injuries

    Surprised me. This is a drop in the ocean.

    and hugely ironically, when I was googling for dangers in Paris generally, I find (Nov 2015)

    Three explosions occurred near the country's national sports stadium, the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, resulting in four deaths, including the three suicide bombers.[66] The explosions happened at 21:16, 21:19,[note 1] and 21:53.[67] At the time, the stadium was hosting an international friendly football match between France and Germany, which President Hollande was attending.[68][69] The suicide bombers arrived slightly late for the game, and eyewitness reports indicated they did not have tickets, resulting in them being turned away by security guards several times.[65]

    The first explosion near the stadium occurred about 20 minutes after the start of the game.[68][69] The first bomber was prevented from entering the stadium again after a security guard patted him down and found the explosive vest.[70] A few seconds after being turned away, he detonated the vest outside the security gate, killing himself and a bystander.[65][71] Investigators later surmised that the first suicide bomber had planned to detonate his vest within the stadium, triggering the crowd's panicked exit onto the streets where two other bombers were lying in wait.[72] Three minutes after the first bombing, the second bomber blew himself up outside another security gate.[note 1][65] Another 23 minutes after that, the third bomber's vest detonated near the stadium. According to some reports, the location of the third explosion was at a McDonald's restaurant, where over 50 people were injured, seven seriously;[65][70][73] others state the bomb detonated some distance away from any discernible target.[74]

    The irony being, nobody has commented on the precedent/parallel because NOBODY REMEMBERED IT. And it's a lot more memorable than last weekend's nonsense
    This one involves random police violence (yes - Paris, I know), in addition to robbery, sexual assault and the rest, by criminal gangs. It is also 2 years before the same place is the main Olympic Stadium. That is a somewhat different category to political violence.

    Here's a link I posted the other day - blind fans with their white sticks subjected to clouds of tear gas at an official gate for disabled people, in a queue with wheelchair users.

    1st item in the programme:
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017tht

    Macron's big risk is his own political situation, and the Olympics - now that the story has broken through.
    Well, not really. There is no danger to the Olympics, because policing of football matches has always been more difficult and aggressive than other sporting events. Football fans have a reputation, one that crosses borders and has endured through modern times.

    In the UK crowds have become more middle class and family oriented, in part because of the costs involved, but the Ultras are usually working class men. Supporting a football team is a semi-authorised outlet for aggression, as we see every week in chants, verbal abuse and now social media abuse. It is all part of the atmosphere at big matches. There are few other places where you can shout insults at people in public.

    It isn't surprising that it overspills the boundaries to violence at times. It is a difficult situation to police, and it does seem as if the reputation of Liverpool fans caused rather an overreaction by the French Police and SdF management. What looks like exuberent to fans can look potentially riotous to police.



    What a farcically pointless misinformed comment. Like a 3 year old trying to explain compound interest

    I have been to about 25 football matches a year for the last couple of decades, so have a fair amount of direct observation.

    I was at the World Cup in St Petersburg and Moscow in 2018 too. The Russians ran it very well, no issues with crowd control or policing at all. Perhaps the CL final should have stayed in StP.
    This has got fuck all to do with football per se and a lot more to do with the ethnic minorities in St Denis and French attitudes to them, accusatory and exculpatory by turns, AND their animosity to the French states, AND the particular history of brutal French policing, AND the history of terrorism at St Denis causing very specific crowd problems, and so on and so forth

    Not for the first time, you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about, you stupid, myopic, bum-faced, wobble-bottomed, morally narcissistic old quack, so shut the fuck up or I shall be forced into rudeness

    I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure it's treason to talk like that on This Of All Days.
    Shouldn't you be eating imperial vanilla iced slices round a plyboard table in the drizzle?
    Bit difficult in sunny Tbiiisi. But you have a point. Maybe I should have a glass of Saperavi on my terrace?

    i must say the Mall looks pretty splendid from this distance, with all the scrambled eggs on the guardly shoulders on the horses in the sun,..

    is there a moment which is Actual Jubilee? Like, when we can say: this is it. This is when they put the crown on her head, a billion years ago. Like 11am on November 11?
    The coronation was 2 June, but 1953, so 69 years today. Has someone miscounted 🤔
    No, it's just nobody wanted a bank holiday in the middle of February. Better to hold it in the summer and have a nice jolly.
    So 16 months from taking the job to Coronation. Is that par for the course? Have any British monachs popped their clog in that gap?
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,431

    MattW said:

    tlg86 said:

    Octordle in 11; I’m quite pleased with that.

    Daily Octordle #129
    5️⃣🔟
    7️⃣3️⃣
    9️⃣8️⃣
    🕚4️⃣
    octordle.com

    Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo. They haven't.

    Here's my wordle. Octordle takes too long.

    Wordle 348 3/6

    ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
    🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    Today's Worldle is trivially easy.
    Yesterday's was the first I've failed on for ages.
    Its almost impossible to fail at wordle. Thats like not reaching the sand in long jump
    The territory in question was SAINT Helena; didn't realise I had to spell out the 'saint'. Tried St Helena, and was turned down.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,838
    Farooq said:

    I oppose the Royal Family on principle but I have no interest in seeing them removed.

    I have always believed that we should do things that reduce inequality, increase opportunity and create a better society for all. Removing the Royal Family achieves none of those things.

    I will enjoy my extra bank holidays with pleasure, thanks Queenie.

    Point of order: it's 1 extra bank holiday. The other one was just moved from May.
    Typical ruling classes. Rob us to pay us.
  • wooliedyedwooliedyed Posts: 10,061
    dixiedean said:

    MattW said:

    tlg86 said:

    Octordle in 11; I’m quite pleased with that.

    Daily Octordle #129
    5️⃣🔟
    7️⃣3️⃣
    9️⃣8️⃣
    🕚4️⃣
    octordle.com

    Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo. They haven't.

    Here's my wordle. Octordle takes too long.

    Wordle 348 3/6

    ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
    🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    Today's Worldle is trivially easy.
    Yesterday's was the first I've failed on for ages.
    Its almost impossible to fail at wordle. Thats like not reaching the sand in long jump
    Yeah. That's what makes it so successful. I've failed twice.
    I've seen someone not reach the sand. Crushing.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,386
    dixiedean said:

    MattW said:

    tlg86 said:

    Octordle in 11; I’m quite pleased with that.

    Daily Octordle #129
    5️⃣🔟
    7️⃣3️⃣
    9️⃣8️⃣
    🕚4️⃣
    octordle.com

    Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo. They haven't.

    Here's my wordle. Octordle takes too long.

    Wordle 348 3/6

    ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
    🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    Today's Worldle is trivially easy.
    Yesterday's was the first I've failed on for ages.
    Its almost impossible to fail at wordle. Thats like not reaching the sand in long jump
    Yeah. That's what makes it so successful. I've failed twice.
    I always start with 'stead' on the basis that's got the four commonest letters in the language in it.

    If it doesn't have any of those in that narrows it down quite a lot.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,402
    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    MattW said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Eabhal said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Good morning from Old Tbilisi, and a happy Jubilee to everyone, monarchist, anarchist, Fascist, communist….. even republican

    To veer slightly off topic, I recall there were some people on here dismissing the Stade de France story as “a scuffle at a football game, will be forgotten in two days”. i said that was not the case, it is indeed not the case. From the Spectator


    “The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths.

    “What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.”

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-liverpool-fans-sexually-assaulted-at-the-stade-de-france-

    There's rugby and kickball internationals at the SdF, so a complete coin toss which was going on last Saturday, no?

    No.

    Hooligans gonna hooligan, Paris police gonna do what they do best, and life being the harsh struggle against unfair odds, rounded off by a cheap funeral, that it is, Liverpool fans no matter how saintly gonna have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
    Your normal lazy, low-watt, misinformed take on what is now a huge story - in France

    You’re also wrong about the footie/rugby thing. It turns out there have been similar problems at Stade de France at rugby matches too. They have just never been reported as they have been on a smaller scale, and rugby is less salient than soccer
    Huge story in France that the banlieus are bandit country? I should get a job at Le Monde, I could have told them that 25 years ago
    It's pretty unfortunate because it brings to the fore issues France/Macron would rather just ignore. Juxtaposed with what should have been a French triumph.

    Echoes of the 2011 riots?
    Exactly. it’s a big story by itself - thousands of people attacked, dozens of children molested, etc etc - but it throws uncomfortable light on an even bigger story, which Macron is desperate not to talk about


    Remember that the Interior Minister’s FIRST version of events was that the problems all came from “thousands of British fans trying to get in without tickets and violating stewards”

    A complete load of astonishing bollocks from beginning to end.


    He also tried to support this ludicrous version of events by saying “most of the people arrested are English”.

    However since then French journalists have dug into the truth and revealed that most people arrested are “Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian” etc.

    His response to this, last night, when it was pointed out at a press conference? “It is nauseous [ie racist] to talk about the nationality of suspects”. Even tho he was quite happy to call them “English” when it suited him. Incroyable

    It looks like his career is going to be truncated, he will be the sacrificial lamb to propitiate the angry gods. However Macron won’t sack him immediately because, elections
    Yeah it's fucking carnage out there though. Have a guess before looking at the death and injury count over the last 4 years in gilets jaunes carry ons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fatalities_and_injuries

    Surprised me. This is a drop in the ocean.

    and hugely ironically, when I was googling for dangers in Paris generally, I find (Nov 2015)

    Three explosions occurred near the country's national sports stadium, the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, resulting in four deaths, including the three suicide bombers.[66] The explosions happened at 21:16, 21:19,[note 1] and 21:53.[67] At the time, the stadium was hosting an international friendly football match between France and Germany, which President Hollande was attending.[68][69] The suicide bombers arrived slightly late for the game, and eyewitness reports indicated they did not have tickets, resulting in them being turned away by security guards several times.[65]

    The first explosion near the stadium occurred about 20 minutes after the start of the game.[68][69] The first bomber was prevented from entering the stadium again after a security guard patted him down and found the explosive vest.[70] A few seconds after being turned away, he detonated the vest outside the security gate, killing himself and a bystander.[65][71] Investigators later surmised that the first suicide bomber had planned to detonate his vest within the stadium, triggering the crowd's panicked exit onto the streets where two other bombers were lying in wait.[72] Three minutes after the first bombing, the second bomber blew himself up outside another security gate.[note 1][65] Another 23 minutes after that, the third bomber's vest detonated near the stadium. According to some reports, the location of the third explosion was at a McDonald's restaurant, where over 50 people were injured, seven seriously;[65][70][73] others state the bomb detonated some distance away from any discernible target.[74]

    The irony being, nobody has commented on the precedent/parallel because NOBODY REMEMBERED IT. And it's a lot more memorable than last weekend's nonsense
    This one involves random police violence (yes - Paris, I know), in addition to robbery, sexual assault and the rest, by criminal gangs. It is also 2 years before the same place is the main Olympic Stadium. That is a somewhat different category to political violence.

    Here's a link I posted the other day - blind fans with their white sticks subjected to clouds of tear gas at an official gate for disabled people, in a queue with wheelchair users.

    1st item in the programme:
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017tht

    Macron's big risk is his own political situation, and the Olympics - now that the story has broken through.
    Well, not really. There is no danger to the Olympics, because policing of football matches has always been more difficult and aggressive than other sporting events. Football fans have a reputation, one that crosses borders and has endured through modern times.

    In the UK crowds have become more middle class and family oriented, in part because of the costs involved, but the Ultras are usually working class men. Supporting a football team is a semi-authorised outlet for aggression, as we see every week in chants, verbal abuse and now social media abuse. It is all part of the atmosphere at big matches. There are few other places where you can shout insults at people in public.

    It isn't surprising that it overspills the boundaries to violence at times. It is a difficult situation to police, and it does seem as if the reputation of Liverpool fans caused rather an overreaction by the French Police and SdF management. What looks like exuberent to fans can look potentially riotous to police.



    What a farcically pointless misinformed comment. Like a 3 year old trying to explain compound interest

    I have been to about 25 football matches a year for the last couple of decades, so have a fair amount of direct observation.

    I was at the World Cup in St Petersburg and Moscow in 2018 too. The Russians ran it very well, no issues with crowd control or policing at all. Perhaps the CL final should have stayed in StP.
    This has got fuck all to do with football per se and a lot more to do with the ethnic minorities in St Denis and French attitudes to them, accusatory and exculpatory by turns, AND their animosity to the French states, AND the particular history of brutal French policing, AND the history of terrorism at St Denis causing very specific crowd problems, and so on and so forth

    Not for the first time, you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about, you stupid, myopic, bum-faced, wobble-bottomed, morally narcissistic old quack, so shut the fuck up or I shall be forced into rudeness

    I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure it's treason to talk like that on This Of All Days.
    Shouldn't you be eating imperial vanilla iced slices round a plyboard table in the drizzle?
    Bit difficult in sunny Tbiiisi. But you have a point. Maybe I should have a glass of Saperavi on my terrace?

    i must say the Mall looks pretty splendid from this distance, with all the scrambled eggs on the guardly shoulders on the horses in the sun,..

    is there a moment which is Actual Jubilee? Like, when we can say: this is it. This is when they put the crown on her head, a billion years ago. Like 11am on November 11?
    The coronation was 2 June, but 1953, so 69 years today. Has someone miscounted 🤔
    No, it's just nobody wanted a bank holiday in the middle of February. Better to hold it in the summer and have a nice jolly.
    More likely. Have another next year as well.
  • I oppose the Royal Family on principle but I have no interest in seeing them removed.

    I have always believed that we should do things that reduce inequality, increase opportunity and create a better society for all. Removing the Royal Family achieves none of those things.

    I will enjoy my extra bank holidays with pleasure, thanks Queenie.

    A practical horse speaks.
    I tend to agree.
    Political parties exist to get into Government and to make change, in my case I support progressive change.

    In Government we must always be practical and do things that actually enact change. We stay true to our principles but we do things that help, not just for the sake of ideology.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    malcolmg said:

    Stereodog said:

    I'm at Trooping the Colour and it's complete and utter chaos. We're in a massive queue for ticket holders and there are just swarms of unticketed people swarming down Great George Street swamping the queue. No barriers, marshals or any form of crowd control. Loads of elderly veterans getting swamped and jostled. I thought we were supposed to be good at this kind of thing.

    Are the French organising it then
    i think Steve Clarke is in overall control.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,781
    dixiedean said:

    MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Eabhal said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Good morning from Old Tbilisi, and a happy Jubilee to everyone, monarchist, anarchist, Fascist, communist….. even republican

    To veer slightly off topic, I recall there were some people on here dismissing the Stade de France story as “a scuffle at a football game, will be forgotten in two days”. i said that was not the case, it is indeed not the case. From the Spectator


    “The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths.

    “What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.”

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-liverpool-fans-sexually-assaulted-at-the-stade-de-france-

    There's rugby and kickball internationals at the SdF, so a complete coin toss which was going on last Saturday, no?

    No.

    Hooligans gonna hooligan, Paris police gonna do what they do best, and life being the harsh struggle against unfair odds, rounded off by a cheap funeral, that it is, Liverpool fans no matter how saintly gonna have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
    Your normal lazy, low-watt, misinformed take on what is now a huge story - in France

    You’re also wrong about the footie/rugby thing. It turns out there have been similar problems at Stade de France at rugby matches too. They have just never been reported as they have been on a smaller scale, and rugby is less salient than soccer
    Huge story in France that the banlieus are bandit country? I should get a job at Le Monde, I could have told them that 25 years ago
    It's pretty unfortunate because it brings to the fore issues France/Macron would rather just ignore. Juxtaposed with what should have been a French triumph.

    Echoes of the 2011 riots?
    Exactly. it’s a big story by itself - thousands of people attacked, dozens of children molested, etc etc - but it throws uncomfortable light on an even bigger story, which Macron is desperate not to talk about


    Remember that the Interior Minister’s FIRST version of events was that the problems all came from “thousands of British fans trying to get in without tickets and violating stewards”

    A complete load of astonishing bollocks from beginning to end.


    He also tried to support this ludicrous version of events by saying “most of the people arrested are English”.

    However since then French journalists have dug into the truth and revealed that most people arrested are “Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian” etc.

    His response to this, last night, when it was pointed out at a press conference? “It is nauseous [ie racist] to talk about the nationality of suspects”. Even tho he was quite happy to call them “English” when it suited him. Incroyable

    It looks like his career is going to be truncated, he will be the sacrificial lamb to propitiate the angry gods. However Macron won’t sack him immediately because, elections
    Yeah it's fucking carnage out there though. Have a guess before looking at the death and injury count over the last 4 years in gilets jaunes carry ons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fatalities_and_injuries

    Surprised me. This is a drop in the ocean.

    and hugely ironically, when I was googling for dangers in Paris generally, I find (Nov 2015)

    Three explosions occurred near the country's national sports stadium, the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, resulting in four deaths, including the three suicide bombers.[66] The explosions happened at 21:16, 21:19,[note 1] and 21:53.[67] At the time, the stadium was hosting an international friendly football match between France and Germany, which President Hollande was attending.[68][69] The suicide bombers arrived slightly late for the game, and eyewitness reports indicated they did not have tickets, resulting in them being turned away by security guards several times.[65]

    The first explosion near the stadium occurred about 20 minutes after the start of the game.[68][69] The first bomber was prevented from entering the stadium again after a security guard patted him down and found the explosive vest.[70] A few seconds after being turned away, he detonated the vest outside the security gate, killing himself and a bystander.[65][71] Investigators later surmised that the first suicide bomber had planned to detonate his vest within the stadium, triggering the crowd's panicked exit onto the streets where two other bombers were lying in wait.[72] Three minutes after the first bombing, the second bomber blew himself up outside another security gate.[note 1][65] Another 23 minutes after that, the third bomber's vest detonated near the stadium. According to some reports, the location of the third explosion was at a McDonald's restaurant, where over 50 people were injured, seven seriously;[65][70][73] others state the bomb detonated some distance away from any discernible target.[74]

    The irony being, nobody has commented on the precedent/parallel because NOBODY REMEMBERED IT. And it's a lot more memorable than last weekend's nonsense
    Yes, some of the problems seem to come from the Stade de France changing its crowd management policies, after the terror attacks. Eg there are few if any reports of crowd difficulties before the big attacks of 2015, they all date from after then, when the authorities got paranoid about the wrong people getting in

    And of course you’re right that is a bigger story than last weekend, but last weekend is still pretty bloody serious. 1000s of people robbed, attacked and traumatised, and dozens if not hundreds of sexual assaults - with police officers saying they have never witnessed anything on this scale

    It looks like the French now have a toxic cocktail of near-impossible crowd management problems in the face of terrorism, and all of this with a stadium surrounded by Islamist migrants, and on top of that they now have the threat of constant Cologne style mass robbery and sexual molestation

    This is a French paper speculating that the mess might cost Macron “fifty deputies”

    “It will end up costing us 50 deputies like the social VAT of Borloo”, fears a senior officer of the macronie. Darmanin in the middle of the fire lopinion.fr/politique/stad… by @LVigogne @mdeprieck Drawing @MonsieurKak”

    https://twitter.com/carovigoureux/status/1532273757016014848?s=21&t=-8JXjXAEBDrJOgaFrO_IOQ

    Personally, I would not go to the Stade de France to watch anything, not now. And I would have been happy to do so, before, because I was oblivious, like all of us

    They really should not have built that stadium in Paris 93
    Yet. Has been noted before. Stratford wasn't ritzy when we built ours there. It was a dump in the 90's.
    When I was living in London in the period around 2000, 3 bed semis in decent streets in Stratford for £70k or so were one hot tip from the London Property Guide.
    I reckon Catford might be the next gentrification target. I went out for a drink and a meal with a mate there last night. It's really quite ropey but has excellent transport links into central London with two train stations side by side. There's a bizarrely good and cheap Italian restaurant there too - two pizzas, two deserts and a nice bottle of Primitivo for a bit over £50. Catford is the new Peckham - you heard it here first.
    Really? Had some mates in Catford in the 90's. We always thought it had an unusual air of respectable, dull suburbia for Central London.
    Either it's gone downhill, or the rest of London has exploded in wealth. Probably the latter.
    It may be a bit of both. It's not got a very respectable feel currently, at least not in the central section round the world famous gyratory.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    So it begins

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  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,386
    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    MattW said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Eabhal said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Good morning from Old Tbilisi, and a happy Jubilee to everyone, monarchist, anarchist, Fascist, communist….. even republican

    To veer slightly off topic, I recall there were some people on here dismissing the Stade de France story as “a scuffle at a football game, will be forgotten in two days”. i said that was not the case, it is indeed not the case. From the Spectator


    “The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths.

    “What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.”

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-liverpool-fans-sexually-assaulted-at-the-stade-de-france-

    There's rugby and kickball internationals at the SdF, so a complete coin toss which was going on last Saturday, no?

    No.

    Hooligans gonna hooligan, Paris police gonna do what they do best, and life being the harsh struggle against unfair odds, rounded off by a cheap funeral, that it is, Liverpool fans no matter how saintly gonna have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
    Your normal lazy, low-watt, misinformed take on what is now a huge story - in France

    You’re also wrong about the footie/rugby thing. It turns out there have been similar problems at Stade de France at rugby matches too. They have just never been reported as they have been on a smaller scale, and rugby is less salient than soccer
    Huge story in France that the banlieus are bandit country? I should get a job at Le Monde, I could have told them that 25 years ago
    It's pretty unfortunate because it brings to the fore issues France/Macron would rather just ignore. Juxtaposed with what should have been a French triumph.

    Echoes of the 2011 riots?
    Exactly. it’s a big story by itself - thousands of people attacked, dozens of children molested, etc etc - but it throws uncomfortable light on an even bigger story, which Macron is desperate not to talk about


    Remember that the Interior Minister’s FIRST version of events was that the problems all came from “thousands of British fans trying to get in without tickets and violating stewards”

    A complete load of astonishing bollocks from beginning to end.


    He also tried to support this ludicrous version of events by saying “most of the people arrested are English”.

    However since then French journalists have dug into the truth and revealed that most people arrested are “Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian” etc.

    His response to this, last night, when it was pointed out at a press conference? “It is nauseous [ie racist] to talk about the nationality of suspects”. Even tho he was quite happy to call them “English” when it suited him. Incroyable

    It looks like his career is going to be truncated, he will be the sacrificial lamb to propitiate the angry gods. However Macron won’t sack him immediately because, elections
    Yeah it's fucking carnage out there though. Have a guess before looking at the death and injury count over the last 4 years in gilets jaunes carry ons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fatalities_and_injuries

    Surprised me. This is a drop in the ocean.

    and hugely ironically, when I was googling for dangers in Paris generally, I find (Nov 2015)

    Three explosions occurred near the country's national sports stadium, the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, resulting in four deaths, including the three suicide bombers.[66] The explosions happened at 21:16, 21:19,[note 1] and 21:53.[67] At the time, the stadium was hosting an international friendly football match between France and Germany, which President Hollande was attending.[68][69] The suicide bombers arrived slightly late for the game, and eyewitness reports indicated they did not have tickets, resulting in them being turned away by security guards several times.[65]

    The first explosion near the stadium occurred about 20 minutes after the start of the game.[68][69] The first bomber was prevented from entering the stadium again after a security guard patted him down and found the explosive vest.[70] A few seconds after being turned away, he detonated the vest outside the security gate, killing himself and a bystander.[65][71] Investigators later surmised that the first suicide bomber had planned to detonate his vest within the stadium, triggering the crowd's panicked exit onto the streets where two other bombers were lying in wait.[72] Three minutes after the first bombing, the second bomber blew himself up outside another security gate.[note 1][65] Another 23 minutes after that, the third bomber's vest detonated near the stadium. According to some reports, the location of the third explosion was at a McDonald's restaurant, where over 50 people were injured, seven seriously;[65][70][73] others state the bomb detonated some distance away from any discernible target.[74]

    The irony being, nobody has commented on the precedent/parallel because NOBODY REMEMBERED IT. And it's a lot more memorable than last weekend's nonsense
    This one involves random police violence (yes - Paris, I know), in addition to robbery, sexual assault and the rest, by criminal gangs. It is also 2 years before the same place is the main Olympic Stadium. That is a somewhat different category to political violence.

    Here's a link I posted the other day - blind fans with their white sticks subjected to clouds of tear gas at an official gate for disabled people, in a queue with wheelchair users.

    1st item in the programme:
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017tht

    Macron's big risk is his own political situation, and the Olympics - now that the story has broken through.
    Well, not really. There is no danger to the Olympics, because policing of football matches has always been more difficult and aggressive than other sporting events. Football fans have a reputation, one that crosses borders and has endured through modern times.

    In the UK crowds have become more middle class and family oriented, in part because of the costs involved, but the Ultras are usually working class men. Supporting a football team is a semi-authorised outlet for aggression, as we see every week in chants, verbal abuse and now social media abuse. It is all part of the atmosphere at big matches. There are few other places where you can shout insults at people in public.

    It isn't surprising that it overspills the boundaries to violence at times. It is a difficult situation to police, and it does seem as if the reputation of Liverpool fans caused rather an overreaction by the French Police and SdF management. What looks like exuberent to fans can look potentially riotous to police.



    What a farcically pointless misinformed comment. Like a 3 year old trying to explain compound interest

    I have been to about 25 football matches a year for the last couple of decades, so have a fair amount of direct observation.

    I was at the World Cup in St Petersburg and Moscow in 2018 too. The Russians ran it very well, no issues with crowd control or policing at all. Perhaps the CL final should have stayed in StP.
    This has got fuck all to do with football per se and a lot more to do with the ethnic minorities in St Denis and French attitudes to them, accusatory and exculpatory by turns, AND their animosity to the French states, AND the particular history of brutal French policing, AND the history of terrorism at St Denis causing very specific crowd problems, and so on and so forth

    Not for the first time, you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about, you stupid, myopic, bum-faced, wobble-bottomed, morally narcissistic old quack, so shut the fuck up or I shall be forced into rudeness

    I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure it's treason to talk like that on This Of All Days.
    Shouldn't you be eating imperial vanilla iced slices round a plyboard table in the drizzle?
    Bit difficult in sunny Tbiiisi. But you have a point. Maybe I should have a glass of Saperavi on my terrace?

    i must say the Mall looks pretty splendid from this distance, with all the scrambled eggs on the guardly shoulders on the horses in the sun,..

    is there a moment which is Actual Jubilee? Like, when we can say: this is it. This is when they put the crown on her head, a billion years ago. Like 11am on November 11?
    The coronation was 2 June, but 1953, so 69 years today. Has someone miscounted 🤔
    No, it's just nobody wanted a bank holiday in the middle of February. Better to hold it in the summer and have a nice jolly.
    So 16 months from taking the job to Coronation. Is that par for the course? Have any British monachs popped their clog in that gap?
    No, but one abdicated (Edward VIII) and one was usurped (Edward V).

    Until the twentieth century it was normal to hold coronations very punctually, as that marked the actual de jure start of the reign and usually a regent had to fill in until it took place (e.g. in 1509 Margaret Beaufort acted as regent for three months until Henry VIII could be crowned, then died the evening of his coronation).

    That became less important as time went on and by 1901 more time needed to be allowed for representatives from distant parts of the Empire to get here, so it became more normal to wait about a year.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,838
    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    MattW said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Eabhal said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Good morning from Old Tbilisi, and a happy Jubilee to everyone, monarchist, anarchist, Fascist, communist….. even republican

    To veer slightly off topic, I recall there were some people on here dismissing the Stade de France story as “a scuffle at a football game, will be forgotten in two days”. i said that was not the case, it is indeed not the case. From the Spectator


    “The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths.

    “What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.”

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-liverpool-fans-sexually-assaulted-at-the-stade-de-france-

    There's rugby and kickball internationals at the SdF, so a complete coin toss which was going on last Saturday, no?

    No.

    Hooligans gonna hooligan, Paris police gonna do what they do best, and life being the harsh struggle against unfair odds, rounded off by a cheap funeral, that it is, Liverpool fans no matter how saintly gonna have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
    Your normal lazy, low-watt, misinformed take on what is now a huge story - in France

    You’re also wrong about the footie/rugby thing. It turns out there have been similar problems at Stade de France at rugby matches too. They have just never been reported as they have been on a smaller scale, and rugby is less salient than soccer
    Huge story in France that the banlieus are bandit country? I should get a job at Le Monde, I could have told them that 25 years ago
    It's pretty unfortunate because it brings to the fore issues France/Macron would rather just ignore. Juxtaposed with what should have been a French triumph.

    Echoes of the 2011 riots?
    Exactly. it’s a big story by itself - thousands of people attacked, dozens of children molested, etc etc - but it throws uncomfortable light on an even bigger story, which Macron is desperate not to talk about


    Remember that the Interior Minister’s FIRST version of events was that the problems all came from “thousands of British fans trying to get in without tickets and violating stewards”

    A complete load of astonishing bollocks from beginning to end.


    He also tried to support this ludicrous version of events by saying “most of the people arrested are English”.

    However since then French journalists have dug into the truth and revealed that most people arrested are “Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian” etc.

    His response to this, last night, when it was pointed out at a press conference? “It is nauseous [ie racist] to talk about the nationality of suspects”. Even tho he was quite happy to call them “English” when it suited him. Incroyable

    It looks like his career is going to be truncated, he will be the sacrificial lamb to propitiate the angry gods. However Macron won’t sack him immediately because, elections
    Yeah it's fucking carnage out there though. Have a guess before looking at the death and injury count over the last 4 years in gilets jaunes carry ons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fatalities_and_injuries

    Surprised me. This is a drop in the ocean.

    and hugely ironically, when I was googling for dangers in Paris generally, I find (Nov 2015)

    Three explosions occurred near the country's national sports stadium, the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, resulting in four deaths, including the three suicide bombers.[66] The explosions happened at 21:16, 21:19,[note 1] and 21:53.[67] At the time, the stadium was hosting an international friendly football match between France and Germany, which President Hollande was attending.[68][69] The suicide bombers arrived slightly late for the game, and eyewitness reports indicated they did not have tickets, resulting in them being turned away by security guards several times.[65]

    The first explosion near the stadium occurred about 20 minutes after the start of the game.[68][69] The first bomber was prevented from entering the stadium again after a security guard patted him down and found the explosive vest.[70] A few seconds after being turned away, he detonated the vest outside the security gate, killing himself and a bystander.[65][71] Investigators later surmised that the first suicide bomber had planned to detonate his vest within the stadium, triggering the crowd's panicked exit onto the streets where two other bombers were lying in wait.[72] Three minutes after the first bombing, the second bomber blew himself up outside another security gate.[note 1][65] Another 23 minutes after that, the third bomber's vest detonated near the stadium. According to some reports, the location of the third explosion was at a McDonald's restaurant, where over 50 people were injured, seven seriously;[65][70][73] others state the bomb detonated some distance away from any discernible target.[74]

    The irony being, nobody has commented on the precedent/parallel because NOBODY REMEMBERED IT. And it's a lot more memorable than last weekend's nonsense
    This one involves random police violence (yes - Paris, I know), in addition to robbery, sexual assault and the rest, by criminal gangs. It is also 2 years before the same place is the main Olympic Stadium. That is a somewhat different category to political violence.

    Here's a link I posted the other day - blind fans with their white sticks subjected to clouds of tear gas at an official gate for disabled people, in a queue with wheelchair users.

    1st item in the programme:
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017tht

    Macron's big risk is his own political situation, and the Olympics - now that the story has broken through.
    Well, not really. There is no danger to the Olympics, because policing of football matches has always been more difficult and aggressive than other sporting events. Football fans have a reputation, one that crosses borders and has endured through modern times.

    In the UK crowds have become more middle class and family oriented, in part because of the costs involved, but the Ultras are usually working class men. Supporting a football team is a semi-authorised outlet for aggression, as we see every week in chants, verbal abuse and now social media abuse. It is all part of the atmosphere at big matches. There are few other places where you can shout insults at people in public.

    It isn't surprising that it overspills the boundaries to violence at times. It is a difficult situation to police, and it does seem as if the reputation of Liverpool fans caused rather an overreaction by the French Police and SdF management. What looks like exuberent to fans can look potentially riotous to police.



    What a farcically pointless misinformed comment. Like a 3 year old trying to explain compound interest

    I have been to about 25 football matches a year for the last couple of decades, so have a fair amount of direct observation.

    I was at the World Cup in St Petersburg and Moscow in 2018 too. The Russians ran it very well, no issues with crowd control or policing at all. Perhaps the CL final should have stayed in StP.
    This has got fuck all to do with football per se and a lot more to do with the ethnic minorities in St Denis and French attitudes to them, accusatory and exculpatory by turns, AND their animosity to the French states, AND the particular history of brutal French policing, AND the history of terrorism at St Denis causing very specific crowd problems, and so on and so forth

    Not for the first time, you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about, you stupid, myopic, bum-faced, wobble-bottomed, morally narcissistic old quack, so shut the fuck up or I shall be forced into rudeness

    I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure it's treason to talk like that on This Of All Days.
    Shouldn't you be eating imperial vanilla iced slices round a plyboard table in the drizzle?
    Bit difficult in sunny Tbiiisi. But you have a point. Maybe I should have a glass of Saperavi on my terrace?

    i must say the Mall looks pretty splendid from this distance, with all the scrambled eggs on the guardly shoulders on the horses in the sun,..

    is there a moment which is Actual Jubilee? Like, when we can say: this is it. This is when they put the crown on her head, a billion years ago. Like 11am on November 11?
    The coronation was 2 June, but 1953, so 69 years today. Has someone miscounted 🤔
    No, it's just nobody wanted a bank holiday in the middle of February. Better to hold it in the summer and have a nice jolly.
    So 16 months from taking the job to Coronation. Is that par for the course? Have any British monachs popped their clog in that gap?
    Edward VIII did even worse.

    Re crownings, James VII never got crowned in Scotland. Neither did anyone else thereafter.
  • One of the biggest pluses in the Starmer column is that he does seem to have moved away from ideology for the sake of it, which I think the 2017 manifesto did quite well but then 2019 gave up and went full scale ideology ideology ideology.

    Labour has only ever won when it has moved away from the abstract and into reality. We must not lose sight.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,278
    malcolmg said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good

    Joyless my arse , you slaver over a bunch of grifters, crooked, sexual deviants , ne'er do wells etc. A pox on your Royals.
    See, you enjoyed writing that. QED

    LOOK. Even the Georgians are celebrating your majestic English Queen 👑👑🥂🥂


  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,135
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good
    I used to think this way about the Royals as a young man. I don't now, having rather belatedly matured, both emotionally and intellectually, but I can still relate to the sentiment which I wouldn't mock or denigrate.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,838
    IshmaelZ said:

    So it begins

    Dear ISHMAEL ,

    Food and drinks may not be available on your flight, we're very sorry about any inconvenience this may cause. We recommend that you bring your own food and soft drinks for the flight.

    Please remember that if you buy alcohol before your flight, you won’t be able to drink it on board.


    easyJet Customer Services

    Yuu're lucky. Friend of mine had his sister and b-i-l coming (for a local funeral) last week. Easyjet pulled the key out of the clockwork - they had to drive up from the south pdq.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 15,781
    TimS said:

    kinabalu said:

    MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Eabhal said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Good morning from Old Tbilisi, and a happy Jubilee to everyone, monarchist, anarchist, Fascist, communist….. even republican

    To veer slightly off topic, I recall there were some people on here dismissing the Stade de France story as “a scuffle at a football game, will be forgotten in two days”. i said that was not the case, it is indeed not the case. From the Spectator


    “The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths.

    “What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.”

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-liverpool-fans-sexually-assaulted-at-the-stade-de-france-

    There's rugby and kickball internationals at the SdF, so a complete coin toss which was going on last Saturday, no?

    No.

    Hooligans gonna hooligan, Paris police gonna do what they do best, and life being the harsh struggle against unfair odds, rounded off by a cheap funeral, that it is, Liverpool fans no matter how saintly gonna have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
    Your normal lazy, low-watt, misinformed take on what is now a huge story - in France

    You’re also wrong about the footie/rugby thing. It turns out there have been similar problems at Stade de France at rugby matches too. They have just never been reported as they have been on a smaller scale, and rugby is less salient than soccer
    Huge story in France that the banlieus are bandit country? I should get a job at Le Monde, I could have told them that 25 years ago
    It's pretty unfortunate because it brings to the fore issues France/Macron would rather just ignore. Juxtaposed with what should have been a French triumph.

    Echoes of the 2011 riots?
    Exactly. it’s a big story by itself - thousands of people attacked, dozens of children molested, etc etc - but it throws uncomfortable light on an even bigger story, which Macron is desperate not to talk about


    Remember that the Interior Minister’s FIRST version of events was that the problems all came from “thousands of British fans trying to get in without tickets and violating stewards”

    A complete load of astonishing bollocks from beginning to end.


    He also tried to support this ludicrous version of events by saying “most of the people arrested are English”.

    However since then French journalists have dug into the truth and revealed that most people arrested are “Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian” etc.

    His response to this, last night, when it was pointed out at a press conference? “It is nauseous [ie racist] to talk about the nationality of suspects”. Even tho he was quite happy to call them “English” when it suited him. Incroyable

    It looks like his career is going to be truncated, he will be the sacrificial lamb to propitiate the angry gods. However Macron won’t sack him immediately because, elections
    Yeah it's fucking carnage out there though. Have a guess before looking at the death and injury count over the last 4 years in gilets jaunes carry ons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fatalities_and_injuries

    Surprised me. This is a drop in the ocean.

    and hugely ironically, when I was googling for dangers in Paris generally, I find (Nov 2015)

    Three explosions occurred near the country's national sports stadium, the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, resulting in four deaths, including the three suicide bombers.[66] The explosions happened at 21:16, 21:19,[note 1] and 21:53.[67] At the time, the stadium was hosting an international friendly football match between France and Germany, which President Hollande was attending.[68][69] The suicide bombers arrived slightly late for the game, and eyewitness reports indicated they did not have tickets, resulting in them being turned away by security guards several times.[65]

    The first explosion near the stadium occurred about 20 minutes after the start of the game.[68][69] The first bomber was prevented from entering the stadium again after a security guard patted him down and found the explosive vest.[70] A few seconds after being turned away, he detonated the vest outside the security gate, killing himself and a bystander.[65][71] Investigators later surmised that the first suicide bomber had planned to detonate his vest within the stadium, triggering the crowd's panicked exit onto the streets where two other bombers were lying in wait.[72] Three minutes after the first bombing, the second bomber blew himself up outside another security gate.[note 1][65] Another 23 minutes after that, the third bomber's vest detonated near the stadium. According to some reports, the location of the third explosion was at a McDonald's restaurant, where over 50 people were injured, seven seriously;[65][70][73] others state the bomb detonated some distance away from any discernible target.[74]

    The irony being, nobody has commented on the precedent/parallel because NOBODY REMEMBERED IT. And it's a lot more memorable than last weekend's nonsense
    Yes, some of the problems seem to come from the Stade de France changing its crowd management policies, after the terror attacks. Eg there are few if any reports of crowd difficulties before the big attacks of 2015, they all date from after then, when the authorities got paranoid about the wrong people getting in

    And of course you’re right that is a bigger story than last weekend, but last weekend is still pretty bloody serious. 1000s of people robbed, attacked and traumatised, and dozens if not hundreds of sexual assaults - with police officers saying they have never witnessed anything on this scale

    It looks like the French now have a toxic cocktail of near-impossible crowd management problems in the face of terrorism, and all of this with a stadium surrounded by Islamist migrants, and on top of that they now have the threat of constant Cologne style mass robbery and sexual molestation

    This is a French paper speculating that the mess might cost Macron “fifty deputies”

    “It will end up costing us 50 deputies like the social VAT of Borloo”, fears a senior officer of the macronie. Darmanin in the middle of the fire lopinion.fr/politique/stad… by @LVigogne @mdeprieck Drawing @MonsieurKak”

    https://twitter.com/carovigoureux/status/1532273757016014848?s=21&t=-8JXjXAEBDrJOgaFrO_IOQ

    Personally, I would not go to the Stade de France to watch anything, not now. And I would have been happy to do so, before, because I was oblivious, like all of us

    They really should not have built that stadium in Paris 93
    Yet. Has been noted before. Stratford wasn't ritzy when we built ours there. It was a dump in the 90's.
    When I was living in London in the period around 2000, 3 bed semis in decent streets in Stratford for £70k or so were one hot tip from the London Property Guide.
    I reckon Catford might be the next gentrification target. I went out for a drink and a meal with a mate there last night. It's really quite ropey but has excellent transport links into central London with two train stations side by side. There's a bizarrely good and cheap Italian restaurant there too - two pizzas, two deserts and a nice bottle of Primitivo for a bit over £50. Catford is the new Peckham - you heard it here first.
    I once lived near there. I remember it for that cat statue and the dog track - my last visit to which left me with itchy skin for a few days. Think it's closed now, sadly, which maybe does point to gentrification. You probably shouldn't have a dog track if you want to gentrify.
    Bit too suburban to be the new Peckham I think. But it has solid Edwardian housing stock and decent rail links. More like the new Walthamstow or new Balham.

    I think the bearded hipster threshold will stay along the Hither Green/ Ladywell/Crofton Park/Nunhead demarcation line. Beyond that they don’t thrive.
    Ha ha, you may be right, although hipsters eventually get forced out by boring rich people so I am sure they will have to move on eventually. Catford is only 2 minutes by train from Crofton Park so it really is the next territory to be conquered. Catford pubs already have a load of craft ales in tap, so they are readying themselves for the invasion.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,160
    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    MattW said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Eabhal said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Good morning from Old Tbilisi, and a happy Jubilee to everyone, monarchist, anarchist, Fascist, communist….. even republican

    To veer slightly off topic, I recall there were some people on here dismissing the Stade de France story as “a scuffle at a football game, will be forgotten in two days”. i said that was not the case, it is indeed not the case. From the Spectator

    There's rugby and kickball internationals at the SdF, so a complete coin toss which was going on last Saturday, no?

    No.

    Hooligans gonna hooligan, Paris police gonna do what they do best, and life being the harsh struggle against unfair odds, rounded off by a cheap funeral, that it is, Liverpool fans no matter how saintly gonna have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
    Your normal lazy, low-watt, misinformed take on what is now a huge story - in France

    You’re also wrong about the footie/rugby thing. It turns out there have been similar problems at Stade de France at rugby matches too. They have just never been reported as they have been on a smaller scale, and rugby is less salient than soccer
    Huge story in France that the banlieus are bandit country? I should get a job at Le Monde, I could have told them that 25 years ago
    It's pretty unfortunate because it brings to the fore issues France/Macron would rather just ignore. Juxtaposed with what should have been a French triumph.

    Echoes of the 2011 riots?
    Exactly. it’s a big story by itself - thousands of people attacked, dozens of children molested, etc etc - but it throws uncomfortable light on an even bigger story, which Macron is desperate not to talk about


    Remember that the Interior Minister’s FIRST version of events was that the problems all came from “thousands of British fans trying to get in without tickets and violating stewards”

    A complete load of astonishing bollocks from beginning to end.


    He also tried to support this ludicrous version of events by saying “most of the people arrested are English”.

    However since then French journalists have dug into the truth and revealed that most people arrested are “Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian” etc.

    His response to this, last night, when it was pointed out at a press conference? “It is nauseous [ie racist] to talk about the nationality of suspects”. Even tho he was quite happy to call them “English” when it suited him. Incroyable

    It looks like his career is going to be truncated, he will be the sacrificial lamb to propitiate the angry gods. However Macron won’t sack him immediately because, elections
    Yeah it's fucking carnage out there though. Have a guess before looking at the death and injury count over the last 4 years in gilets jaunes carry ons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fatalities_and_injuries

    This one involves random police violence (yes - Paris, I know), in addition to robbery, sexual assault and the rest, by criminal gangs. It is also 2 years before the same place is the main Olympic Stadium. That is a somewhat different category to political violence.

    Here's a link I posted the other day - blind fans with their white sticks subjected to clouds of tear gas at an official gate for disabled people, in a queue with wheelchair users.

    1st item in the programme:
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017tht

    Macron's big risk is his own political situation, and the Olympics - now that the story has broken through.
    Well, not really. There is no danger to the Olympics, because policing of football matches has always been more difficult and aggressive than other sporting events. Football fans have a reputation, one that crosses borders and has endured through modern times.

    In the UK crowds have become more middle class and family oriented, in part because of the costs involved, but the Ultras are usually working class men. Supporting a football team is a semi-authorised outlet for aggression, as we see every week in chants, verbal abuse and now social media abuse. It is all part of the atmosphere at big matches. There are few other places where you can shout insults at people in public.

    It isn't surprising that it overspills the boundaries to violence at times. It is a difficult situation to police, and it does seem as if the reputation of Liverpool fans caused rather an overreaction by the French Police and SdF management. What looks like exuberent to fans can look potentially riotous to police.



    What a farcically pointless misinformed comment. Like a 3 year old trying to explain compound interest

    I have been to about 25 football matches a year for the last couple of decades, so have a fair amount of direct observation.

    I was at the World Cup in St Petersburg and Moscow in 2018 too. The Russians ran it very well, no issues with crowd control or policing at all. Perhaps the CL final should have stayed in StP.
    This has got fuck all to do with football per se and a lot more to do with the ethnic minorities in St Denis and French attitudes to them, accusatory and exculpatory by turns, AND their animosity to the French states, AND the particular history of brutal French policing, AND the history of terrorism at St Denis causing very specific crowd problems, and so on and so forth

    Not for the first time, you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about, you stupid, myopic, bum-faced, wobble-bottomed, morally narcissistic old quack, so shut the fuck up or I shall be forced into rudeness

    I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure it's treason to talk like that on This Of All Days.
    Shouldn't you be eating imperial vanilla iced slices round a plyboard table in the drizzle?
    Bit difficult in sunny Tbiiisi. But you have a point. Maybe I should have a glass of Saperavi on my terrace?

    i must say the Mall looks pretty splendid from this distance, with all the scrambled eggs on the guardly shoulders on the horses in the sun,..

    is there a moment which is Actual Jubilee? Like, when we can say: this is it. This is when they put the crown on her head, a billion years ago. Like 11am on November 11?
    The coronation was 2 June, but 1953, so 69 years today. Has someone miscounted 🤔
    The succession happens when the prevous one pops clogs so yes - probably you :smile:

    I read that "Mall" as Mail. Someone on PB praising the Mail?

    MattW said:

    tlg86 said:

    Octordle in 11; I’m quite pleased with that.

    Daily Octordle #129
    5️⃣🔟
    7️⃣3️⃣
    9️⃣8️⃣
    🕚4️⃣
    octordle.com

    Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo. They haven't.

    Here's my wordle. Octordle takes too long.

    Wordle 348 3/6

    ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩
    🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    Today's Worldle is trivially easy.
    Yesterday's was the first I've failed on for ages.
    Did not try that one until today.

    Wordle 347 4/6

    🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜
    ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
    ⬜🟩🟨⬜⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
  • Nunu3Nunu3 Posts: 224

    In answer to your question, the last time the Tories lost two by elections on the same day was the 7th of November 1991 when the Tories lost Langbaurgh and Kincardine & Deeside to Labour and the Lib Dems respectively.

    And then the tories got the most votes ever. Its almost like midterm losses are not a prediction for the next GE
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 18,361
    edited June 2022
    Leon said:

    ydoethur said:

    Fucking hell, another one:

    Oklahoma hospital shooting: Four killed and multiple injured
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61669873


    What’s the problem? All they have to do it Arm The Patients. Maybe even give a couple of guns to the dead
    The first autonomous armed drones might be used to defend schools rather than on the battlefield?

    Logical endpoint of the, "guns aren't the problem people are," argument. And then someone hacks one.
  • Nunu3 said:

    In answer to your question, the last time the Tories lost two by elections on the same day was the 7th of November 1991 when the Tories lost Langbaurgh and Kincardine & Deeside to Labour and the Lib Dems respectively.

    And then the tories got the most votes ever. Its almost like midterm losses are not a prediction for the next GE
    It's a fair point.

    But if you look at approval ratings, Johnson is at Corbyn levels now. I believed for a while Corbyn could pull it back - but they predicted his big loss well over a year before it happened.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,402
    My flats are having a free buffet with wine at 6pm.
    I shall be overfilling my boots regardless of my personal opinions. It's entirely in keeping with my strict moral code.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,647
    Leon said:

    malcolmg said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good

    Joyless my arse , you slaver over a bunch of grifters, crooked, sexual deviants , ne'er do wells etc. A pox on your Royals.
    See, you enjoyed writing that. QED

    LOOK. Even the Georgians are celebrating your majestic English Queen 👑👑🥂🥂


    Thats the Georgian flag.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,094

    kinabalu said:

    So, the Jube is here and the weather playing ball. Turns out the road next to us is having a 'street party'. Found this out just yesterday. I was pretty mortified at first but I guess no harm. Might show my face briefly.

    Anything that gets people socialising with their neighbours sounds good to me.
    You have better neighbours than some, perhaps...
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,278
    edited June 2022
    kjh said:

    Tips on what to see in Lisbon please - 2 and a bit days

    Tips on what to see in Faro please - 3 hours, near train station

    Cheers all.

    Lisbon:

    the Old Town (obvs)

    The Jeronimos Monastery

    One of the famous custard cake shops

    The big square by the sea: Praca de Comercio. Have some white wine from Alentejano. Don’t slip on the shiny cobbles

    Faro:

    Hmm. Not that much. Have a cataplana - they are delicious (like a juicy seafoody paella)
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 22,822
    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    malcolmg said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good

    Joyless my arse , you slaver over a bunch of grifters, crooked, sexual deviants , ne'er do wells etc. A pox on your Royals.
    See, you enjoyed writing that. QED

    LOOK. Even the Georgians are celebrating your majestic English Queen 👑👑🥂🥂


    Thats the Georgian flag.
    Pfff, cultural appropriation if you ask me. Next those pesky foreigners will be laying claim to St George!!!
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,094
    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    malcolmg said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good

    Joyless my arse , you slaver over a bunch of grifters, crooked, sexual deviants , ne'er do wells etc. A pox on your Royals.
    See, you enjoyed writing that. QED

    LOOK. Even the Georgians are celebrating your majestic English Queen 👑👑🥂🥂


    Thats the Georgian flag.
    I'm sure after mutiple days in Tblisi that will have been a compelte shock.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,431
    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    MattW said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Eabhal said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Good morning from Old Tbilisi, and a happy Jubilee to everyone, monarchist, anarchist, Fascist, communist….. even republican

    To veer slightly off topic, I recall there were some people on here dismissing the Stade de France story as “a scuffle at a football game, will be forgotten in two days”. i said that was not the case, it is indeed not the case. From the Spectator


    “The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths.

    “What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.”

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-liverpool-fans-sexually-assaulted-at-the-stade-de-france-

    There's rugby and kickball internationals at the SdF, so a complete coin toss which was going on last Saturday, no?

    No.

    Hooligans gonna hooligan, Paris police gonna do what they do best, and life being the harsh struggle against unfair odds, rounded off by a cheap funeral, that it is, Liverpool fans no matter how saintly gonna have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
    Your normal lazy, low-watt, misinformed take on what is now a huge story - in France

    You’re also wrong about the footie/rugby thing. It turns out there have been similar problems at Stade de France at rugby matches too. They have just never been reported as they have been on a smaller scale, and rugby is less salient than soccer
    Huge story in France that the banlieus are bandit country? I should get a job at Le Monde, I could have told them that 25 years ago
    It's pretty unfortunate because it brings to the fore issues France/Macron would rather just ignore. Juxtaposed with what should have been a French triumph.

    Echoes of the 2011 riots?
    Exactly. it’s a big story by itself - thousands of people attacked, dozens of children molested, etc etc - but it throws uncomfortable light on an even bigger story, which Macron is desperate not to talk about


    Remember that the Interior Minister’s FIRST version of events was that the problems all came from “thousands of British fans trying to get in without tickets and violating stewards”

    A complete load of astonishing bollocks from beginning to end.


    He also tried to support this ludicrous version of events by saying “most of the people arrested are English”.

    However since then French journalists have dug into the truth and revealed that most people arrested are “Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian” etc.

    His response to this, last night, when it was pointed out at a press conference? “It is nauseous [ie racist] to talk about the nationality of suspects”. Even tho he was quite happy to call them “English” when it suited him. Incroyable

    It looks like his career is going to be truncated, he will be the sacrificial lamb to propitiate the angry gods. However Macron won’t sack him immediately because, elections
    Yeah it's fucking carnage out there though. Have a guess before looking at the death and injury count over the last 4 years in gilets jaunes carry ons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fatalities_and_injuries

    Surprised me. This is a drop in the ocean.

    and hugely ironically, when I was googling for dangers in Paris generally, I find (Nov 2015)

    Three explosions occurred near the country's national sports stadium, the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, resulting in four deaths, including the three suicide bombers.[66] The explosions happened at 21:16, 21:19,[note 1] and 21:53.[67] At the time, the stadium was hosting an international friendly football match between France and Germany, which President Hollande was attending.[68][69] The suicide bombers arrived slightly late for the game, and eyewitness reports indicated they did not have tickets, resulting in them being turned away by security guards several times.[65]

    The first explosion near the stadium occurred about 20 minutes after the start of the game.[68][69] The first bomber was prevented from entering the stadium again after a security guard patted him down and found the explosive vest.[70] A few seconds after being turned away, he detonated the vest outside the security gate, killing himself and a bystander.[65][71] Investigators later surmised that the first suicide bomber had planned to detonate his vest within the stadium, triggering the crowd's panicked exit onto the streets where two other bombers were lying in wait.[72] Three minutes after the first bombing, the second bomber blew himself up outside another security gate.[note 1][65] Another 23 minutes after that, the third bomber's vest detonated near the stadium. According to some reports, the location of the third explosion was at a McDonald's restaurant, where over 50 people were injured, seven seriously;[65][70][73] others state the bomb detonated some distance away from any discernible target.[74]

    The irony being, nobody has commented on the precedent/parallel because NOBODY REMEMBERED IT. And it's a lot more memorable than last weekend's nonsense
    This one involves random police violence (yes - Paris, I know), in addition to robbery, sexual assault and the rest, by criminal gangs. It is also 2 years before the same place is the main Olympic Stadium. That is a somewhat different category to political violence.

    Here's a link I posted the other day - blind fans with their white sticks subjected to clouds of tear gas at an official gate for disabled people, in a queue with wheelchair users.

    1st item in the programme:
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017tht

    Macron's big risk is his own political situation, and the Olympics - now that the story has broken through.
    Well, not really. There is no danger to the Olympics, because policing of football matches has always been more difficult and aggressive than other sporting events. Football fans have a reputation, one that crosses borders and has endured through modern times.

    In the UK crowds have become more middle class and family oriented, in part because of the costs involved, but the Ultras are usually working class men. Supporting a football team is a semi-authorised outlet for aggression, as we see every week in chants, verbal abuse and now social media abuse. It is all part of the atmosphere at big matches. There are few other places where you can shout insults at people in public.

    It isn't surprising that it overspills the boundaries to violence at times. It is a difficult situation to police, and it does seem as if the reputation of Liverpool fans caused rather an overreaction by the French Police and SdF management. What looks like exuberent to fans can look potentially riotous to police.



    What a farcically pointless misinformed comment. Like a 3 year old trying to explain compound interest

    I have been to about 25 football matches a year for the last couple of decades, so have a fair amount of direct observation.

    I was at the World Cup in St Petersburg and Moscow in 2018 too. The Russians ran it very well, no issues with crowd control or policing at all. Perhaps the CL final should have stayed in StP.
    This has got fuck all to do with football per se and a lot more to do with the ethnic minorities in St Denis and French attitudes to them, accusatory and exculpatory by turns, AND their animosity to the French states, AND the particular history of brutal French policing, AND the history of terrorism at St Denis causing very specific crowd problems, and so on and so forth

    Not for the first time, you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about, you stupid, myopic, bum-faced, wobble-bottomed, morally narcissistic old quack, so shut the fuck up or I shall be forced into rudeness

    I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure it's treason to talk like that on This Of All Days.
    Shouldn't you be eating imperial vanilla iced slices round a plyboard table in the drizzle?
    Bit difficult in sunny Tbiiisi. But you have a point. Maybe I should have a glass of Saperavi on my terrace?

    i must say the Mall looks pretty splendid from this distance, with all the scrambled eggs on the guardly shoulders on the horses in the sun,..

    is there a moment which is Actual Jubilee? Like, when we can say: this is it. This is when they put the crown on her head, a billion years ago. Like 11am on November 11?
    The coronation was 2 June, but 1953, so 69 years today. Has someone miscounted 🤔
    No, it's just nobody wanted a bank holiday in the middle of February. Better to hold it in the summer and have a nice jolly.
    So 16 months from taking the job to Coronation. Is that par for the course? Have any British monachs popped their clog in that gap?
    It was about the same 'gap' as intended for Edward VIII, but the latter preferred the charms of Wallis Simpson to being King, so George VI took the date.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,135

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Eabhal said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Good morning from Old Tbilisi, and a happy Jubilee to everyone, monarchist, anarchist, Fascist, communist….. even republican

    To veer slightly off topic, I recall there were some people on here dismissing the Stade de France story as “a scuffle at a football game, will be forgotten in two days”. i said that was not the case, it is indeed not the case. From the Spectator


    “The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths.

    “What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.”

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-liverpool-fans-sexually-assaulted-at-the-stade-de-france-

    There's rugby and kickball internationals at the SdF, so a complete coin toss which was going on last Saturday, no?

    No.

    Hooligans gonna hooligan, Paris police gonna do what they do best, and life being the harsh struggle against unfair odds, rounded off by a cheap funeral, that it is, Liverpool fans no matter how saintly gonna have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
    Your normal lazy, low-watt, misinformed take on what is now a huge story - in France

    You’re also wrong about the footie/rugby thing. It turns out there have been similar problems at Stade de France at rugby matches too. They have just never been reported as they have been on a smaller scale, and rugby is less salient than soccer
    Huge story in France that the banlieus are bandit country? I should get a job at Le Monde, I could have told them that 25 years ago
    It's pretty unfortunate because it brings to the fore issues France/Macron would rather just ignore. Juxtaposed with what should have been a French triumph.

    Echoes of the 2011 riots?
    Exactly. it’s a big story by itself - thousands of people attacked, dozens of children molested, etc etc - but it throws uncomfortable light on an even bigger story, which Macron is desperate not to talk about


    Remember that the Interior Minister’s FIRST version of events was that the problems all came from “thousands of British fans trying to get in without tickets and violating stewards”

    A complete load of astonishing bollocks from beginning to end.


    He also tried to support this ludicrous version of events by saying “most of the people arrested are English”.

    However since then French journalists have dug into the truth and revealed that most people arrested are “Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian” etc.

    His response to this, last night, when it was pointed out at a press conference? “It is nauseous [ie racist] to talk about the nationality of suspects”. Even tho he was quite happy to call them “English” when it suited him. Incroyable

    It looks like his career is going to be truncated, he will be the sacrificial lamb to propitiate the angry gods. However Macron won’t sack him immediately because, elections
    Yeah it's fucking carnage out there though. Have a guess before looking at the death and injury count over the last 4 years in gilets jaunes carry ons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fatalities_and_injuries

    Surprised me. This is a drop in the ocean.

    and hugely ironically, when I was googling for dangers in Paris generally, I find (Nov 2015)

    Three explosions occurred near the country's national sports stadium, the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, resulting in four deaths, including the three suicide bombers.[66] The explosions happened at 21:16, 21:19,[note 1] and 21:53.[67] At the time, the stadium was hosting an international friendly football match between France and Germany, which President Hollande was attending.[68][69] The suicide bombers arrived slightly late for the game, and eyewitness reports indicated they did not have tickets, resulting in them being turned away by security guards several times.[65]

    The first explosion near the stadium occurred about 20 minutes after the start of the game.[68][69] The first bomber was prevented from entering the stadium again after a security guard patted him down and found the explosive vest.[70] A few seconds after being turned away, he detonated the vest outside the security gate, killing himself and a bystander.[65][71] Investigators later surmised that the first suicide bomber had planned to detonate his vest within the stadium, triggering the crowd's panicked exit onto the streets where two other bombers were lying in wait.[72] Three minutes after the first bombing, the second bomber blew himself up outside another security gate.[note 1][65] Another 23 minutes after that, the third bomber's vest detonated near the stadium. According to some reports, the location of the third explosion was at a McDonald's restaurant, where over 50 people were injured, seven seriously;[65][70][73] others state the bomb detonated some distance away from any discernible target.[74]

    The irony being, nobody has commented on the precedent/parallel because NOBODY REMEMBERED IT. And it's a lot more memorable than last weekend's nonsense
    Yes, some of the problems seem to come from the Stade de France changing its crowd management policies, after the terror attacks. Eg there are few if any reports of crowd difficulties before the big attacks of 2015, they all date from after then, when the authorities got paranoid about the wrong people getting in

    And of course you’re right that is a bigger story than last weekend, but last weekend is still pretty bloody serious. 1000s of people robbed, attacked and traumatised, and dozens if not hundreds of sexual assaults - with police officers saying they have never witnessed anything on this scale

    It looks like the French now have a toxic cocktail of near-impossible crowd management problems in the face of terrorism, and all of this with a stadium surrounded by Islamist migrants, and on top of that they now have the threat of constant Cologne style mass robbery and sexual molestation

    This is a French paper speculating that the mess might cost Macron “fifty deputies”

    “It will end up costing us 50 deputies like the social VAT of Borloo”, fears a senior officer of the macronie. Darmanin in the middle of the fire lopinion.fr/politique/stad… by @LVigogne @mdeprieck Drawing @MonsieurKak”

    https://twitter.com/carovigoureux/status/1532273757016014848?s=21&t=-8JXjXAEBDrJOgaFrO_IOQ

    Personally, I would not go to the Stade de France to watch anything, not now. And I would have been happy to do so, before, because I was oblivious, like all of us

    They really should not have built that stadium in Paris 93
    Yet. Has been noted before. Stratford wasn't ritzy when we built ours there. It was a dump in the 90's.
    When I was living in London in the period around 2000, 3 bed semis in decent streets in Stratford for £70k or so were one hot tip from the London Property Guide.
    I reckon Catford might be the next gentrification target. I went out for a drink and a meal with a mate there last night. It's really quite ropey but has excellent transport links into central London with two train stations side by side. There's a bizarrely good and cheap Italian restaurant there too - two pizzas, two deserts and a nice bottle of Primitivo for a bit over £50. Catford is the new Peckham - you heard it here first.
    I once lived near there. I remember it for that cat statue and the dog track - my last visit to which left me with itchy skin for a few days. Think it's closed now, sadly, which maybe does point to gentrification. You probably shouldn't have a dog track if you want to gentrify.
    Good point.

    They got rid of the dog tracks at Hackney Wick and Clapton just before gentrification began.
    And Walthamstow - the Royal Ascot of greyhound racing. No fleas there.

    I used to go to the dogs quite regularly in my 20s and 30s.
    I used to go Southend track OUAT. Quite enjoy dog racing, provided one realises it can be just a tiny bit iffy!
    Yes, I was quite into it at one time. I owned a dog, actually, but only got to see 2 runs before it died in a training accident.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,278
    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    malcolmg said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good

    Joyless my arse , you slaver over a bunch of grifters, crooked, sexual deviants , ne'er do wells etc. A pox on your Royals.
    See, you enjoyed writing that. QED

    LOOK. Even the Georgians are celebrating your majestic English Queen 👑👑🥂🥂


    Thats the Georgian flag.
    OMG. I’ve literally made this joke about half a dozen times and you still don’t get it
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,443
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good

    Yes, they are rude, humourless, joyless, self-obsessed and rather pompous people.

    Nobody can watch Trooping the Colour today and tell us that a republic would better; still less an elected head of state that would command neither the history, prestige or magic of a monarchial family stretching back 1,000 years nor provide its continuity or unity. It wouldn't help in providing a unifying role for the State above the dirty squabbles and pettiness of day to day politics and political behaviour. And nor would it aid Britain in enhancing its profile and admiration around the world.

    Republics are either political and divisive, or entirely forgettable and boring.

    I have no desire to replace something so magical and wonderful that works so well for us to satisfy the neurosis and insecurities of a small minority.
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 4,945

    One of the biggest pluses in the Starmer column is that he does seem to have moved away from ideology for the sake of it, which I think the 2017 manifesto did quite well but then 2019 gave up and went full scale ideology ideology ideology.

    Labour has only ever won when it has moved away from the abstract and into reality. We must not lose sight.

    Somebody brought up the 1997 New Labour pledge card the other day with 5 concrete pledges. Compare that to the less than, err, concrete "pledges" on the 2015 EdStone.

    If Labour can provide actual answers to the cost of living crisis and how to actually improve life for the majority in the UK, they will win.
  • Nunu3Nunu3 Posts: 224

    Enjoy the Jubilee holiday y'all

    Then next week we can concentrate on the letters 👍

    OK, but don't say y'all.
  • kyf_100 said:

    One of the biggest pluses in the Starmer column is that he does seem to have moved away from ideology for the sake of it, which I think the 2017 manifesto did quite well but then 2019 gave up and went full scale ideology ideology ideology.

    Labour has only ever won when it has moved away from the abstract and into reality. We must not lose sight.

    Somebody brought up the 1997 New Labour pledge card the other day with 5 concrete pledges. Compare that to the less than, err, concrete "pledges" on the 2015 EdStone.

    If Labour can provide actual answers to the cost of living crisis and how to actually improve life for the majority in the UK, they will win.
    I would cut VAT to 10% or lower.

    I would invest heavily in renewables to create new jobs.

    I would invest heavily in defence.

    I would commit to 100% FTTP to every property, obligating Openreach to upgrade their copper USO to FTTP.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,921
    The Prince of Wales, Princess Anne and the Duke of Cambridge arrive on the horseguards parade ground as Trooping the Colour gets under way, the first official event of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee Central Weekend
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,662
    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    malcolmg said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good

    Joyless my arse , you slaver over a bunch of grifters, crooked, sexual deviants , ne'er do wells etc. A pox on your Royals.
    See, you enjoyed writing that. QED

    LOOK. Even the Georgians are celebrating your majestic English Queen 👑👑🥂🥂


    Thats the Georgian flag.
    Wooooosh
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,094
    malcolmg said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good

    Joyless my arse , you slaver over a bunch of grifters, crooked, sexual deviants , ne'er do wells etc. A pox on your Royals.
    I knew they missed a trick in not naming one of Will's children a good Scottish monarch name like Alexander, David, or Malcolm, then you'd have been on side :)
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    Carnyx said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    So it begins

    Dear ISHMAEL ,

    Food and drinks may not be available on your flight, we're very sorry about any inconvenience this may cause. We recommend that you bring your own food and soft drinks for the flight.

    Please remember that if you buy alcohol before your flight, you won’t be able to drink it on board.


    easyJet Customer Services

    Yuu're lucky. Friend of mine had his sister and b-i-l coming (for a local funeral) last week. Easyjet pulled the key out of the clockwork - they had to drive up from the south pdq.
    Yes, but that hasn't not happened to me yet. And I can hardly drive to Catania if it does.
  • wooliedyedwooliedyed Posts: 10,061
    Protestortastic arrests at Trooping.
    Barrier jumpIng not recommended.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    HYUFD said:

    The Prince of Wales, Princess Anne and the Duke of Cambridge arrive on the horseguards parade ground as Trooping the Colour gets under way, the first official event of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee Central Weekend

    Any sign of the paedophile?
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,662
    No Queen?

    I'm just watching for the fainting/horse bolting drama.
  • Nunu3Nunu3 Posts: 224
    Leon said:

    ydoethur said:

    Fucking hell, another one:

    Oklahoma hospital shooting: Four killed and multiple injured
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61669873


    What’s the problem? All they have to do it Arm The Patients. Maybe even give a couple of guns to the dead
    America is a deeply sick nation.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,386
    edited June 2022

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good

    Yes, they are rude, humourless, joyless, self-obsessed and rather pompous people.
    I thought for a moment you meant the royal family, and I was about to say that seemed a bit unfair.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,094
    edited June 2022
    Farooq said:


    "No man's land" is surprisingly crowded these days. A good one in six are undecided on keeping the monarchy.
    On my side of the lines, we've got about a quarter of the population.

    Surprised? Me too. Seems like there's a problem with those voices of republicans getting heard despite our numbers growing.

    .

    Really? That sounds a bit dramatic to me, I've never noticed republicans having difficulty getting heard in any context.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,278
    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    ydoethur said:

    Fucking hell, another one:

    Oklahoma hospital shooting: Four killed and multiple injured
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61669873


    What’s the problem? All they have to do it Arm The Patients. Maybe even give a couple of guns to the dead
    We once had an American doctor visit, from Cook County Hospital, a rough inner city part of Chicago. We asked him if he saw many shootings in their Emergency Dept. He replied one a week or so.

    We looked at each other non-pluseed, having expecting many more. Then the penny dropped. He meant one a week being shot actually within the Emergency Dept...

    It was a very good symposium on managing major trauma, but the carnage in his pictures was appalling, only topped by the guy speaking from Soweto Hospital.
    One measure of American gun violence: Baltimore, St Louis, San Juan and Detroit all have homicide rates worse than Johannesburg

    In fact Cape Town is the only AFRICAN city with more murders per capita than St Louis

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rate
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 4,945
    edited June 2022

    kyf_100 said:

    One of the biggest pluses in the Starmer column is that he does seem to have moved away from ideology for the sake of it, which I think the 2017 manifesto did quite well but then 2019 gave up and went full scale ideology ideology ideology.

    Labour has only ever won when it has moved away from the abstract and into reality. We must not lose sight.

    Somebody brought up the 1997 New Labour pledge card the other day with 5 concrete pledges. Compare that to the less than, err, concrete "pledges" on the 2015 EdStone.

    If Labour can provide actual answers to the cost of living crisis and how to actually improve life for the majority in the UK, they will win.
    I would cut VAT to 10% or lower.

    I would invest heavily in renewables to create new jobs.

    I would invest heavily in defence.

    I would commit to 100% FTTP to every property, obligating Openreach to upgrade their copper USO to FTTP.
    Good answers, I'd vote for that platform.

    Especially the cut in VAT to 10% - a hideously regressive tax that impacts the poorest in society the most.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,838
    IshmaelZ said:

    Carnyx said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    So it begins

    Dear ISHMAEL ,

    Food and drinks may not be available on your flight, we're very sorry about any inconvenience this may cause. We recommend that you bring your own food and soft drinks for the flight.

    Please remember that if you buy alcohol before your flight, you won’t be able to drink it on board.


    easyJet Customer Services

    Yuu're lucky. Friend of mine had his sister and b-i-l coming (for a local funeral) last week. Easyjet pulled the key out of the clockwork - they had to drive up from the south pdq.
    Yes, but that hasn't not happened to me yet. And I can hardly drive to Catania if it does.
    Touch wood!
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,135
    IshmaelZ said:

    So it begins

    Dear ISHMAEL ,

    Food and drinks may not be available on your flight, we're very sorry about any inconvenience this may cause. We recommend that you bring your own food and soft drinks for the flight.

    Please remember that if you buy alcohol before your flight, you won’t be able to drink it on board.

    easyJet Customer Services

    Does this mean the real possibility of a flight without the option of a bloody mary?

    I'd struggle to embark on such an undertaking.
  • RogerRoger Posts: 19,913

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good

    Yes, they are rude, humourless, joyless, self-obsessed and rather pompous people.

    Nobody can watch Trooping the Colour today and tell us that a republic would better; still less an elected head of state that would command neither the history, prestige or magic of a monarchial family stretching back 1,000 years nor provide its continuity or unity. It wouldn't help in providing a unifying role for the State above the dirty squabbles and pettiness of day to day politics and political behaviour. And nor would it aid Britain in enhancing its profile and admiration around the world.

    Republics are either political and divisive, or entirely forgettable and boring.

    I have no desire to replace something so magical and wonderful that works so well for us to satisfy the neurosis and insecurities of a small minority.
    Many would say the same about yanking us out of the EU.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,402
    IshmaelZ said:

    HYUFD said:

    The Prince of Wales, Princess Anne and the Duke of Cambridge arrive on the horseguards parade ground as Trooping the Colour gets under way, the first official event of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee Central Weekend

    Any sign of the paedophile?
    My local Spoons is having a "Dress as your favourite Royal" competition.
    The opportunities are endless.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 22,822
    Leon said:

    kjh said:

    Tips on what to see in Lisbon please - 2 and a bit days

    Tips on what to see in Faro please - 3 hours, near train station

    Cheers all.

    Lisbon:

    the Old Town (obvs)

    The Jeronimos Monastery

    One of the famous custard cake shops

    The big square by the sea: Praca de Comercio. Have some white wine from Alentejano. Don’t slip on the shiny cobbles

    Faro:

    Hmm. Not that much. Have a cataplana - they are delicious (like a juicy seafoody paella)
    Lisbon Time Out Food Hall is fantastic. Gulbenkian if you like your art. And a weird one, if you have wide feet Guimaraes have the best selection of wide mens shoes I have found in a shop.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,386
    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    One of the biggest pluses in the Starmer column is that he does seem to have moved away from ideology for the sake of it, which I think the 2017 manifesto did quite well but then 2019 gave up and went full scale ideology ideology ideology.

    Labour has only ever won when it has moved away from the abstract and into reality. We must not lose sight.

    Somebody brought up the 1997 New Labour pledge card the other day with 5 concrete pledges. Compare that to the less than, err, concrete "pledges" on the 2015 EdStone.

    If Labour can provide actual answers to the cost of living crisis and how to actually improve life for the majority in the UK, they will win.
    I would cut VAT to 10% or lower.

    I would invest heavily in renewables to create new jobs.

    I would invest heavily in defence.

    I would commit to 100% FTTP to every property, obligating Openreach to upgrade their copper USO to FTTP.
    Good answers, I'd vote for that platform.

    Especially the cut in VAT to 10% - a hideously regressive tax that impacts the poorest in society the most.
    Although they would have to say where taxes would rise elsewhere to pay for it.

    I would suggest a political free hit for Labour is merging NI and IT. Those who would lose out mostly vote Tory anyway and it would be a vast improvement on the current tax arrangements.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,094
    dixiedean said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    HYUFD said:

    The Prince of Wales, Princess Anne and the Duke of Cambridge arrive on the horseguards parade ground as Trooping the Colour gets under way, the first official event of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee Central Weekend

    Any sign of the paedophile?
    My local Spoons is having a "Dress as your favourite Royal" competition.
    The opportunities are endless.
    Vlad the Impaler it is.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 18,361

    kyf_100 said:

    One of the biggest pluses in the Starmer column is that he does seem to have moved away from ideology for the sake of it, which I think the 2017 manifesto did quite well but then 2019 gave up and went full scale ideology ideology ideology.

    Labour has only ever won when it has moved away from the abstract and into reality. We must not lose sight.

    Somebody brought up the 1997 New Labour pledge card the other day with 5 concrete pledges. Compare that to the less than, err, concrete "pledges" on the 2015 EdStone.

    If Labour can provide actual answers to the cost of living crisis and how to actually improve life for the majority in the UK, they will win.
    I would cut VAT to 10% or lower.

    I would invest heavily in renewables to create new jobs.

    I would invest heavily in defence.

    I would commit to 100% FTTP to every property, obligating Openreach to upgrade their copper USO to FTTP.
    What spending will you cut in the emergency budget after the Sterling crisis and government debt crisis?

    There really is no money left this time. The fiscal outlook is a lot worse than in 2010.

    The main source of potential extra tax revenues - the vast accumulated store of unearned housing wealth - would be more politically toxic to tax than kicking kittens.

    We're in a desperate situation.
  • kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    One of the biggest pluses in the Starmer column is that he does seem to have moved away from ideology for the sake of it, which I think the 2017 manifesto did quite well but then 2019 gave up and went full scale ideology ideology ideology.

    Labour has only ever won when it has moved away from the abstract and into reality. We must not lose sight.

    Somebody brought up the 1997 New Labour pledge card the other day with 5 concrete pledges. Compare that to the less than, err, concrete "pledges" on the 2015 EdStone.

    If Labour can provide actual answers to the cost of living crisis and how to actually improve life for the majority in the UK, they will win.
    I would cut VAT to 10% or lower.

    I would invest heavily in renewables to create new jobs.

    I would invest heavily in defence.

    I would commit to 100% FTTP to every property, obligating Openreach to upgrade their copper USO to FTTP.
    Good answers, I'd vote for that platform.

    Especially the cut in VAT to 10% - a hideously regressive tax that impacts the poorest in society the most.
    Thank you. I agree on the VAT side.

    I think FTTP is the real levelling up to be honest and I have thought so for a long time. And to be fair the Tories don't seem to be entirely fucking it up just yet, so I wonder why they don't talk about it more.

    But they still have not assured 100% FTTP to all, which is necessary. It should not matter where you live.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,402
    Meanwhile. It is silent out there. Literally no one around. No kids playing. No lawns mowed. No traffic. No pedestrians. Beautiful sunshine. Where's everyone gone?
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,160
    edited June 2022
    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    One of the biggest pluses in the Starmer column is that he does seem to have moved away from ideology for the sake of it, which I think the 2017 manifesto did quite well but then 2019 gave up and went full scale ideology ideology ideology.

    Labour has only ever won when it has moved away from the abstract and into reality. We must not lose sight.

    Somebody brought up the 1997 New Labour pledge card the other day with 5 concrete pledges. Compare that to the less than, err, concrete "pledges" on the 2015 EdStone.

    If Labour can provide actual answers to the cost of living crisis and how to actually improve life for the majority in the UK, they will win.
    I would cut VAT to 10% or lower.

    I would invest heavily in renewables to create new jobs.

    I would invest heavily in defence.

    I would commit to 100% FTTP to every property, obligating Openreach to upgrade their copper USO to FTTP.
    Good answers, I'd vote for that platform.

    Especially the cut in VAT to 10% - a hideously regressive tax that impacts the poorest in society the most.
    Good job we Brexited.

    Still in the EU we could not lower VAT below 17%.

    :smiley:

    If that loses half of VAT revenue, the Govt will need an extra £66 billion from somewhere per annum to make up the difference.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 60,216
    You can almost sense the New York Times warming up to deliver a truly awful take on the Jubilee


    https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1532291365345927168
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,838
    ydoethur said:

    kyf_100 said:

    kyf_100 said:

    One of the biggest pluses in the Starmer column is that he does seem to have moved away from ideology for the sake of it, which I think the 2017 manifesto did quite well but then 2019 gave up and went full scale ideology ideology ideology.

    Labour has only ever won when it has moved away from the abstract and into reality. We must not lose sight.

    Somebody brought up the 1997 New Labour pledge card the other day with 5 concrete pledges. Compare that to the less than, err, concrete "pledges" on the 2015 EdStone.

    If Labour can provide actual answers to the cost of living crisis and how to actually improve life for the majority in the UK, they will win.
    I would cut VAT to 10% or lower.

    I would invest heavily in renewables to create new jobs.

    I would invest heavily in defence.

    I would commit to 100% FTTP to every property, obligating Openreach to upgrade their copper USO to FTTP.
    Good answers, I'd vote for that platform.

    Especially the cut in VAT to 10% - a hideously regressive tax that impacts the poorest in society the most.
    Although they would have to say where taxes would rise elsewhere to pay for it.

    I would suggest a political free hit for Labour is merging NI and IT. Those who would lose out mostly vote Tory anyway and it would be a vast improvement on the current tax arrangements.
    Quite. Tories don't, or won't, then count under the constitutional theory propounded by at least one person on here that a political party is elected solely to benefit its own voters and screw those who voted for the other lot.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,921
    dixiedean said:

    Meanwhile. It is silent out there. Literally no one around. No kids playing. No lawns mowed. No traffic. No pedestrians. Beautiful sunshine. Where's everyone gone?

    Watching Trooping the Colour?
  • boulayboulay Posts: 5,486
    Have to say, whatever you think of the monarchy, however cynical you are or down on Britain the Trooping of the Colour is bloody magnificent as a spectacle.

    It knocks those big presidential parades such as Red Dquare and the French Bastille parade into a cocked hat - there’s something Victorian about it still so a gentle bit of time travel.

    It’s almost, hopefully not being too wanky, a demonstration of an iron fist in a velvet glove by the military rather than the in your face bombast of other parades where they drive the tanks etc etc.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,432
    Leon said:

    ydoethur said:

    Fucking hell, another one:

    Oklahoma hospital shooting: Four killed and multiple injured
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61669873


    What’s the problem? All they have to do it Arm The Patients. Maybe even give a couple of guns to the dead
    Joking aside, I think would be 'mass shooters' to get taken down by armed public on a semi-regular basis. There was one the other day.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 51,632
    Do Tobias Ellwood's comments on the single market create a problem for Keir Starmer? If he doesn't at least match the offer of rejoining the single market then committed Labour-voting Rejoiners will become disillusioned.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 96,094
    edited June 2022
    Farooq said:

    kle4 said:

    Farooq said:


    "No man's land" is surprisingly crowded these days. A good one in six are undecided on keeping the monarchy.
    On my side of the lines, we've got about a quarter of the population.

    Surprised? Me too. Seems like there's a problem with those voices of republicans getting heard despite our numbers growing.

    .

    Really? That sounds a bit dramatic to me, I've never noticed republicans having difficulty getting heard in any context.
    Perhaps it's just a perception bias. I was surprised to find that there's as much support as there is for a republic. I thought, much like Casino_Royale, that numbers were small.
    My gut feeling, without looking at stats, is that politically engaged people are more likely to be republicans on the basis it is a quite political issue. Some are very firmly in favour on the monarchy, and a large group are content with it and the status quo. The latter are probably persuadable, but perhaps not as easily as some republicans think - since the core arguments are more abstract than anything else, equality and so on, and in practice its possible not much would change, as the many presidents residing in palaces, inspecting the troops and giving out awards could show. So the urgency is not there, and people in general are reluctant to change the status quo without a need.

    My own position is I think it works, more or less, and I'm content with that, and I defend the system but try not to be weird about it.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 23,160
    I was not expecting this.

    Turkey in English is now officially ‘Türkiye’.

    Now, where's the Umlaut on my keyboard?

    How does one pronounce "iye" - is it like the first part of E-I-E-I-O from Old MacDonald?

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/2/un-registers-turkiye-as-new-country-name-for-turkey
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 22,822

    Do Tobias Ellwood's comments on the single market create a problem for Keir Starmer? If he doesn't at least match the offer of rejoining the single market then committed Labour-voting Rejoiners will become disillusioned.

    No, hope that helps.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,647

    Foxy said:

    ydoethur said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    Foxy said:

    MattW said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Eabhal said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Good morning from Old Tbilisi, and a happy Jubilee to everyone, monarchist, anarchist, Fascist, communist….. even republican

    To veer slightly off topic, I recall there were some people on here dismissing the Stade de France story as “a scuffle at a football game, will be forgotten in two days”. i said that was not the case, it is indeed not the case. From the Spectator


    “The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths.

    “What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.”

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-liverpool-fans-sexually-assaulted-at-the-stade-de-france-

    There's rugby and kickball internationals at the SdF, so a complete coin toss which was going on last Saturday, no?

    No.

    Hooligans gonna hooligan, Paris police gonna do what they do best, and life being the harsh struggle against unfair odds, rounded off by a cheap funeral, that it is, Liverpool fans no matter how saintly gonna have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
    Your normal lazy, low-watt, misinformed take on what is now a huge story - in France

    You’re also wrong about the footie/rugby thing. It turns out there have been similar problems at Stade de France at rugby matches too. They have just never been reported as they have been on a smaller scale, and rugby is less salient than soccer
    Huge story in France that the banlieus are bandit country? I should get a job at Le Monde, I could have told them that 25 years ago
    It's pretty unfortunate because it brings to the fore issues France/Macron would rather just ignore. Juxtaposed with what should have been a French triumph.

    Echoes of the 2011 riots?
    Exactly. it’s a big story by itself - thousands of people attacked, dozens of children molested, etc etc - but it throws uncomfortable light on an even bigger story, which Macron is desperate not to talk about


    Remember that the Interior Minister’s FIRST version of events was that the problems all came from “thousands of British fans trying to get in without tickets and violating stewards”

    A complete load of astonishing bollocks from beginning to end.


    He also tried to support this ludicrous version of events by saying “most of the people arrested are English”.

    However since then French journalists have dug into the truth and revealed that most people arrested are “Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian” etc.

    His response to this, last night, when it was pointed out at a press conference? “It is nauseous [ie racist] to talk about the nationality of suspects”. Even tho he was quite happy to call them “English” when it suited him. Incroyable

    It looks like his career is going to be truncated, he will be the sacrificial lamb to propitiate the angry gods. However Macron won’t sack him immediately because, elections
    Yeah it's fucking carnage out there though. Have a guess before looking at the death and injury count over the last 4 years in gilets jaunes carry ons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fatalities_and_injuries

    Surprised me. This is a drop in the ocean.

    and hugely ironically, when I was googling for dangers in Paris generally, I find (Nov 2015)

    Three explosions occurred near the country's national sports stadium, the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, resulting in four deaths, including the three suicide bombers.[66] The explosions happened at 21:16, 21:19,[note 1] and 21:53.[67] At the time, the stadium was hosting an international friendly football match between France and Germany, which President Hollande was attending.[68][69] The suicide bombers arrived slightly late for the game, and eyewitness reports indicated they did not have tickets, resulting in them being turned away by security guards several times.[65]

    The first explosion near the stadium occurred about 20 minutes after the start of the game.[68][69] The first bomber was prevented from entering the stadium again after a security guard patted him down and found the explosive vest.[70] A few seconds after being turned away, he detonated the vest outside the security gate, killing himself and a bystander.[65][71] Investigators later surmised that the first suicide bomber had planned to detonate his vest within the stadium, triggering the crowd's panicked exit onto the streets where two other bombers were lying in wait.[72] Three minutes after the first bombing, the second bomber blew himself up outside another security gate.[note 1][65] Another 23 minutes after that, the third bomber's vest detonated near the stadium. According to some reports, the location of the third explosion was at a McDonald's restaurant, where over 50 people were injured, seven seriously;[65][70][73] others state the bomb detonated some distance away from any discernible target.[74]

    The irony being, nobody has commented on the precedent/parallel because NOBODY REMEMBERED IT. And it's a lot more memorable than last weekend's nonsense
    This one involves random police violence (yes - Paris, I know), in addition to robbery, sexual assault and the rest, by criminal gangs. It is also 2 years before the same place is the main Olympic Stadium. That is a somewhat different category to political violence.

    Here's a link I posted the other day - blind fans with their white sticks subjected to clouds of tear gas at an official gate for disabled people, in a queue with wheelchair users.

    1st item in the programme:
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017tht

    Macron's big risk is his own political situation, and the Olympics - now that the story has broken through.
    Well, not really. There is no danger to the Olympics, because policing of football matches has always been more difficult and aggressive than other sporting events. Football fans have a reputation, one that crosses borders and has endured through modern times.

    In the UK crowds have become more middle class and family oriented, in part because of the costs involved, but the Ultras are usually working class men. Supporting a football team is a semi-authorised outlet for aggression, as we see every week in chants, verbal abuse and now social media abuse. It is all part of the atmosphere at big matches. There are few other places where you can shout insults at people in public.

    It isn't surprising that it overspills the boundaries to violence at times. It is a difficult situation to police, and it does seem as if the reputation of Liverpool fans caused rather an overreaction by the French Police and SdF management. What looks like exuberent to fans can look potentially riotous to police.



    What a farcically pointless misinformed comment. Like a 3 year old trying to explain compound interest

    I have been to about 25 football matches a year for the last couple of decades, so have a fair amount of direct observation.

    I was at the World Cup in St Petersburg and Moscow in 2018 too. The Russians ran it very well, no issues with crowd control or policing at all. Perhaps the CL final should have stayed in StP.
    This has got fuck all to do with football per se and a lot more to do with the ethnic minorities in St Denis and French attitudes to them, accusatory and exculpatory by turns, AND their animosity to the French states, AND the particular history of brutal French policing, AND the history of terrorism at St Denis causing very specific crowd problems, and so on and so forth

    Not for the first time, you don’t know what the fuck you are talking about, you stupid, myopic, bum-faced, wobble-bottomed, morally narcissistic old quack, so shut the fuck up or I shall be forced into rudeness

    I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure it's treason to talk like that on This Of All Days.
    Shouldn't you be eating imperial vanilla iced slices round a plyboard table in the drizzle?
    Bit difficult in sunny Tbiiisi. But you have a point. Maybe I should have a glass of Saperavi on my terrace?

    i must say the Mall looks pretty splendid from this distance, with all the scrambled eggs on the guardly shoulders on the horses in the sun,..

    is there a moment which is Actual Jubilee? Like, when we can say: this is it. This is when they put the crown on her head, a billion years ago. Like 11am on November 11?
    The coronation was 2 June, but 1953, so 69 years today. Has someone miscounted 🤔
    No, it's just nobody wanted a bank holiday in the middle of February. Better to hold it in the summer and have a nice jolly.
    So 16 months from taking the job to Coronation. Is that par for the course? Have any British monachs popped their clog in that gap?
    It was about the same 'gap' as intended for Edward VIII, but the latter preferred the charms of Wallis Simpson to being King, so George VI took the date.
    They kept the same date? How practical!
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,431
    Roger said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good

    Yes, they are rude, humourless, joyless, self-obsessed and rather pompous people.

    Nobody can watch Trooping the Colour today and tell us that a republic would better; still less an elected head of state that would command neither the history, prestige or magic of a monarchial family stretching back 1,000 years nor provide its continuity or unity. It wouldn't help in providing a unifying role for the State above the dirty squabbles and pettiness of day to day politics and political behaviour. And nor would it aid Britain in enhancing its profile and admiration around the world.

    Republics are either political and divisive, or entirely forgettable and boring.

    I have no desire to replace something so magical and wonderful that works so well for us to satisfy the neurosis and insecurities of a small minority.
    Many would say the same about yanking us out of the EU.
    Rog, mate, leave it. You're right, but leave it. Today.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 38,811

    MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Eabhal said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Good morning from Old Tbilisi, and a happy Jubilee to everyone, monarchist, anarchist, Fascist, communist….. even republican

    To veer slightly off topic, I recall there were some people on here dismissing the Stade de France story as “a scuffle at a football game, will be forgotten in two days”. i said that was not the case, it is indeed not the case. From the Spectator


    “The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths.

    “What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.”

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-liverpool-fans-sexually-assaulted-at-the-stade-de-france-

    There's rugby and kickball internationals at the SdF, so a complete coin toss which was going on last Saturday, no?

    No.

    Hooligans gonna hooligan, Paris police gonna do what they do best, and life being the harsh struggle against unfair odds, rounded off by a cheap funeral, that it is, Liverpool fans no matter how saintly gonna have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
    Your normal lazy, low-watt, misinformed take on what is now a huge story - in France

    You’re also wrong about the footie/rugby thing. It turns out there have been similar problems at Stade de France at rugby matches too. They have just never been reported as they have been on a smaller scale, and rugby is less salient than soccer
    Huge story in France that the banlieus are bandit country? I should get a job at Le Monde, I could have told them that 25 years ago
    It's pretty unfortunate because it brings to the fore issues France/Macron would rather just ignore. Juxtaposed with what should have been a French triumph.

    Echoes of the 2011 riots?
    Exactly. it’s a big story by itself - thousands of people attacked, dozens of children molested, etc etc - but it throws uncomfortable light on an even bigger story, which Macron is desperate not to talk about


    Remember that the Interior Minister’s FIRST version of events was that the problems all came from “thousands of British fans trying to get in without tickets and violating stewards”

    A complete load of astonishing bollocks from beginning to end.


    He also tried to support this ludicrous version of events by saying “most of the people arrested are English”.

    However since then French journalists have dug into the truth and revealed that most people arrested are “Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian” etc.

    His response to this, last night, when it was pointed out at a press conference? “It is nauseous [ie racist] to talk about the nationality of suspects”. Even tho he was quite happy to call them “English” when it suited him. Incroyable

    It looks like his career is going to be truncated, he will be the sacrificial lamb to propitiate the angry gods. However Macron won’t sack him immediately because, elections
    Yeah it's fucking carnage out there though. Have a guess before looking at the death and injury count over the last 4 years in gilets jaunes carry ons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fatalities_and_injuries

    Surprised me. This is a drop in the ocean.

    and hugely ironically, when I was googling for dangers in Paris generally, I find (Nov 2015)

    Three explosions occurred near the country's national sports stadium, the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, resulting in four deaths, including the three suicide bombers.[66] The explosions happened at 21:16, 21:19,[note 1] and 21:53.[67] At the time, the stadium was hosting an international friendly football match between France and Germany, which President Hollande was attending.[68][69] The suicide bombers arrived slightly late for the game, and eyewitness reports indicated they did not have tickets, resulting in them being turned away by security guards several times.[65]

    The first explosion near the stadium occurred about 20 minutes after the start of the game.[68][69] The first bomber was prevented from entering the stadium again after a security guard patted him down and found the explosive vest.[70] A few seconds after being turned away, he detonated the vest outside the security gate, killing himself and a bystander.[65][71] Investigators later surmised that the first suicide bomber had planned to detonate his vest within the stadium, triggering the crowd's panicked exit onto the streets where two other bombers were lying in wait.[72] Three minutes after the first bombing, the second bomber blew himself up outside another security gate.[note 1][65] Another 23 minutes after that, the third bomber's vest detonated near the stadium. According to some reports, the location of the third explosion was at a McDonald's restaurant, where over 50 people were injured, seven seriously;[65][70][73] others state the bomb detonated some distance away from any discernible target.[74]

    The irony being, nobody has commented on the precedent/parallel because NOBODY REMEMBERED IT. And it's a lot more memorable than last weekend's nonsense
    Yes, some of the problems seem to come from the Stade de France changing its crowd management policies, after the terror attacks. Eg there are few if any reports of crowd difficulties before the big attacks of 2015, they all date from after then, when the authorities got paranoid about the wrong people getting in

    And of course you’re right that is a bigger story than last weekend, but last weekend is still pretty bloody serious. 1000s of people robbed, attacked and traumatised, and dozens if not hundreds of sexual assaults - with police officers saying they have never witnessed anything on this scale

    It looks like the French now have a toxic cocktail of near-impossible crowd management problems in the face of terrorism, and all of this with a stadium surrounded by Islamist migrants, and on top of that they now have the threat of constant Cologne style mass robbery and sexual molestation

    This is a French paper speculating that the mess might cost Macron “fifty deputies”

    “It will end up costing us 50 deputies like the social VAT of Borloo”, fears a senior officer of the macronie. Darmanin in the middle of the fire lopinion.fr/politique/stad… by @LVigogne @mdeprieck Drawing @MonsieurKak”

    https://twitter.com/carovigoureux/status/1532273757016014848?s=21&t=-8JXjXAEBDrJOgaFrO_IOQ

    Personally, I would not go to the Stade de France to watch anything, not now. And I would have been happy to do so, before, because I was oblivious, like all of us

    They really should not have built that stadium in Paris 93
    Yet. Has been noted before. Stratford wasn't ritzy when we built ours there. It was a dump in the 90's.
    When I was living in London in the period around 2000, 3 bed semis in decent streets in Stratford for £70k or so were one hot tip from the London Property Guide.
    I reckon Catford might be the next gentrification target. I went out for a drink and a meal with a mate there last night. It's really quite ropey but has excellent transport links into central London with two train stations side by side. There's a bizarrely good and cheap Italian restaurant there too - two pizzas, two deserts and a nice bottle of Primitivo for a bit over £50. Catford is the new Peckham - you heard it here first.
    No tube station. Areas that don't have tube or overground struggle to gentrify. It's only when the overground was properly revamped that the eastern bit of London where I grew up really started to gentrify. Before that it was a no go area and my parents couldn't leave fast enough when my dad got his chartership and a good job.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,838
    boulay said:

    Have to say, whatever you think of the monarchy, however cynical you are or down on Britain the Trooping of the Colour is bloody magnificent as a spectacle.

    It knocks those big presidential parades such as Red Dquare and the French Bastille parade into a cocked hat - there’s something Victorian about it still so a gentle bit of time travel.

    It’s almost, hopefully not being too wanky, a demonstration of an iron fist in a velvet glove by the military rather than the in your face bombast of other parades where they drive the tanks etc etc.

    OTOH the horses sort of got outdated in September 1939. And it's not as if the MoD had had the sense to keep some old Churchill tanks for parades. They do those things better in Burma.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 48,647
    Farooq said:

    Leon said:

    malcolmg said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Farooq said:

    Republic. Now.

    Obviously. Tomorrow is too late.


    I’m afraid the endearing ineptitude of that makes me more of a monarchist
    Republicans always get their timing, tone and arguments wrong. Always wrong.

    They will try again at the next coronation, and lose then too.

    They will always lose.
    Yep

    The genius of a monarchy is its predictably human unpredictability. So it has inherent drama, like a soap opera, and we are all addicted, even when it takes a dark turn

    So you get periods when it’s awful, ugh, Prince Andrew is a fiddler, yuk, and the Queen is nearly dead, oh no, and then suddenly you get a birth or a birthday or a wedding and then Yay, look, the Mall is lovely in the sun! - it reminds me of having a baby which is exactly like Brexit, no, it’s like bringing up a baby - you have periods when it is all nappies and what the F and then you get the first smile or the first word and happiness is unconfined

    Except for the churlish, joyless republicans, but then I suspect they get a secret surly joy out of being churlish and joyless, so it’s all good

    Joyless my arse , you slaver over a bunch of grifters, crooked, sexual deviants , ne'er do wells etc. A pox on your Royals.
    See, you enjoyed writing that. QED

    LOOK. Even the Georgians are celebrating your majestic English Queen 👑👑🥂🥂


    Are you staying in a shanty town?
    One mans shanty town is anothers vernacular architecture. You have to think like a travel writer on a freebie.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,261
    kinabalu said:

    So, the Jube is here and the weather playing ball. Turns out the road next to us is having a 'street party'. Found this out just yesterday. I was pretty mortified at first but I guess no harm. Might show my face briefly.

    Why are you mortified?

    Should I, as an atheist, be upset that the Seventh Day Adventist church round the corner uses impromptu food bank they run outside their church as a proselytizing operation?

    Or should I smile at them?
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,431
    HYUFD said:

    dixiedean said:

    Meanwhile. It is silent out there. Literally no one around. No kids playing. No lawns mowed. No traffic. No pedestrians. Beautiful sunshine. Where's everyone gone?

    Watching Trooping the Colour?
    Test Match. England bowling. NZ 1-0 AToW.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 122,921
    edited June 2022
    Farooq said:

    kle4 said:

    Farooq said:


    "No man's land" is surprisingly crowded these days. A good one in six are undecided on keeping the monarchy.
    On my side of the lines, we've got about a quarter of the population.

    Surprised? Me too. Seems like there's a problem with those voices of republicans getting heard despite our numbers growing.

    .

    Really? That sounds a bit dramatic to me, I've never noticed republicans having difficulty getting heard in any context.
    Perhaps it's just a perception bias. I was surprised to find that there's as much support as there is for a republic. I thought, much like Casino_Royale, that numbers were small.
    22% support a republic in a Yougov poll this week, so even less than the LDs got in 2010.

    Those numbers are driven by Labour voters, 37% of Labour voters back a republic, compared to just 9% of Conservative voters and 26% of LDs.

    London is the most republican region of the UK, 33% of Londoners now want a republic, compared to just 19% in the South and North and 20% in the Midlands and Wales who are republicans. In fact even more Londoners are republicans than the 32% of Scots who are pro republic

    https://yougov.co.uk/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2022/06/01/platinum-jubilee-where-does-public-opinion-stand-m
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,386
    edited June 2022
    MattW said:

    I was not expecting this.

    Turkey in English is now officially ‘Türkiye’.

    Now, where's the Umlaut on my keyboard?

    How does one pronounce "iye" - is it like the first part of E-I-E-I-O from Old MacDonald?

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/2/un-registers-turkiye-as-new-country-name-for-turkey

    Sounds like they got the bird about the English version.

    You can listen here, btw.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tur-Türkiye_Cumhuriyeti.ogg
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 8,662
    Brave protestors. Awful lot of big horses and drawn swords to dodge.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 33,431

    HYUFD said:

    dixiedean said:

    Meanwhile. It is silent out there. Literally no one around. No kids playing. No lawns mowed. No traffic. No pedestrians. Beautiful sunshine. Where's everyone gone?

    Watching Trooping the Colour?
    Test Match. England bowling. NZ 1-0 AToW.
    Yay! 1-1. c Bairstow b Anderson. What idiot left Anderson out of the last tour?
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,386
    Eabhal said:

    Brave protestors. Awful lot of big horses and drawn swords to dodge.

    If an animal rights protestor is ridden down by an enraged horse, does that mean karma's a mare?
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,386

    HYUFD said:

    dixiedean said:

    Meanwhile. It is silent out there. Literally no one around. No kids playing. No lawns mowed. No traffic. No pedestrians. Beautiful sunshine. Where's everyone gone?

    Watching Trooping the Colour?
    Test Match. England bowling. NZ 1-0 AToW.
    Yay! 1-1. c Bairstow b Anderson. What idiot left Anderson out of the last tour?
    Joe Root.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,432

    kinabalu said:

    So, the Jube is here and the weather playing ball. Turns out the road next to us is having a 'street party'. Found this out just yesterday. I was pretty mortified at first but I guess no harm. Might show my face briefly.

    Why are you mortified?

    Should I, as an atheist, be upset that the Seventh Day Adventist church round the corner uses impromptu food bank they run outside their church as a proselytizing operation?

    Or should I smile at them?
    Nothing to stop a group of militant atheists setting up a food bank to spread the gospel according to Dawkins.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 60,216
    edited June 2022
    MattW said:

    I was not expecting this.

    Turkey in English is now officially ‘Türkiye’.

    Now, where's the Umlaut on my keyboard?

    How does one pronounce "iye" - is it like the first part of E-I-E-I-O from Old MacDonald?

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/2/un-registers-turkiye-as-new-country-name-for-turkey

    Turkish airlines (is it still “Turkish” - ed.?) has a video after the safety demo and before every film promoting the new name…
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 29,402
    MaxPB said:

    MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Eabhal said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Good morning from Old Tbilisi, and a happy Jubilee to everyone, monarchist, anarchist, Fascist, communist….. even republican

    To veer slightly off topic, I recall there were some people on here dismissing the Stade de France story as “a scuffle at a football game, will be forgotten in two days”. i said that was not the case, it is indeed not the case. From the Spectator


    “The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths.

    “What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.”

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-liverpool-fans-sexually-assaulted-at-the-stade-de-france-

    There's rugby and kickball internationals at the SdF, so a complete coin toss which was going on last Saturday, no?

    No.

    Hooligans gonna hooligan, Paris police gonna do what they do best, and life being the harsh struggle against unfair odds, rounded off by a cheap funeral, that it is, Liverpool fans no matter how saintly gonna have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
    Your normal lazy, low-watt, misinformed take on what is now a huge story - in France

    You’re also wrong about the footie/rugby thing. It turns out there have been similar problems at Stade de France at rugby matches too. They have just never been reported as they have been on a smaller scale, and rugby is less salient than soccer
    Huge story in France that the banlieus are bandit country? I should get a job at Le Monde, I could have told them that 25 years ago
    It's pretty unfortunate because it brings to the fore issues France/Macron would rather just ignore. Juxtaposed with what should have been a French triumph.

    Echoes of the 2011 riots?
    Exactly. it’s a big story by itself - thousands of people attacked, dozens of children molested, etc etc - but it throws uncomfortable light on an even bigger story, which Macron is desperate not to talk about


    Remember that the Interior Minister’s FIRST version of events was that the problems all came from “thousands of British fans trying to get in without tickets and violating stewards”

    A complete load of astonishing bollocks from beginning to end.


    He also tried to support this ludicrous version of events by saying “most of the people arrested are English”.

    However since then French journalists have dug into the truth and revealed that most people arrested are “Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian” etc.

    His response to this, last night, when it was pointed out at a press conference? “It is nauseous [ie racist] to talk about the nationality of suspects”. Even tho he was quite happy to call them “English” when it suited him. Incroyable

    It looks like his career is going to be truncated, he will be the sacrificial lamb to propitiate the angry gods. However Macron won’t sack him immediately because, elections
    Yeah it's fucking carnage out there though. Have a guess before looking at the death and injury count over the last 4 years in gilets jaunes carry ons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fatalities_and_injuries

    Surprised me. This is a drop in the ocean.

    and hugely ironically, when I was googling for dangers in Paris generally, I find (Nov 2015)

    Three explosions occurred near the country's national sports stadium, the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, resulting in four deaths, including the three suicide bombers.[66] The explosions happened at 21:16, 21:19,[note 1] and 21:53.[67] At the time, the stadium was hosting an international friendly football match between France and Germany, which President Hollande was attending.[68][69] The suicide bombers arrived slightly late for the game, and eyewitness reports indicated they did not have tickets, resulting in them being turned away by security guards several times.[65]

    The first explosion near the stadium occurred about 20 minutes after the start of the game.[68][69] The first bomber was prevented from entering the stadium again after a security guard patted him down and found the explosive vest.[70] A few seconds after being turned away, he detonated the vest outside the security gate, killing himself and a bystander.[65][71] Investigators later surmised that the first suicide bomber had planned to detonate his vest within the stadium, triggering the crowd's panicked exit onto the streets where two other bombers were lying in wait.[72] Three minutes after the first bombing, the second bomber blew himself up outside another security gate.[note 1][65] Another 23 minutes after that, the third bomber's vest detonated near the stadium. According to some reports, the location of the third explosion was at a McDonald's restaurant, where over 50 people were injured, seven seriously;[65][70][73] others state the bomb detonated some distance away from any discernible target.[74]

    The irony being, nobody has commented on the precedent/parallel because NOBODY REMEMBERED IT. And it's a lot more memorable than last weekend's nonsense
    Yes, some of the problems seem to come from the Stade de France changing its crowd management policies, after the terror attacks. Eg there are few if any reports of crowd difficulties before the big attacks of 2015, they all date from after then, when the authorities got paranoid about the wrong people getting in

    And of course you’re right that is a bigger story than last weekend, but last weekend is still pretty bloody serious. 1000s of people robbed, attacked and traumatised, and dozens if not hundreds of sexual assaults - with police officers saying they have never witnessed anything on this scale

    It looks like the French now have a toxic cocktail of near-impossible crowd management problems in the face of terrorism, and all of this with a stadium surrounded by Islamist migrants, and on top of that they now have the threat of constant Cologne style mass robbery and sexual molestation

    This is a French paper speculating that the mess might cost Macron “fifty deputies”

    “It will end up costing us 50 deputies like the social VAT of Borloo”, fears a senior officer of the macronie. Darmanin in the middle of the fire lopinion.fr/politique/stad… by @LVigogne @mdeprieck Drawing @MonsieurKak”

    https://twitter.com/carovigoureux/status/1532273757016014848?s=21&t=-8JXjXAEBDrJOgaFrO_IOQ

    Personally, I would not go to the Stade de France to watch anything, not now. And I would have been happy to do so, before, because I was oblivious, like all of us

    They really should not have built that stadium in Paris 93
    Yet. Has been noted before. Stratford wasn't ritzy when we built ours there. It was a dump in the 90's.
    When I was living in London in the period around 2000, 3 bed semis in decent streets in Stratford for £70k or so were one hot tip from the London Property Guide.
    I reckon Catford might be the next gentrification target. I went out for a drink and a meal with a mate there last night. It's really quite ropey but has excellent transport links into central London with two train stations side by side. There's a bizarrely good and cheap Italian restaurant there too - two pizzas, two deserts and a nice bottle of Primitivo for a bit over £50. Catford is the new Peckham - you heard it here first.
    No tube station. Areas that don't have tube or overground struggle to gentrify. It's only when the overground was properly revamped that the eastern bit of London where I grew up really started to gentrify. Before that it was a no go area and my parents couldn't leave fast enough when my dad got his chartership and a good job.
    Which is strange.
    As we are assured the north of England doesn't need better public transport infrastructure to "level up".
    I wonder why?
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,585
    Sitting in a bar thousands of miles from London, having lunch and watching the Jubilee celebrations on TV. This is a truly global event, we Brits are very lucky to have Her Majesty.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,135
    Farooq said:

    kle4 said:

    Farooq said:


    "No man's land" is surprisingly crowded these days. A good one in six are undecided on keeping the monarchy.
    On my side of the lines, we've got about a quarter of the population.

    Surprised? Me too. Seems like there's a problem with those voices of republicans getting heard despite our numbers growing.

    .

    Really? That sounds a bit dramatic to me, I've never noticed republicans having difficulty getting heard in any context.
    Perhaps it's just a perception bias. I was surprised to find that there's as much support as there is for a republic. I thought, much like Casino_Royale, that numbers were small.
    Same here. I'm surprised by how much Republican sentiment there is. And once we get post QE2 I'd think it would only grow.

    There are 4 categories of people, I'd say.

    1. Monarchists.
    2. Not fussed but would vote to keep if asked.
    3. Not fussed but would vote to scrap if asked.
    4. Republicans.

    ATM spread approx 25/35/15/25.

    So, as per usual, it's about moving that middle ground. If lots of 2s become 3s the pressure will build for a Referendum.

    Because you can't just keep ignoring the people.
  • FrankBoothFrankBooth Posts: 9,828

    Do Tobias Ellwood's comments on the single market create a problem for Keir Starmer? If he doesn't at least match the offer of rejoining the single market then committed Labour-voting Rejoiners will become disillusioned.

    I'd be amazed if the next Tory leader suggested rejoining the single market. That said I don't know or understand the party too well.
  • RogerRoger Posts: 19,913
    boulay said:

    Have to say, whatever you think of the monarchy, however cynical you are or down on Britain the Trooping of the Colour is bloody magnificent as a spectacle.

    It knocks those big presidential parades such as Red Dquare and the French Bastille parade into a cocked hat - there’s something Victorian about it still so a gentle bit of time travel.

    It’s almost, hopefully not being too wanky, a demonstration of an iron fist in a velvet glove by the military rather than the in your face bombast of other parades where they drive the tanks etc etc.

    You should try North Korea. It'll blow your head off.
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 22,011
    kjh said:

    Tips on what to see in Lisbon please - 2 and a bit days

    Tips on what to see in Faro please - 3 hours, near train station

    Cheers all.

    Lisbon - take a trip on the Electrico and eat some custard tarts. We just generally meandered about, taking in the sights, calling in for a coffee or beer. There is one famous old cafe - Cafe Brasileira - that is very atmospheric.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 28,432
    ydoethur said:

    MattW said:

    I was not expecting this.

    Turkey in English is now officially ‘Türkiye’.

    Now, where's the Umlaut on my keyboard?

    How does one pronounce "iye" - is it like the first part of E-I-E-I-O from Old MacDonald?

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/2/un-registers-turkiye-as-new-country-name-for-turkey

    Sounds like they got the bird about the English version.

    You can listen here, btw.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tur-Türkiye_Cumhuriyeti.ogg
    Bit rude to tell them to get stuffed I suppose.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 22,822
    ydoethur said:

    MattW said:

    I was not expecting this.

    Turkey in English is now officially ‘Türkiye’.

    Now, where's the Umlaut on my keyboard?

    How does one pronounce "iye" - is it like the first part of E-I-E-I-O from Old MacDonald?

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/2/un-registers-turkiye-as-new-country-name-for-turkey

    Sounds like they got the bird about the English version.

    You can listen here, btw.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tur-Türkiye_Cumhuriyeti.ogg
    I thought about going to Istanbul to launch a protest but on reflection am too chicken.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,386

    ydoethur said:

    MattW said:

    I was not expecting this.

    Turkey in English is now officially ‘Türkiye’.

    Now, where's the Umlaut on my keyboard?

    How does one pronounce "iye" - is it like the first part of E-I-E-I-O from Old MacDonald?

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/2/un-registers-turkiye-as-new-country-name-for-turkey

    Sounds like they got the bird about the English version.

    You can listen here, btw.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tur-Türkiye_Cumhuriyeti.ogg
    Bit rude to tell them to get stuffed I suppose.
    Would definitely be saucy.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,261
    MaxPB said:

    MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Eabhal said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    Good morning from Old Tbilisi, and a happy Jubilee to everyone, monarchist, anarchist, Fascist, communist….. even republican

    To veer slightly off topic, I recall there were some people on here dismissing the Stade de France story as “a scuffle at a football game, will be forgotten in two days”. i said that was not the case, it is indeed not the case. From the Spectator


    “The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths.

    “What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.”

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/were-liverpool-fans-sexually-assaulted-at-the-stade-de-france-

    There's rugby and kickball internationals at the SdF, so a complete coin toss which was going on last Saturday, no?

    No.

    Hooligans gonna hooligan, Paris police gonna do what they do best, and life being the harsh struggle against unfair odds, rounded off by a cheap funeral, that it is, Liverpool fans no matter how saintly gonna have the sins of their fathers visited upon them.
    Your normal lazy, low-watt, misinformed take on what is now a huge story - in France

    You’re also wrong about the footie/rugby thing. It turns out there have been similar problems at Stade de France at rugby matches too. They have just never been reported as they have been on a smaller scale, and rugby is less salient than soccer
    Huge story in France that the banlieus are bandit country? I should get a job at Le Monde, I could have told them that 25 years ago
    It's pretty unfortunate because it brings to the fore issues France/Macron would rather just ignore. Juxtaposed with what should have been a French triumph.

    Echoes of the 2011 riots?
    Exactly. it’s a big story by itself - thousands of people attacked, dozens of children molested, etc etc - but it throws uncomfortable light on an even bigger story, which Macron is desperate not to talk about


    Remember that the Interior Minister’s FIRST version of events was that the problems all came from “thousands of British fans trying to get in without tickets and violating stewards”

    A complete load of astonishing bollocks from beginning to end.


    He also tried to support this ludicrous version of events by saying “most of the people arrested are English”.

    However since then French journalists have dug into the truth and revealed that most people arrested are “Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian” etc.

    His response to this, last night, when it was pointed out at a press conference? “It is nauseous [ie racist] to talk about the nationality of suspects”. Even tho he was quite happy to call them “English” when it suited him. Incroyable

    It looks like his career is going to be truncated, he will be the sacrificial lamb to propitiate the angry gods. However Macron won’t sack him immediately because, elections
    Yeah it's fucking carnage out there though. Have a guess before looking at the death and injury count over the last 4 years in gilets jaunes carry ons

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests#Fatalities_and_injuries

    Surprised me. This is a drop in the ocean.

    and hugely ironically, when I was googling for dangers in Paris generally, I find (Nov 2015)

    Three explosions occurred near the country's national sports stadium, the Stade de France, in the suburb of Saint-Denis, resulting in four deaths, including the three suicide bombers.[66] The explosions happened at 21:16, 21:19,[note 1] and 21:53.[67] At the time, the stadium was hosting an international friendly football match between France and Germany, which President Hollande was attending.[68][69] The suicide bombers arrived slightly late for the game, and eyewitness reports indicated they did not have tickets, resulting in them being turned away by security guards several times.[65]

    The first explosion near the stadium occurred about 20 minutes after the start of the game.[68][69] The first bomber was prevented from entering the stadium again after a security guard patted him down and found the explosive vest.[70] A few seconds after being turned away, he detonated the vest outside the security gate, killing himself and a bystander.[65][71] Investigators later surmised that the first suicide bomber had planned to detonate his vest within the stadium, triggering the crowd's panicked exit onto the streets where two other bombers were lying in wait.[72] Three minutes after the first bombing, the second bomber blew himself up outside another security gate.[note 1][65] Another 23 minutes after that, the third bomber's vest detonated near the stadium. According to some reports, the location of the third explosion was at a McDonald's restaurant, where over 50 people were injured, seven seriously;[65][70][73] others state the bomb detonated some distance away from any discernible target.[74]

    The irony being, nobody has commented on the precedent/parallel because NOBODY REMEMBERED IT. And it's a lot more memorable than last weekend's nonsense
    Yes, some of the problems seem to come from the Stade de France changing its crowd management policies, after the terror attacks. Eg there are few if any reports of crowd difficulties before the big attacks of 2015, they all date from after then, when the authorities got paranoid about the wrong people getting in

    And of course you’re right that is a bigger story than last weekend, but last weekend is still pretty bloody serious. 1000s of people robbed, attacked and traumatised, and dozens if not hundreds of sexual assaults - with police officers saying they have never witnessed anything on this scale

    It looks like the French now have a toxic cocktail of near-impossible crowd management problems in the face of terrorism, and all of this with a stadium surrounded by Islamist migrants, and on top of that they now have the threat of constant Cologne style mass robbery and sexual molestation

    This is a French paper speculating that the mess might cost Macron “fifty deputies”

    “It will end up costing us 50 deputies like the social VAT of Borloo”, fears a senior officer of the macronie. Darmanin in the middle of the fire lopinion.fr/politique/stad… by @LVigogne @mdeprieck Drawing @MonsieurKak”

    https://twitter.com/carovigoureux/status/1532273757016014848?s=21&t=-8JXjXAEBDrJOgaFrO_IOQ

    Personally, I would not go to the Stade de France to watch anything, not now. And I would have been happy to do so, before, because I was oblivious, like all of us

    They really should not have built that stadium in Paris 93
    Yet. Has been noted before. Stratford wasn't ritzy when we built ours there. It was a dump in the 90's.
    When I was living in London in the period around 2000, 3 bed semis in decent streets in Stratford for £70k or so were one hot tip from the London Property Guide.
    I reckon Catford might be the next gentrification target. I went out for a drink and a meal with a mate there last night. It's really quite ropey but has excellent transport links into central London with two train stations side by side. There's a bizarrely good and cheap Italian restaurant there too - two pizzas, two deserts and a nice bottle of Primitivo for a bit over £50. Catford is the new Peckham - you heard it here first.
    No tube station. Areas that don't have tube or overground struggle to gentrify. It's only when the overground was properly revamped that the eastern bit of London where I grew up really started to gentrify. Before that it was a no go area and my parents couldn't leave fast enough when my dad got his chartership and a good job.
    The major regenerations in London - Kings Cross, Stratford - involved wholesale removal of er... problematic elements. The most aggressive version was at Kings Cross, where a substantial portion of the local population was displaced. The method was taking over and evicting rental properties.

    Some areas were done without this. Canary Wharf was a wasteland. Canada Water was a shithole until the actual Tube station opened. Then all the owners of big Victorian houses started binning their tenants....
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 60,443
    boulay said:

    Have to say, whatever you think of the monarchy, however cynical you are or down on Britain the Trooping of the Colour is bloody magnificent as a spectacle.

    It knocks those big presidential parades such as Red Dquare and the French Bastille parade into a cocked hat - there’s something Victorian about it still so a gentle bit of time travel.

    It’s almost, hopefully not being too wanky, a demonstration of an iron fist in a velvet glove by the military rather than the in your face bombast of other parades where they drive the tanks etc etc.

    Hear hear.

    It also shows the absolute professionalism of the British Army and the extremely high-calibre of its people.

    It's a hugely impressive organisation.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,386
    For a moment I thought Bairstow had dropped that. What a recovery!
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 42,838
    ydoethur said:

    ydoethur said:

    MattW said:

    I was not expecting this.

    Turkey in English is now officially ‘Türkiye’.

    Now, where's the Umlaut on my keyboard?

    How does one pronounce "iye" - is it like the first part of E-I-E-I-O from Old MacDonald?

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/2/un-registers-turkiye-as-new-country-name-for-turkey

    Sounds like they got the bird about the English version.

    You can listen here, btw.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tur-Türkiye_Cumhuriyeti.ogg
    Bit rude to tell them to get stuffed I suppose.
    Would definitely be saucy.
    I do like seeing the informed and sage opinions on PB.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 50,261
    Carnyx said:

    boulay said:

    Have to say, whatever you think of the monarchy, however cynical you are or down on Britain the Trooping of the Colour is bloody magnificent as a spectacle.

    It knocks those big presidential parades such as Red Dquare and the French Bastille parade into a cocked hat - there’s something Victorian about it still so a gentle bit of time travel.

    It’s almost, hopefully not being too wanky, a demonstration of an iron fist in a velvet glove by the military rather than the in your face bombast of other parades where they drive the tanks etc etc.

    OTOH the horses sort of got outdated in September 1939. And it's not as if the MoD had had the sense to keep some old Churchill tanks for parades. They do those things better in Burma.
    A visiting friend, from Iceland, commented that the combination of antique uniforms with modern rifles was an interesting touch.

    Most other countries have parade units that carry parade weapons.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 71,386
    Carnyx said:

    ydoethur said:

    ydoethur said:

    MattW said:

    I was not expecting this.

    Turkey in English is now officially ‘Türkiye’.

    Now, where's the Umlaut on my keyboard?

    How does one pronounce "iye" - is it like the first part of E-I-E-I-O from Old MacDonald?

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/2/un-registers-turkiye-as-new-country-name-for-turkey

    Sounds like they got the bird about the English version.

    You can listen here, btw.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tur-Türkiye_Cumhuriyeti.ogg
    Bit rude to tell them to get stuffed I suppose.
    Would definitely be saucy.
    I do like seeing the informed and sage opinions on PB.
    We all know our onions.
This discussion has been closed.