5.88t 🇺🇦

Indeed. One of the consequences is that MPs and journalists who still consider themselves centre-right now discuss unilaterally revoking settlement rights and deporting people on a mass scale as if this a normal policy option like tax cuts or bus spending.

Here’s Danny, telling us that Reform UK are planning a police state.

As you said in your reasonable thread - ) Football hooliganism is *never* just about football.
It is about all that is going on relevant to the team(s) involved and in this case it does very much include, as part of a broad mix, anti semitism. But the safety issues should prevail and they have.

That is a good thread and,might I suggest, I would have read and probably liked if I hadn’t come across your post that started this thread.

My meaning is in the text not in the gaps between. You assume what you like, but I have been careful not to name groups because I know them to be diverse. Maccabi aren’t all virulent hooligans and anti Maccabi certainly are not all Muslims, we see that most weeks at the pro Palestine marches.

You started by talking about people arguing for the rights of football hooligans, as if that is the entire issue when Maccabi visit. Patent bollox , frankly. It does involve hooligans but this situation has far more layers than bloody Legia Warsaw.

Your words not mine. The police can manage 2 or 3 thousand fans if it is just that & set of home fans. If it is wider than that they may struggle. That non football local element in this case will be pro Palestine & pro Hamas. They’ll be all sorts & some will of course be Muslim but by no means all.

Look I’m done. We can’t police it so ban them. Might be the right decision and they aren’t coming even if the ban is lifted, which is a decision made for the safety of a majority of their own travelling fan base, whilst acknowledging they have a problem with minority elements within it.

Yeah fine, he’s our problem

Quite circular this little chat. High risk match but mainly because of non football politics. Maccabi are not special, they are just from Israel. The ban may well be fair enough but says as much about our own violent non football thugs as it does about the Maccabi travelling support.

Yes, Liverpool. And many. Trouble with this particular situation is that it isn’t about football hooligans seeking each other out but about the identity of one set of fans. Maybe they should be banned, we can’t police the locals from either whack camp.

I know it isn’t unique in those terms. It is unique or extremely rare at least to ban a supporter group because of trouble that the local
Police in the city in question didn’t report as the direct fault of those away supporters. Not that some of them didn’t get very involved.

I shall as we are both stuck.

Which may be the right decision even if it does stink of all sorts of other things. But, it wasn’t a decision made because Maccabi fans are any different from other fans apart from them being Israeli.

Your first post in this thread pretty much does. Almost all groups of travelling fans contain a contingent of Ultras. That can and usually is policed. It becomes a problem when the home team is not the only likely source of confrontation. That’s the issue and we have said we won’t deal with it.

People are just realising that we had a better grip on immigration within the EU They gave us bar staff and builders - we gave them sunburnt pensioners and seaside property booms. It was win-win.

So when Farage rails against the latest migration figures, he's railing against a monster of his own making. The EU didn't impose uncontrolled immigration on us; it offered a framework that reflected geography, economics and reality”

ie - control.

www.thelondoneconomic.com/opinion/peop...

The evidence is not there to back a claim that Maccabi are uniquely violent. The fact that they are Israeli means that the Police decided they can’t police the local area. That’s our problem.

The police may have made the right decision in that they can’t Police the locals. They regularly police 2-3 thousand travelling football fans that very often include a few 100 ultras. Maccabi are no different and you have yet to even attempt to prove otherwise.

Ok, so what are you reading because the Amsterdam police report is not sufficient for your claims.

Ok, but you are insisting that Maccabi are uniquely violent troublemakers. Using the normal tools available to me like search engines and AI I have yet to find any record that they have a unique history of violence etc. if anything it’s the English travelling support of the 70s/80s that have.

I have read all I can find on what happened in Amsterdam. I did not say that some Maccabi fans are not a proper pain in the arse, I did say that portraying them as particularly violent does not bear scrutiny. They do need extra policing currently, for obvious non football reasons.

Evidence please.

I’ve not seen evidence, other than the Amsterdam trouble that the Dutch police did not pin on them specifically, that they are any worse than any other bunch of Ultras.

There is no obvious reason to single out Maccabi fans as being particularly violent relative to many other visiting fans. On the other hand it might be said that the area they are visiting holds a more particular desire to attack them than they might other visiting fans, no?

Agree, most didn’t know what they were voting for, there was no plan, but perhaps more importantly, most didn’t know what they were voting to leave.

Dennis is on point again in one of his eloquent rants. He points to the gay rights movements advocating for conversion therapy 2.0.
It's true.
The biggest gay rights organisation in my country told a man who sought help for his unease about his homosexuality to go in transition.

Not every single leaver….

It was pretty shit to be honest. Didn’t matter to me as a kid at the time. Maybe if we’d had the single market by 1972 things would have been better. So let’s go back but magic up the SM, CU and the channel tunnel so things would be a lot better this time.

The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark For nearly 250 years, America promoted freedom and equality abroad, even when it failed to live up to those ideals itself. Not anymore.

"We always think about America’s postwar role in Europe as an act of great generosity, the defense of allies from Soviet aggression. But by putting democracy at the center of our international identity, we also helped strengthen our own political system"
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

Today, I'm signing legislation to safeguard our elections and the voice of every voter.

It's now illegal to use contests or payments to get people to register to vote.

And in the 2026 election, voters have the chance to repeal our state's ban on the public financing of elections.