Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Hillsborough Leppings Lane end
The specific depiction of Liverpool fans in the Leppings Lane end as inhuman beasts begs questions Photo: PA
Matthew Norman By Matthew Norman7:49PM BST 11 Apr 2014
In death, the victims of Hillsborough never walk alone, and so it is that this weekend we honour their memory with delayed kick-offs, impeccably observed minutes of silence and memories of our own.
Yet if the notion of paying respect to the 96 Liverpool fans crushed to death during the abandoned FA Cup semi-final in Sheffield seems obvious, it was not always so. One cannot mark the 25th anniversary merely by empathising with the dead and injured, their families and friends, and those Liverpool FC employees who, as Alan Hansen movingly recalled on our sports pages this week, remain traumatised to this day.
Properly honouring the victims also demands we remember how they were smeared and ask why those smears, for all their transparent absurdity, were so blithely accepted for so long.

Hillsborough was the most predictable disaster imaginable. In 1981, I was there to see Spurs play Wolves in another Cup semi-final when several hundred fans spilled out of the overcrowded Leppings Lane end and were led to safety. Thirty-eight people suffered cracked ribs, broken limbs and so on. The police, who thought that the lack of fatalities was pure luck, suggested safety precautions be taken. None were.
That staggering complacency was born in part of the generic perception, in that Eighties heyday of hooliganism, of football fans as psychotic cattle to be herded into and out of pens, and just not worth the effort and expense of adequately protecting.
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Yet the specific depiction of Liverpool fans in the Leppings Lane end as inhuman beasts begs questions. Would it have been meted out to people from another city, and if it had been would anyone sane have believed it? Had the victims been from Bristol, Brighton, Newcastle or Norwich, would the perception that many fans were drunk, and stormed the ground without tickets – that some stole from the pockets of the dead and dying, and others urinated on officers as they tried to help the stricken – have taken more than two decades categorically to be debunked?
That kind of propaganda is generally reserved for enemy armies. And yet when applied to fellow citizens who had suffered unconscionable horror, it was widely believed. How could a quasi blood libel on an entire city take such hold on the national consciousness? Why was the howling grief of Liverpool dismissed as yet more tiresome whingeing from “self-pity city”? By what reckoning had Liverpudlians come to be viewed as innately less human than the rest of us?
The idea of Liverpool as an enclave of benefits scrounging, petty crime and violence did not emerge from a vacuum. What for a while during the Victorian era was the planet’s richest city had long since been shrunken and impoverished by the callous march of industrial history, and regarded as a leech on the nation’s blood.
In the Eighties, when Mrs Thatcher dismissed Michael Heseltine’s splendid drive for regeneration as a self-serving public relations stunt, the screeching hysteria of Derek Hatton and Militant fed into the image. So did the crazed Yosser Hughes approaching strangers with: “I could do that. Gissa job.” So did Carla Lane’s sitcom Bread which, however fondly, painted the archetypal Scouser as a scally driven only to find ever more creative ways of defrauding the welfare state. Old-school club comics routinely told their audiences that they went to Liverpool once a year on holiday “to visit me bleedin’ hub caps”.
In 1985, the violence of some Liverpool fans contributed to the Heysel Stadium disaster. The thuggery, however nasty, was no worse than that perpetrated on countless other European football nights by followers of other clubs. The consequences were, however, and reinforced the stereotype that permitted Hillsborough’s innocents to be portrayed as callous criminals.
The lessons of Hillsborough go far beyond those learnt long ago about how safely to police a sports stadium. The lesson that perhaps will never be learnt is that at heart other people are not so different from us. Whether they follow other creeds or have joined us from foreign lands, or whether they come from a proud city on the Mersey that looks out towards the New World, they have the same feelings and sensibilities. They are numbed with fear and shock when they see their brethren lying dead and dying. They do not reach into the back pocket of a corpse for a tenner, or empty their bladders over coppers. They weep and grieve inconsolably for friends and neighbours, and for strangers with whom they share a postcode and the love of a football club. They – just like Mr Hansen, Kenny Dalglish and other Liverpool FC legends whose unflinching, unfading commitment to offer solace to the survivors of Hillsborough has been so humbling to those of us looking on from afar – never entirely recover. They are united with us all in this perplexing, painful business of being human.
The greatest tragedy of Hillsborough is that so many needlessly died. The second greatest, and also worth remembering over the days ahead, is that so many of us sacrificed a part of our humanity by failing for so long to recognise theirs.


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11 Apr 2014

goldfinger

Do you by any chance think at the next election they may form a coalition with the Tories

How many seats would they need ? Can't see them getting that many.

Farage done well on "Have I Got News 4u ", considering the amount of piss take he had to put up with, think he came over very well, done a lot for his image as a honest stright talking party leader.

"The Trip to Italy" A very funny relaxing program to watch, with the very talented witty pair of Steve Coogan & Rob Brydon .

Those tossers on AOL/HUFF post , have got the headline that FARAGE IS TORN TO SHREDS on Have I Got News

He wasn't torn to shreds, but he was made to look a buffoon. He laughed along with the panelists, but they were laughing at him and not with him. The object was to make him look like a figure of fun and ridiculous; it was successful. Surely no one could take him seriously after that performance. I detect an underlying steak of nastiness in him. When he was at public school, one of the teachers wrote to the headmaster complaining that he should not be made a prefect as he had fascist views. He used to shout racist abuse at some pupils and had marched through the streets with some supporters singing Nazi songs. The letter is viewable on the internet.

i don't really agree with either of you about NF's imaging on hign4u ..... however, while NF probably didn't do himself any harm, any more than boris does when compering, i don't think it remotely enhanced his image as a serious politician, let alone statesman

What a novel idea.....



Unthinkable? Ministers who know their stuff

If practical experience were made a precondition for ministerial appointment, politicians might regain what they crave most of all – respect


Editorial


The Guardian, Friday 11 April 2014 22.36 BST

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/11/unthinkable-ministers-who-know-their-stuff


The former children's laureate Michael Rosen could be on to something. Mr Rosen's view that the new culture secretary Sajid Javid ought to be knowledgeable about culture has been mocked.

It may seem obvious for condescending insiders to dismiss such suggestions as naive. A lot of people, though, will think Mr Rosen's view is common sense. What is wrong with knowing your field? No one wants a gifted amateur, still less an ungifted one, to conduct hospital operations, to give university lectures, to defend murder suspects or to be placed in charge of a nuclear submarine. Much better, surely, to give such jobs to people who know what they are doing. So why ignore that same rule in government? On that basis, there may even be an entire government-in-waiting on the back benches at Westminster consisting of people who actually know their business. Would a cabinet that fielded, for example, Conservative GP Dr Sarah Wollaston as health secretary, Labour benefits expert Kate Green at work and pensions, Lib Dem barrister Sir Menzies Campbell as justice minister, ex-diplomat Rory Stewart as foreign secretary, former lecturer Barry Sheerman at education, former parachute regiment officer Dan Jarvis at defence or successful entrepreneur Margot James as business secretary be significantly more lightweight than the current team? If practical experience were made a precondition for ministerial appointment, politicians might regain what, with the exception of office, they crave most of all – respect.

The are far too many posts to be filled to find experts on the subject matter amongst the MPs. It is even more difficult when you consider that the person has to be capable of performing as a minister. In a particular ministry there are experts who do most of the work.

Post 39542

That is obvious from the present Pm, cabinet and lower rung ministers. As Manuel might say some of them are idiots as well as corrupt.

If they didn't have department experts to restrain them, God help the UK.


----------

I tend to appreciate individuals who can laugh at or mock themselves.

But, as is said bad publicity is better than no publicity.

It would interesting the panto figurer Cameron on "Have I got News for you".

He would go down like a damp squib.

Bur it seems he is to much of a political coward to have an alive debate with Farrage.

----------
What about volunteering the Hazy One onto the show would be quite interesting.!

Sorry, that would be unfair









to the audience!

In support of hazy

Cameron, don't turn round your party will get you anyway!

There is a new Populus online poll out today which shows Labour’s lead over the Conservatives down to just 1%
Conservatives 34% (no change)
Labour 35% (down 2%)
Lib Dem 11% (up 2%)
UKIP 12% (down 2%)

And what does your poll show?


Even if it was representative, all it does is reinforce the position that there is now no real leader regardless of party.

Dave is a dead duck, and so are the other two headless chickens.

UKIP wont win the election, but it will bugger up the other two/three incumbants nicely!




Why not abandon elections altogether and simply install a €uro Union appointee?

Good idea, or why not borrow Putin for a few years?

For Haze's breakfast reading

"Two new polls tonight (YouGov/Sunday Times is still to come) and both showing six point Labour leads and UKIP increasing their support.

The online ComRes poll in the Independent on Sunday/Sunday Mirror has topline figures of CON 29%(-3), LAB 35%(nc), LDEM 7%(-2), UKIP 20%(+4). The 20% for UKIP is the highest that ComRes have shown to date, the 7 for the Lib Dems the lowest.
Meanwhile Opinium in the Observer have topline figures of CON 30%(-2), LAB 36%(+3),

LDEM 7%(-3), UKIP 18%(+3). Opinium tend to show higher UKIP scores anyway, so this isn’t as record-breaking as the ComRes figure, they’ve shown UKIP at 20 and 21 in the past."

meanwhile, scenario in ukraine continues to get uglier :-(

Yes!!!!!

But look around the rest of the World.

It resembles a boiling pot.

Doreen Lawrence 'Could Be Labour's Candidate For London Mayor in 2016'

I don't think that would be a good idea , can't see her getting tough on black crime when most gun & gang crimes are by young blacks in London. What other expeairance as she got to run London?

Another topic entirely;;;
Am I the only one irritated by a chatting woman (or man, even) that appears without end... looks like someone using airspace to promote their angle on Finance in the US.

I can switch it off, but Windowes is so dumb that this affects the beeps and other warnings, also on other sites everything is silent. Arrgh.

On my PC she's chattering as I type.... very distracting..... please, let's have an Add-off button.... and make it a large one.

Maybe I've found the Solution....
If you hover over the picture, some control icons appear - slide the VOL to zero. Now on the Desktop, return the VOL to max.

Tried it...but that interruption returns next time you visit another page (or Home etc.)... so you have to move the audio-slider for each page visit..... Grr.

( Pausing it is a simpler operation, BTW ).

Alders,cheers mate..............a big thumbs up.

Isnt it funny how you fall out with someone originaly and then find out you have assesed them wrong on your first meeting/contact.

I took alders to be a kid from a screaming rich family, how wrong I was, just goes to show you have to use a lot of discretion when summing somone up on the first contact.

I mean look at cynic what a tosser i thought,.........and now.........what a tosser........wink, only kidding.................but I know you like it.

hangon.........welcome to the OLD FARTS THREAD............more more more.....please.