Name cannot be blank

Warrington Town (@theyellows). Liverpool FC (@lfc). Warrington Wolves. The US office is the best thing on TV. Astronomy. Astrophotography.

[Name cannot be blank @TheVicar02]

@MrDtAFC Christ youre a whiney little bitch aren't you?
Such a small club/fan base mentality.
Why do you care what other fanbase think?

[Fesshole🧻 @fesshole]

Been happily married for over 20 years, good sex life but my wife has always insisted on doing it with the lights off. Recently dawned on me that as we approach 50 and she still looks incredible the lights are off for her benefit.

[Name cannot be blank @TheVicar02]

@WarringtonRLFC Something is seriously wrong with our sport when we lose so many players to injuries.
Warrington isnt the only team... most teams will go through an injury crisis at some point.

[God @TheTweetOfGod]

The fact that the Bible is the book people "swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" on is hilarious.

[Name cannot be blank @TheVicar02]

@donkopleone Absolutely classless you twerp

[Space | ™ @ITKSpace]

Spain face Belgium tomorrow night, and all eyes will be on Liverpool’s newest jewel, Victor Muñoz, who chose football’s biggest and most successful institution over Bayern Munich, proving once again that while Bayern can offer inflated wages, Liverpool offer a stage, a legacy and a badge the world’s brightest young talents do not just wear, but surrender to.

#AD (18+)

[Name cannot be blank @TheVicar02]

@astor_charlie I cant even bare to hear his voice let alone look at his face.
A pathetic person/primeminister

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The Asylum Backlog Hit 87,450. The Terror Watchdog Warned of a Security Risk

87,450 people are in the asylum appeals backlog. That is roughly the population of Carlisle. Imagine every man, woman and child in that city, waiting in a queue that grows by the day, more than double the number of new asylum claims made in the same year.

The numbers published this week should stop a government in its tracks. The backlog is up 71.5 percent in a single year. 70 percent of rejected claimants now appeal. 40 percent of those rejected remain in Britain regardless. Of the more than 200,000 people who have crossed the Channel illegally since 2018, only around 4 percent have ever been removed. The system is not failing to cope with the numbers. The system is the numbers.

The Home Office describes this as progress, pointing to a 72 percent fall in the initial decision backlog since 2023. What it does not say is where those decisions went. They went into the appeals system, where the backlog has more than doubled. Speeding up the front door while leaving the back door unchanged relocates the queue and multiplies it, because every rejected claimant who appeals is entitled to taxpayer-funded accommodation while they wait. The National Audit Office puts the total cost at £4.9 billion for 2024-25, with £2.1 billion spent on hotels alone.

Shabana Mahmood's response is to legislate again, restricting Article 8 family life claims to immediate family, requiring judges to prioritise public safety, and setting a 28-week limit on appeals. That legislation implicitly admits the current framework has allowed dubious family connections to block removal, that judges have not been prioritising public safety, and that appeals have run indefinitely. These are not new problems Mahmood has discovered. They have been documented for years by anyone willing to look, while those who raised them were told they were exaggerating or that no evidence existed.

Then there is Jonathan Hall. Not a commentator. Not an activist. The government's own Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, a King's Counsel appointed specifically to provide neutral expert assessment of the law. This week, in the aftermath of the Belfast stabbing and the riots that followed, Hall said publicly that immigration must be assessed in national security terms, that certain nationalities present elevated risk profiles for serious violence, and that trauma among asylum seekers from conflict zones may compound that risk further. Foreign nationals accounted for one in seven sexual offence convictions in 2024. Hall is not speculating. He is the most senior independent legal authority on terrorism law in the country, and he has said the system as it stands is a security risk.

The government's response to Hall's intervention was silence. He raised it through proper channels. Nobody answered.

So here is where Britain stands. An appeals backlog larger than the population of an entire English city, growing at 71.5 percent a year. A removal rate of 4 percent for illegal arrivals. A National Audit Office report confirming the cost is disproportionately high and driven by delay. A Home Secretary legislating to fix problems that amount to an admission the system has been broken in exactly the ways critics described. And a terror watchdog, appointed by the government itself, warning that the entire framework constitutes a national security risk, met with silence from the department responsible for it.

This is not a system under strain. It is a system working exactly as designed. Faster removals, restricted appeals, leaving the ECHR, every lever has been available for years and none pulled with urgency. The backlog will keep growing. The removal rate will stay near zero. Somewhere in that queue of 87,450, the next Belfast is already waiting its turn.

"In the aftermath of the Belfast stabbing and the riots that followed, Hall said publicly that immigration must be assessed in national security terms"

[Dominic King @DKingTelegraph]

Scotland should win the World Cup just for this alone.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The BBC Has Ruled. Brexit Damaged The Economy. No Further Debate Required.

The BBC's editorial complaints unit has decided that the negative economic impact of Brexit is now a settled fact. Not a contested judgement. Not one side of a live debate. A fact, in the same category as man-made climate change, requiring no balancing view.

The ruling followed a Radio 4 Today programme segment featuring Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, alongside Liam Byrne and Sir John Gieve, both long-standing advocates of closer EU alignment. All three agreed Brexit had damaged growth. The presenter, Katya Adler, did not challenge the premise or introduce a dissenting voice. A complaint followed.

The ECU's response is the revealing part. It acknowledged the segment failed to "acknowledge the alternative case" for pursuing opportunities outside the EU rather than realignment with it. That part of the complaint was upheld. But the central complaint, that three pro-EU voices agreeing with each other on air is not balance, was dismissed. The reasoning given was that this reflected "the consensus among economists" and there was no "significant body of economic opinion" on the other side.

This is worth pausing on. The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist. The institution that is legally required to be impartial has ruled itself the arbiter of which questions are still open and which are closed, and Brexit has just been moved into the closed file.

The economics itself does not support the certainty on display. The headline figure driving much of this narrative, an 8 per cent hit to GDP since 2016, comes from an NBER paper built on a "synthetic control" model that constructs a hypothetical non-Brexit Britain from a basket of comparator countries. The largest weighting in that basket, over 60 per cent, is the United States, a country currently riding an AI investment boom and a separate fiscal stimulus. The model also weights Estonia and Greece more heavily than France or Germany. On a straightforward per capita basis against France and Germany, the actual comparators, Britain's performance since 2016 sits roughly in line with both. An 8 per cent gap simply isn't visible. This is a model producing a number that then gets reported as "the consensus," which the BBC then cites as the reason no alternative view is required.

That loop, model produces number, number becomes consensus, consensus becomes fact, fact requires no balance, is the mechanism. It does not require a conspiracy. It requires an institution that has decided which conclusions are respectable and which are not, and which then treats its own prior decision as evidence.

The same posture has been on display all week. A government department can decide its diversity targets are lawful without seeking legal advice to check. A police force can decide a book about dismantling "inner white supremacy" is leadership training. A broadcaster can decide an economic question is closed and that deciding so does not breach its own impartiality rules. In each case, the institution marks its own homework, and the mark is always a pass.

None of this requires Brexit to have been a triumph. Britain's economy has genuine problems, most of them unrelated to single market membership. But a state broadcaster, funded by compulsory licence fee under threat of prosecution, has now formally placed one of the most consequential political decisions in modern British history beyond the reach of its own impartiality obligations. Reform's Lee Anderson called it being "blinkered by groupthink." The more precise description is an institution that has stopped being able to tell the difference between its own assumptions and the facts.

"The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist."

[Name cannot be blank @TheVicar02]

@WilsonCoxLFC If psg have offered him to liverpool, surely it puts us in a better negotiating position

[Name cannot be blank @TheVicar02]

@WilsonCoxLFC Even a broke clock is right twice a day...
You post that much, youre bound to get something right.

[Name cannot be blank @TheVicar02]

@WilsonCoxLFC @David_Ornstein Good guess mate

[Name cannot be blank @TheVicar02]

@Hugosakkk @JacobsBen Please tell me why, or how, the manager has set us back 4-5 years...
Why is Hughes deluded?
What about Edwards makes you say his ego is the problem?
Specifics please...
Or are you just another over stimulated man/child with no patience, no evidence and no thoughts of your own?

[TheChefTrevor @TheChefTrevor]

@RpsAgainstTrump @annofbigbeach You were warned dummy! You helped get him elected anyways!

[Name cannot be blank @TheVicar02]

@RadioWarrington
Hi Steve, is the year 1990?

From your father in law

[Name cannot be blank @TheVicar02]

@astor_charlie @paulcox1972

[Name cannot be blank @TheVicar02]

@WarringtonRLFC Comon the wire

[Aston Villa Updates @avfcbreaking]

There was a time when a European final belonged to the supporters who dragged their club there.

Not anymore.

When Aston Villa were handed roughly 11,000 tickets for a Europa League final in a 70,000-plus stadium, the number itself told the story. UEFA can package the event however it likes — “festival of football”, “European showpiece”, “global celebration” — but the modern European final is no longer built around supporters. It is built around clients.

The supporters fund the journey. The corporates inherit the destination.

Villa fans will have spent thousands following the club across Europe. Flights, hotels, time off work, loyalty schemes built over years. Yet when the final arrives, huge sections of the stadium are reserved for sponsors, hospitality guests, executives, delegates and “neutral” allocations that often end up on resale sites within hours.

And supporters are expected to accept it.

UEFA’s defence is familiar. Sponsors fund competitions. Broadcasters need space. Hospitality drives revenue. All true. But football crossed a line when the event surrounding the final became more important than the supporters inside it.

The optics are awful because fans can see it themselves.

A finalist gets 11,000 tickets while corporate packages costing thousands remain available. Genuine supporters scramble through ballots with lottery-like odds, while neutral areas fill with tourists taking photos during the warm-up.

And UEFA wonders why resentment grows.

Supporters are constantly called “the lifeblood of the game” until ticket allocations are discussed. Then they become an inconvenience to work around premium inventory.

Football did not become Europe’s dominant sport because sponsors created atmosphere. The noise, colour and emotion UEFA sells globally every season is generated by match-going supporters — the same people increasingly pushed aside at the biggest games.

The “neutral fan” concept is perhaps the biggest fiction of all. In theory it promotes access. In reality it fuels resale markets, inflated prices and thousands travelling ticketless out of desperation.

UEFA could change it tomorrow. Finalists could receive 70 per cent of the stadium combined. Corporate sections could shrink. Hospitality would still exist.

But that would mean sacrificing revenue.

And modern football has shown repeatedly which side wins that argument.
#AVFC #scfreiburg