Gerald O'Reilly @OreillyGerald

“The fasten seat belts sign is on”. This is a message I received early this morning from one of the UK’s most experienced, savvy and respected financial traders. Someone I have come to know and trust for the last 25 years. 10-year bond yields are now almost 4.5pc - up some 50 basis points over the last month. 30-year yields this morning went above 6pc - a 28-year high. Yet the UK’s political and media class continues to focus on party posturing and folksy rhetoric, ignoring the slow-motion disaster that has been happening on the UK’s sovereign bond markets for at least the last 18 months - a disaster that will inevitably, unless we drastically change course, turn into a fully blown market meltdown. At that point, the UK government won’t be able to borrow enough money to finance our already spiralling debt interest bill. Britain’s financial management will be taken over by overseas technocrats - that will be the condition of additional borrowing, to maintain the basic functions of the state, as happened in Greece and Italy back in the early 2010s and here in Britain 50 years ago this year (when we were forced in 1976 to apply to the IMF for a bailout). The austerity then imposed on Britain would make 2010-2019 feel like a picnic - far, far worse than it would be if we took serious action now to control our public finances. Lower-income households would suffer most - and there would be serious damage done to the UK’s already rapidly-fraying social fabric …. I have been warning about these looking fiscal dangers publicly, in my newspaper columns and elsewhere, since at least early 2024. Doing so hasn’t been easy or fun. I have been dismissed and derided by numerous economists, “economists”, officials and policymakers - as well as lots of journalists. I absolutely don’t want a disastrous 1976-style outcome - which is why I’ve taken the blows and issued the warnings. The state is too big. Public spending is out of control. Our fiscal rules are a convenient nonsense - designed to kick the can of financial reality into the future. We need to get real … and take bold action to tame the growth of spending, push back a now totally over-bearing state and snap the British economy out of today’s high-tax-high-borrowing-low-growth doom loop - the result of myopic, counter-productive policy-making by successive governments for the last decade and more … Other prominent economists who agree with me - ie who are financially-literate, can read a yield curve, have a passing interest in economic history and who understand the dangers of some 80pc of UK government borrowing going on debt interest as it currently is - need to chuck “career risk” in the bin, and start saying publicly what so many of them have, for quite a while now, only had the bottle to say to me in private … Remember: “The fasten seat belts sign is on”

🇺🇸@SecretaryWright delivered the U.S. National Statement at the @iaeaorg conference — delivering @POTUS’ message of unleashing American nuclear energy, fueled by partnership and peace.

BINGO

Vivid.🇮🇱 @VividProwess

3 weeks ago

Bill Clinton: “The Palestinians were offered a state. They refused. A state wasn't their goal. Killing Jews was." This must be shared every single day.

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Att jaga iväg pengarna och duktiga människor från Sverige, det kommer inte att vara någon framgångsmodell, säger Fredrik Lundberg efn.se/fredrik-lundbe…

Jag har sagt det förut men låt mig förklara det igen. Muslimer utgör idag 10-11 procent av Sveriges befolkning. Det är en stor minoritet. De är givetvis inte en monolit – jag menar inte att de är likadana men det är en stor minoritet. Tittar du på Sverige i det yngre åldersspannet 0-30 år utgör muslimer 26.7 procent av befolkningen. Över en fjärdedel. Det är Sveriges framtid. Vill du ha den rösten måste du appellera till antisemitismen.  Vinner vänstern valet – och släpper in upp emot en miljon till de närmsta fyra åren – kommer de borgerliga partierna aldrig kunna vinna ett val igen. Om de inte på något sätt börjar övertrumfa vänstern i judehat såklart. Jag sa redan efter eu-valet 2024 att vänstern nu har fattat att antisemitismen är ett utmärkt sätt att organisera sin politik på. För Dig som har glömt det citerade OMNI efter valet Nooshis odödliga ord: ”Gazafrågan bidrog till vår valsuccé” Se hela avsnittet på YouTube. Länk i kommentarerna!

Introducing our new 17 👕

@jonnorris12 all the rage in sweden still ! 😀

Barrack is failing to de-escalate Turkish-Israeli relations because the obstacles to de-escalation are rooted in many different factors, and he will have a difficult time if he genuinely wants to address them. Let’s analyze the problems from scratch. 1. Political Leaders Increasingly Receive Distorted Information The presidents in both countries are strong leaders with long governing experience. However, like everyone else, they rely on reports, documents, briefings, assessments and analyses provided to them by different state mechanisms. In both countries, reports coming from lower and mid-level bureaucracy do not necessarily reach the upper level directly. They are frequently “revised” by gatekeepers. As information travels upward, reports can become marginalized, acquire a sharper tone, become more politically convenient, and move further away from the reality on the ground to satisfy the leaders. Demagogic vocabulary gradually replaces proper analysis. Instead of analyzing both countries, evaluating their strategic interests, conducting deep analyses, identifying possible areas of cooperation, identifying genuine threats and distinguishing between capabilities and intentions, analyses become filled with accusations. Politicians are free to use such discourse among the public. They also have every right to use foreign policy as an instrument of domestic politics, practically every government does this to some extent. However, behind the curtains, foreign policy cannot be conducted effectively through campaign slogans. When political rhetoric contaminates internal analysis, decision-makers lose the distinction between what is useful to say publicly and what is necessary to know privately. The problem, therefore, is not simply misinformation. It is institutionalized confirmation bias. If every level of bureaucracy gradually learns which conclusions are politically desirable, decision-makers may eventually receive increasingly sophisticated versions of what they already believe. Information that challenges the dominant narrative becomes filtered out. In such an environment, leaders may still receive enormous amounts of information while becoming less informed about the actual society they are dealing with. 2. Expertise Has Increasingly Been Replaced by Populist Narratives In Israel, although there are excellent experts on Turkey, many have been sidelined for some years, while the public discussion has increasingly been hijacked by populist “experts” who adore talking big, making dramatic predictions and producing sensational arguments rather than describing realities. “Turkey is becoming the next Iran” is a perfect example, it is a powerful television sentence and also so a very poor analytical framework. The problem is not that Israel lacks expertise; the problem is which expertise reaches the public, which expertise reaches politicians, which voices are rewarded by television programs, and which interpretations ultimately become dominant. Many of the “experts” who shape public discourse do not fully understand the sociological complexity of contemporary Turkey. Their perspectives are often shaped by overwhelmingly metropolitan environments, particularly Istanbul and İzmir and by relatively urban and elite social circles. Many have spent little significant time in smaller Turkish cities or rural areas and may therefore have limited exposure to the different social and political segments of the Turkish electorate. There is a genuine selection-effect problem here. If most information about Turkey is filtered through metropolitan, secular, elite, security-oriented or expatriate perspectives, Israeli decision-makers may receive a detailed picture of one Turkey while remaining poorly informed about provincial Turkey, nationalist voters, conservative voters, Kurdish-majority regions, Black Sea politics, Central Anatolia, different generations of AKP voters, opposition constituencies, and the complex ideological combinations that characterize Turkish society. The issue, therefore, is not ethnicity. It is epistemic closure. The Kurdish Issue The second problem is that Israeli analysis is too heavily based on the “Kurdish issue against the Palestinian issue” argument. Since the Gaza flotilla incident, Israeli media and academia have increasingly pushed the Kurdish issue forward. Much of the discussion implicitly presents Kurdish politics through the prism of Israel's relationship with the Palestinians: if Turkey criticizes Israel over Palestinians, Israel should retaliate by emphasizing Kurdish issues. But the majority of the time, some of these ideas become so radical that ordinary Israelis may be left believing that all Kurds in the world love Israel, support Israel and are ready to rebel against the countries in which they currently live. This is simply not a serious understanding of Kurdish politics. Kurdish populations are fragmented by state borders, class, religion, political ideology, tribal networks, party affiliation, linguistic differences, historical experiences, and competing nationalist projects. The “experts expectations” on Kurds of Syria and Iran failed dramatically and caused problems for Israeli politics in the region due to reports based on wishful thinking. Moreover, some of the strongest anti-Israeli positions in Turkey, Iraq and Iran can probably be found in Kurdish-majority cities. Yet Israeli “experts” still occasionally push the fantasy of “Kurdish boots on the ground.” Relying on nationalist discourses of ethnic groups for information about realities on the ground has never worked particularly well for Israel. No matter how many times this approach fails highly ideological arguments continue to receive attention and continue poisoning Israel's near-abroad policy. Same applies to Turkey; majority of the Israeli Arabs are perfectly integrated to Israeli society and not all Gazans are Hamas supporters, but on the contrary against Hamas and protest from time to time. There is a difference between recognizing that Kurdish actors may occasionally have overlapping tactical interests with Israel and imagining a homogeneous transnational Kurdish bloc permanently aligned with Israel. Countering the Palestinian centered discourse with Kurdish centered discourse does not work at all but many times backfire. Israel's Image of Turkish Society Turkish society is not really known by either the Israeli government or the Israeli public. After years of this type of discourse in Israeli media by supposed “Turkey experts”, Israelis increasingly tend to see the majority of Turks as people culturally or politically resembling Iran, Syria, Afghanistan or somewhere between. That is an astonishing misunderstanding of Turkey's sociology. The perception of a “Turk” among Israelis over approximately 35 years old is often relatively normal because Turkey used to be an extremely popular holiday destination. Huge numbers of Israelis visited Turkey. Human familiarity creates cognitive friction against demonization. Younger Israelis increasingly lack that experience. Their perception of Turks is therefore much more likely to be constructed through media, war, social media, Erdoğan speeches, Gaza, Syria, and hostile political discourse. Turkey contains deeply conservative constituencies, secular constituencies, ultranationalists, Kurdish nationalists, Turkish nationalists, Islamists, social democrats, liberals, Alevis, religious Sunnis, urban professionals, provincial entrepreneurs, young apolitical voters, old ideological voters, and numerous groups that cannot be placed neatly on a Western left-right spectrum. Reducing all of that to “Islamist Turkey” and “the next Iran” is analytically useless. Turkey Does Exactly the Same Thing to Israel The other side of the coin is almost identical. The Turkish public has little to no knowledge about the different segments of the Israeli political spectrum and tends to see all Jews as religious Zionists or Haredim. The categories collapse into each other with huge overgeneralization follows as: Israeli → Jew → Zionist → religious Zionist → Netanyahu supporter. Many Turks have no idea about the political stance of Gaza Envelope kibbutzniks, many of whom were historically very cordial toward Gazans and strongly supportive of a two-state solution. Some maintained personal friendships with Gazans for many years and helped them in every possible sense (Yet these communities were nevertheless attacked on 7 October, which is another reason that Turkish analysts fail to grab the radical shift in Israeli politics center and leftist voting patterns). The same is true on the Turkish side. The Turkish public has almost no understanding of everyday Israeli life. Nearly none of the Turks have no idea how Israeli Arabs live, despite Arab citizens constituting roughly one fifth of Israel's population. They know almost nothing about Israeli Bedouins, Circassians, Druze, or the internal differences among these communities. Even among Turks with a clearly anti-Israeli stance, Israeli policies are frequently reduced purely to Gaza. Consequently, they miss much of what is happening in the West Bank and Lebanon and also avoid examining Egypt's part in creating or maintaining some of the conditions surrounding Gaza today. That fact is profoundly difficult for much of Turkish discourse to process because it does not fit the simplistic binary categories through which Israeli society is understood. Israeli society is every bit as complicated as Turkish society. Israel contains secular liberals, traditionalists, Haredim, religious Zionists, Mizrahim, Ashkenazim, Russian-speaking communities, Palestinian/Arab citizens, Druze, Bedouins, Circassians, kibbutz movements, development towns, settlers, metropolitan elites, peripheral communities, and radically different political cultures. Yet in Turkey, all of this is overgeneralized. Anybody who attempts to analyze Israel, explain these different groups, discuss the reasons behind Israeli grand strategies, or simply describe why Israel behaves as it does is often expected to begin by cursing Israel or at least to curse Israel somewhere in the argument, otherwise, that individual is immediately labeled suspicious. Cursing, swearing, denunciation, and demagogy are expected when evaluating Israel. Consequently, explaining Israel becomes confused with defending Israel. This destroys analytical depth. It becomes difficult to ask –why- Israel behaves in a particular way because asking the question itself is interpreted as legitimizing the behavior. The result is a mirror-image epistemic problem:: Israelis increasingly understand Turkey through politically useful caricatures, while Turks increasingly understand Israel through politically useful caricatures. Both societies therefore become experts on imaginary versions of each other. 3. The “Hotline” Does Not Really Work Because Human Connection is Lost, NGOs and Civil Society Are Completely Disconnected The “hotline” does not work effectively between the two countries because, to make a hotline work, both sides need actually to want it to work. If there is no meaningful connection between two countries, no technical instrument can magically produce political trust. Only “very technically” there is a contact, started in Azerbaijan last year to establish unwanted military incidents and misunderstandings in Syria but it seems not to work at all. Today there is almost no regular contact between the two countries' NGOs, experts, government officials, opposition figures, military communities, and civil society groups. Leaving all those aside, there is increasingly little meaningful contact even between ordinary people. NGOs are almost completely disconnected, as are civil-society forums and dialogue mechanisms. De-escalation rarely begins with presidents suddenly waking up and deciding to love each other. It often begins below that level, someone knows someone, a businessman calls another businessman, an academic speaks to another academic, a retired diplomat communicates with a former colleague, a journalist tests an idea, an NGO arranges a meeting, a backchannel develops then an unofficial proposal moves upward. Eventually, political leadership has options. Today there is almost nothing comparable between Israel and Turkey from which de-escalation can begin at the most basic level. The ties have been cut in practically every aspect.Civil society is not the fundamental cause of the geopolitical conflict, however. This distinction matters analytically. The collapse of civil society should be understood primarily as an amplifier and the destruction of a safety mechanism, rather than the original source of the conflict. When political relations deteriorate between countries with dense societal relationships, thousands of small connections continue pulling the countries back toward normality. When those connections disappear, there is nothing underneath the governments to absorb the shock. 5. Public Diplomacy Is Fueling the Hostility Rather Than Repairing It Public diplomacy is also working not to repair the wounds created by tense relations between the two countries, but increasingly to fuel them. The IDF's Turkish-language public diplomacy (@TurkishIDF) is horrible. I have analyzed in detail how low-quality much of it is and how frequently it backfires, causing even ordinary and relatively neutral Turks to become seriously irritated because of the quality of the Turkish speaker person of the account and horribly incorrect cultural details. IDF Turkish spokesperson, Arye Sharuz Shalicar, is probably an important factor that detoriates relations with his background and lack of professionalism. In IDF Turkish account videos, Arabic tunes are used as background music for material supposedly aimed at Turks, Turkish coffee is presented in plastic cups, cultural references are badly chosen, language is ear-bleeding. These details communicate something unintentionally: “We do not really know who you are.” That is disastrous public diplomacy. On the contrary IDF Arabic is legendary in sense of public diplomacy and @captainella1 as well as @avichayadraee are realy textbook PR examples. TRT Hebrew is no better. Some of the “news” they have provided has been so strange and has contained completely incorrect information. When you try to correct them, they simply block you. Their producers are in fact the only people who have ever blocked me on X. Public diplomacy may no longer genuinely be intended to persuade the other society, it increasingly functions as domestic-performance diplomacy. Institutions produce foreign-language material because they are institutionally expected to produce it, while the actual ideological audience remains at home. The IDF's Turkish-language communication may therefore satisfy Israeli institutional assumptions about Turkey without persuading Turks. TRT Hebrew may satisfy Turkish assumptions about Israel without persuading Israelis. Once that happens, public diplomacy becomes part of the echo chamber rather than an instrument for escaping it, does not allow communication across societies. 6. The Weakness of American Diplomacy Is Another Problem The incompetence of US diplomats is another factor. Tom Barrack is a figure with enormous authority given to him by Trump but I do not see him as capable of lowering this type of escalation. He is simply not a “tough guy” in the Trump style, nor is he a Kissinger-type strategic diplomat capable of maintaining several contradictory relationships in careful balance. After Israel's 18 August 2026 strike on Abu al-Duhur airbase, he publicly criticized the attack as an unnecessary escalation and stated that Washington was working on a Turkey-Israel-Syria deconfliction mechanism but nobody is happy anymore about only words and condemnations. Therefore, the larger analytical question is not: Is Tom Barrack personally a good diplomat?Or does Washington possess sufficient leverage, credibility, institutional capacity, and political willingness to impose or incentivize meaningful deconfliction among Israel, Turkey and Syria? The United States is one of the very few actors capable of talking seriously to both Ankara and Jerusalem. If Washington cannot produce a functioning mechanism, there is presently no obvious alternative external power capable of doing so. 7. The Structural Problem: Gaza Has Societalized the Conflict, While Syria Has Securitized It The factors above are important, but none of them by itself explains the current crisis. NGOs, media, experts, bad public diplomacy, stereotypes and political rhetoric are mostly amplifiers. The structural problem is deeper as Gaza made the relations normatively loaded. A possible future cooperation now generates a normative question: After Gaza, why are you cooperating with Israel? The same question is asked by Israelis, after the massacre of 7 October, why to trust Turkey? That dramatically increases the domestic political cost of rapprochement. Consequently, Gaza has not merely produced hostility but it has societalized foreign policy. Political leaders are no longer simply producing anti-Israeli public opinion from above, public opinion itself increasingly constrains what leaders can do from below. At the same time, Syria is transforming Turkish-Israeli rivalry from an ideological confrontation into a genuine interstate security problem. Turkey increasingly regards post-Assad Syria as a strategic environment in which it has legitimate military, political, security, economic, and historical interests. Ankara believes that instability in Syria directly affects Turkish security through refugees, Kurdish armed groups, jihadist organizations, border security, trade, and regional power competition. Israel increasingly sees Turkish influence in Syria through a different lens. From the Israeli perspective, Turkish military infrastructure, aircraft, drones, air-defense systems, or permanent bases in Syria could eventually restrict Israeli freedom of military action and create a powerful military presence close to Israel's operational environment. This is a textbook security dilemma. Both governments can therefore interpret their own behavior as defensive while interpreting the other's behavior as offensive. That is much more dangerous than governments insulting one another. 8. Regional Alignments Are Making the Problem Larger Than Gaza The relations will probably not significantly improve as long as Gaza remains unresolved or at least stabilized because Turkey has established a very thick red line and does not appear likely to become flexible in the near future. At the same time, the confrontation increasingly extends beyond Gaza. Turkey is building or strengthening a network of regional relationships that it regards as balancing competing regional structures, while Israel's partnerships and strategic relations involving the UAE, Greece, Cyprus, and increasingly Somaliland are viewed from Ankara through a competitive geopolitical lens, countered by Mecca Agreement, bilateral alliance with Somalia and strengtehning presence in Balkans as well as Iraq.. From Turkey's perspective, these alignments can look like a network designed partly to constrain Turkish influence. From Israel's perspective, Turkish regional activism can look like an effort to construct an alternative regional bloc that limits Israeli freedom of maneuver. Thus, Gaza may provide the emotional center of the confrontation, while Syria, the Eastern Mediterranean and Horn of Africa provide its geopolitical architecture. This combination is particularly dangerous because conflicts based purely on material interests can often be bargained over. Conflicts based purely on identity can sometimes be symbolically managed, but when identity conflict and security competition reinforce one another, compromise becomes much more difficult. 9. What Happens If Israel Diretly Attacks Turkish Armed Forces? The most dangerous scenario is therefore not another speech, diplomatic insult, television argument, or social-media campaign but military casualties. If the present escalation leads to the deaths of Turkish soldiers such an incident could cause massive anger throughout Turkish society, regardless of whether people are pro-government or anti-government. A CHP voter, an AKP voter, a nationalist, a secularist, a conservative, or someone who strongly dislikes Erdoğan can still react almost identically to images of Turkish soldiers killed by Israel. This is precisely where the current level of societal hostility matters. Turkey and Israel themselves repaired relations after the Mavi Marmara crisis and restored full diplomatic relations again in 2022, but Turkish military fatalities caused by Israeli action could transform the rivalry from a primarily political and strategic confrontation into a direct interstate security conflict, dramatically increasing the domestic cost of any future normalization. Civilian casualties in Mavi Marmara were ignored by parts of the Turkish society, but any Turkish soldier’s casualty will massively cause a united public anger from all parts of Turkish society towards Israel. There is probably an awareness of this risk on the Israeli side as well. The fact that Abu al-Duhur was struck at around 03:00, when the likelihood of Turkish personnel being present may have been lower (if there were any, of course), could indicate an attempt to avoid Turkish casualties, although the timing alone is obviously not enough to establish such an intention. What matters is that both sides now appear to understand that there is a line which, once crossed, would make the political management of the crisis way more difficult. 10. What next? The real danger is therefore not that Turkey and Israel dislike each other. States can dislike each other for decades and still manage their relations. The danger is that the two countries are increasingly operating in the same military and geopolitical space while having fewer and fewer channels capable of preventing a crisis from getting out of control. De-escalation is still possible but normalization is something else. A military hotline can prevent an aircraft from being shot down but it cannot repair public opinion, rebuild civil-society ties, correct years of bad analysis or create trust between two societies that increasingly see each other through caricatures. For that reason, if American diplomacy really wants a stable Syria, the first objective should probably not even be “normalization.” between Israel and Turkey. That is too ambitious under the present conditions. The immediate objective should be much more basic as preventing direct military confrontation, rebuilding professional communication, bringing serious expertise back into decision-making and creating some human contact below the level of governments. Otherwise, Turkey and Israel may eventually discover that the most dangerous part of their rivalry was not any deliberate decision to confront one another, but the gradual disappearance of everything that once prevented them from doing so.

Our Spurs family 🤍 A number of club legends attended a special lunch with our men's first team at Hotspur Way this afternoon.

In Buddhism we understand that every action comes with a consequence. Due to my decision to stand up for my Jewish friends I am losing a few people from my life. Today I parted company with Tony Pontius who has run my record label BGP for a number of years. I wanted to release 'We Will Dance Again' but he was unequivocal and said 'I want nothing to do with this song' and I responded 'ok, we are done'. When someone is gutless it really does not hurt to say goodbye. My faith in humanity will not diminish and the truth will always win. I will release it!

Tips till islamisten Hanna: Flytta till valfritt sharialand så kan du njuta av att gå heltäckt i tyg och mäns totala dominans 24/7.

Massivt polispådrag idag i Stockholm. Nej, det pågår inget G7-toppmöte. Det är bara vår judiska skola som har skolavslutning. Svenska judars vardag 2026.

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My love letter to @HKane World Cup 2026: Is Harry Kane England's GREATEST ever striker? | FIRST E... youtu.be/Fsdl0kbKiDU?si… via @YouTube

Ayoub Khan MP will, of course, be getting straight on to West Midlands Police and Birmingham City Council to demand PSG fans be banned if they play Aston Villa in the Champions League next season.

Arsenal have set the record for the lowest possession percentage for a team playing in a Champions League final (since records began in 2003-04). The previous lowest record was also Arsenal, set in the 2006 Champions League final, which they played 72 minutes with 10 men.

I grew up in Golders Green in the 50s and early 60s. It was a perfect place to be happily and unproblematically Jewish and British. Now we need leaders of British Muslim communities to be vocal in their abhorrence at these violent acts - verbal as well as physical

This week was tough. I had dinner with my intelligent friends from European countries, people who have spent half their lives working within the United Nations. We were having a good time until the conversation turned to Donald Trump and Iran. Everyone, without exception, spoke badly of Trump: that he causes problems for everyone, that war is terrible, that it is illegal, and so on. I stayed silent. When everyone finally became quiet, I asked only one question: who is actually going to collect and remove those more than 400 kilograms of uranium? My French friend said: Trump is no better than the regime. On top of that, he has started an illegal war, and many countries have nuclear power plants why shouldn’t Iran have them too? I exploded inside, but I remained silent at first. When I finally broke my silence, I said: was it illegal when the United States helped the French during the Second World War? Was it unnecessary? Then silence returned. I kept thinking about how to express everything happening inside me; how to explain the regime to a European-someone surrounded by left-wing ideology, enclosed within indirect forms of censorship, and always ready to say that war is terrible, yet surprised when I say many Iranians wanted it. How do you explain to people who live in safety that some nations sometimes see outside pressure as the only remaining path when every internal path has been closed? How do you explain that they do not even speak in geopolitical terms, but judge only from a position of moral comfort, while others are speaking about survival? Europeans who, despite democracy and free internet, still do not know what happened in Iran on January 8–9. Europeans who believe every conflict can be understood through the same moral template. Europeans who condemn all violence in theory, but have never had to live under a Islamic system where violence is part of everyday life. And I sat there with the feeling that the distance between our realities was greater than the table around which we were sitting…

Reza Pahlavi @PahlaviReza

5 months ago

Whether or not Europe stands with us, whether or not your journalists do their jobs, whether or not your politicians demonstrate the courage to act, I will fight for my people and my country.

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As someone on Spirit of Shankly pointed out, this is just the original concept for the Premier League being delivered. The vision was to move football up a couple of social classes, which to me means price out the less wealthy and encourage a "better" class of clientele with more disposable income. They focused only on the vast riches the PL would bring and they were right. However that model only works long term with regeneration of new fans. It works if you are never gonna get relegated because the group of die hards whose loyalty and love for the club could not be quantified on a balance sheet, have already left and they are now doing something else with their match days. Most of them likely realise that it's quite useful getting the time back and similar to when you break up with an ex, there is rarely any going back. Without the diehards, who indoctrinated the next generation into being obsessed with the team, where does the next generation of fans come from? Good luck convincing a young person to spend what little they have left after paying their rent and other increasing costs, to allocate a big chunk of what's left for an overpriced season ticket. Not happening, football is not high on the importance scale when you can watch every game on telly. As for the "better" clientele they attracted, they will abandon ship as quickly as they arrived come any form of hard times. What the clubs are doing right now with ticket price rises is simply ensuring that they have no loyal die hard fanbase left in 10-15 years. These changes will be forever. No more capacity crowds for just playing in the PL, owners will be forced to try and actually win stuff. If they don't, goodbye fans. If they do, those fans will demand they do it again. I'm from an era that did not place expectation on clubs, we just handed over our money and went to football, because that is the way it was. I'm still clinging on but with next year being my 50th watching West Ham and having been banned this season for breaching health and safety, I'm pretty sure it will be my last one. Unless the owners who fucked my club up completely, finally get the message and fuck off back to their mansions. The people who own clubs know the square root of fuck all about the generations of fans who helped build that club to be the thing it was before they demolished everything they inherited. They do not comprehend love or loyalty because in their world, those things are cash transactions. Football as we knew it is on life support, but the owners won't realise until one day they look around that vast stadium and see a handful of fans watching the latest pile of average they decided to serve up. #BSOUT

It’s properly shit right now isn’t it 😂 but please don’t let it get to you. A few weeks back after Forest, I caught myself getting properly down, even snapping at family. Embarrassing. I had to have a word with myself. It’s not worth it. We’re all powerless. We’ve watched from afar while the owners and leadership have fucked it up over and over again, and there is nothing we could’ve done about it, nothing would have changed anything. They never listened to fans, Levy despised us. Vinai ignored us, We are a nuisance. I couldn’t give a shit about the other clubs, the fans banter and all that, fuck ‘em. Let them laugh if they can’t see this for what it is. We and this club has been fucked over by greed, it’s disgusting, it’s not banter, it’s a clear sign of owners and leaders who care for nothing apart from their own pockets. We are constantly told that Levy was a business genius, was he fuck, that Vinai is the best in the business, is he bollocks, greed, incompetence, arrogance and the biggest failure in the history of the league. That’s on them, not us. No matter what happens, Tottenham will still exist, we will just be playing different teams. I’ll still be in Tottenham with my mates, so will you, a few beers, having a laugh, watching the football. It’s as simple as that. Cheer up. It ain’t over yet, we will still get behind them and hope they click, but don’t let it drag you down. Up the Spurs!

All these men are due to be hanged by the Iranian regime and some are just 18 years old. Where is the outcry? Our piece in today’s Daily Mail- Online link: mol.im/a/15705429 @AndyJehring and @IHRights