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Steve Thomas

Listed below are comments made by Steve Thomas between Friday, 5th June 2009 and Saturday, 5th December 2009.

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England get luck of the draw 11:55am on 05 Dec 2009 I sometimes wonder if having a universally weak group like this really is the best thing. Sure, getting past the group stages should be plain sailing, but getting a good result against a top team(s) in the group stages really sets a team up for the later stages. It both gives a team confidence and also puts some fear into the others that they face, while there is less pressure, since a loss does not automatically put you out of the competition. While group G is going to be really tough, the teams that do progress are going to be looking really dangerous to the rest of the field. England are not going to be able to put any fear into their opponents in the group stages; the only thing they can really do is make themselves look highly beatable by struggling, or worse, losing.
EU opts for Belgian leader 09:11am on 20 Nov 2009 Traffic in Beijing tends to be stationary anyway.
What Mercedes buy-out of Brawn could mean 4:42pm on 17 Nov 2009 #120

I find it hard to begrudge Button asking for significantly more money from Brawn and going elsewhere if he doesn't get it. After taking a 60% pay cut at the beginning of the season in order to secure the future of his team, then delivering the World Championship, he's considering an offer from McClaren that reportedly isn't even as much as he was earning under Honda. If Brawn don't want to pay him more then fine, a contract has to suit both parties, but I think I would be looking elsewhere in his position too.
EU set for tough bargaining 11:00am on 29 Oct 2009 So this treaty that we've ratified with Europe, which supposedly sets out in clear terms how the EU will work better in future and creates all these new roles that will allegedly "streamline decision making", doesn't even set out the job description of these new roles. So we're signing more and more sovereignty over to this body that doesn't have a leader, can't agree on the job description of its leader, can't agree on who should take this new undefined role or even what sort of a person it should be. In addition, the only say that the British public has in the choice of this leader is the vote of Gordon Brown, a man who has never himself faced the British public in an election and has run away from the referendum that he promised on this very issue.

You couldn't make this stuff up.
Button deserves credit for rearguard fight 6:07pm on 28 Sep 2009 I think this season has been exceptionally interesting. F1 is always about the fusion of man, machine and racetrack. Button spent the early part of the season in a car where everything seemed to click. In different conditions, he spent the next few races driving a dog that couldn't get any grip. Barichello capitalized in the races where the conditions suited him better. McClaren couldn't supply its drivers with a drivable car until halfway through the season, but seem to have put in the overtime and are now back with a vengeance. Sadly, they seem to struggle to create a setup that suits both their drivers and Hamilton in invariably favoured. Red Bull have been ahmpered by technical problems and driver errors, but are still in contention.
No team has got it completely right this season, but that's far more interesting than when one team just runs away with the championship.
When panic shapes policy 1:01pm on 11 Sep 2009 This is an absolutely endemic problem with the current government. They love things that they can measure and absolutely hate and disregard things that they don't. As a result, they will choose policies that give easily measurable results above everything else, and pretend that the costs that they can't measure are negligable.

We saw this with hospital waiting lists, where an easily measurable quantity superceded every other factor in NHS care. We've seen it in the drip-drip loss of our civil liberties, where the intangible cost of losing our freedoms and liberty is disregarded in favour of better arrest statistics.

This is exactly the same. In order to show that 22,000 "dangerous people" have been banned from working with children, the government has completely ignored the intangible cost to society of assuming that every adult is a paedophile unless he or she can prove otherwise.
Chelsea will suffer if transfer ban stands 10:48pm on 03 Sep 2009 Does nobody remember that Platini/Blatter's plan to limit foreign players has always stumbled on the hurdle of European employment laws? How does anybody think that this current arbitrary punishment applied to Chelsea on who they can employ is going to be any more legal? Football clubs are businesses. Their players are employees. They are therefore subject to trade and employment laws which FIFA cannot simply decide to trample on.
Should I worry about a flu pandemic? 4:27pm on 11 Jun 2009 The real question is whether out of any of those low-risk deaths, did any show evidence of the pathological cytokyne response that supposedly characterized the Spanish flu? Did they die of secondary complications like pnuemonia or did they die due to their immune response?
Osborne and a corporate tax revolution 2:32pm on 10 Jun 2009 As slimy as he seems to be, George Osbourne is actually making sense in many of his proposals. He's certainly making more sense that GB and AD ever did.
Three extraordinary personal decisions 12:43pm on 05 Jun 2009 You have to presume that many in the Labour party do not believe that the next general election is winnable and are starting to look past it at what happens next. They basically have two choices:
1) Leave Gordon in as leader to fail spectacularly at the next election. Afterwards, take the oportunity to clean out the old guard of the party and try to convince voters that the party has made a break with the past.
2) Have a leadership contest where no viable candidates want to stand. Fail spectacularly at the next election ending the political career of the poor fool who stood in as the fall-guy. Spend the next ten years in an internal power struggle relegated to the political wilderness. This is normally accompanied by the election of a new leader every 2 or 3 years.
While Gordon might have his head firmly buried in the sand on planet Brown, there must be some in the Labour Party who aren't completely stupid. Those in the party who are behind Brown are probably only there so that they can cut him loose later on.

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