Great Britain

3013 days ago

More Rio2016 cobblers: Olympic medals lead to more participation - the cycling myth

As elite sport demands that it retains its £450 million four year Olympic budget or even increases it, supporters base their case on two pillars. One is ridiculous and the other is based on bogus data.

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4399 days ago

Deluded Lefties and the Union Flag

Hell’s teeth I wave the Irish Tricolour at a sporting event and so I am not sure why it upsets me when folks say that the Union Flag has only recently become acceptable. I think it is a matter of who says it but also that it is so patently wrong. Saturday saw another encounter with folks who are without doubt good people. Nice people. But also, utterly deluded academic lefties. And I lost my temper. The Union Flag has always been “acceptable” to most people in this country. Indeed for most folks it has been – quite rightly – a source of pride.

The thesis of the Guardian reading classes is that somewhere along the line the red, white and blue was high jacked by extreme right wingers of the National Front and BNP and thus became a flag that could not be flown with pride. It was only somewhere between Austin Powers and Cool Britannia (1997) and Mo Farah, the Queen’s Jubilee (2012) that it once again became universally acceptable.

On Saturday, the thesis of the left was pushed even further

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