The List Lengthens

The list of clubs with financial issues seems to grow longer by the day.

League One side Bolton, the subject of a Dean Holdsworth fronted takeover just seven months ago, have seen a Boardroom rift threaten the club once again. The Trotters fell into League One in the summer, prompting Holdsworth to leave the Director of Football role  he assume at the takeover.

Holdsworth and Ken Anderson, a former football agent who partnered with the Sports Shield vehicle that made the takeover move, are the only Directors of Burden Leisure Ltd, which is the trading company of the club, but the pair appear to have fallen out over the finances of the club and what each of them has put in to right the ship after their takeover was valued at £7.5million.

Anderson is reported to be the majority shareholder with 60% to Holdsworth's 40%, with Anderson now understood to have agreed a deal with the former striker to take on his shareholding as well. Anderson told the local press the club had no money to pay December's bills, and that without further investment from either one of them the club would drop into Administration.

Bolton have remained under a transfer embargo despite the takeover, and are claimed to also owe kit manufacturer Macron £150,000. Documents are overdue at Companies House including the 2015 accounts which were due in March, with club bills reported to be £800,000 a month on average gates of just under 14,000.

Meanwhile, National South side Margate are reported to have 'less than no money' left in the bank according to their 'Chairman designate'. Alistair Bayliss, formerly a Director at Dover with a brief spell in the Gate's Boardroom two years ago, says he could not become the actual chairman until 'certain legal issues are resolved' when he returned to the club in September.

Bayliss' company is providing coaches for the team to travel to away matches as part of a sponsorship deal struck when he returned, but five straight defeats have left the club just outside the relegation zone with a series of players walking out due to severe budget cuts.

"There is less than no money left. Before I came in, it was the most amateur environment I have seen. Everything is a double negative at the moment, it's a near impossible task to turn it around.' Bayliss told the local press, with a former club CEO having obtained a County Court Judgement against the club.

Bayliss had previously warned the club was run so badly it was just six weeks away from bankruptcy, a claim he later said was 'generous'. Those six weeks are up and, with apparently no improvement following a 30% drop in attendances from last season, it could be just a matter of time before implosion occurs.

Grounds For Complaint

Two Greater Manchester clubs with an unusual link are facing severe financial problems in the coming weeks.

The Danebank was a terrace at historic football ground the Drill Field. It has since been moved to the Victoria Stadium and Broadhurst Park, with both clubs now facing challenges.

FC United of Manchester has told its owners, the supporters, that it is in a "worrying financial position" and that it will have to seek an overdraft facility next month.

The club, formed as a protest against the Glazer takeover at Manchester United and the switching of Saturday 3pm kick offs for financial reasons, had a firmly anti-debt stance throughout its existence. But their ambitious plans to build their own home have seen them spiral quickly into a uncertain future.

The club says it is set to make a loss this season, having seen gates drop some 25% on last term after moving up to National North, and it says it won't have the money to make further improvements to their new £6.3million Broadhurst Park home that they are obligated to this summer, nor meet repayment terms to existing lenders. They suffered a further blow yesterday when their home game was called off just an hour before kick off.

Some of the blame has been foisted on former staff and Directors at the club, calling the staffing structure "not fit for purpose" and financial plans for last season "unrealistic".

Meanwhile, the Evo-Stik League Northern say they have received official notice that Northwich Victoria are to appoint an Administrator.

The nomadic side has had an eventful history under the ownership of the Rushe family. Jim Rushe was part of a consortium to buy the club out of Administration in late 2007, but subsequently saw their Victoria Stadium home sold from underneath them and a move to Stafford, then Flixton, before taking up a second residency at Witton Albion, where they had played while the Victoria Stadium was constructed following the Drill Field's sale.

Rushe senior handed the club to son Martin when he not only failed the FA's Fit and Proper Person test, but was subsequently convicted of conspiring to supply Class A drugs and sentenced to six years in prison in July. The club has flirted with financial disaster through much of the Rushe family's ownership, and saw a large proportion of their fanbase leave to form a new club in 2012, Northwich 1874, when the club took on a groundshare in Stafford, more than 40 miles from their previous home.

The Vics now average just 113 supporters at Step 4, down by nearly half on last season, with the 1874 phoenix attracting 225 in the league below.

A club statement says ownership is to be transferred to the Supporters Club as soon as possible in a 'smooth and solvent transition'.

Both clubs have the root of their problems in agreements for building stadia that were not necessarily the right deals for the clubs. The Vics leaving ownership of their ground to a former Chairman, FC United in signing up for a deal that was incredibly ambitious for a side with limited commercial income.

What A Waste

The proposed takeover of Dagenham and Redbridge has collapsed after the Directors of the club admitted they were unlikely to win a crucial vote of club members over the ownership change to a consortium of investors.

Members had voted last month in favour of changing the structure of the Limited Company from one limited by guarantee to one limited by shares - effectively moving control from the members to the shareholders. However the vote was one that saw so few members vote that the second, crucial, vote to allow the external investment was always on rocky ground.

It didn't help matters that Glenn Tamplin and one of his business interests, Manns Waste Management, were convicted at the end of October of illegally dumping 6,000 tonnes of waste on to an area 'the size of a football pitch' at his home in 2014. It is reported the waste raised ground level by 2 metres with the Court ordering Tamplin to pay over £75,000 in fines and costs within 3 months of the hearing. The total bill for Tamplin, co-defendant Ricky Mann, and the company was in excess of £170,000.

Needing 75% of the members to vote in favour next month, the Board of Directors have admitted defeat and withdrawn support for the proposal - leading to Tamplin and his consortium to withdraw their offer, with a club statement adding:

“The current Board will now arrange for the necessary finance to be put in place for the Club to continue at its current level. It will hopefully submit new proposals to its Members at its upcoming AGM."

Managing Director Steve Thompson had previously told supporters it would be the end of the club before the season was out if the investment didn't come in, with fans questioning the quality and detail of the financial situation of the club offered prior to the first vote.

Thompson faced a fans forum after the announcement where he faced repeated calls for his, and the Board's, resignations. The six figure sum paid out by the consortium to the club now has to be repaid, and the club is coy on how it now intends to plug both that gap and the hole in funding that saw Thompson make such stark comments about the club's lifespan.

Supporters of the club remain calling for answers that they are yet to receive.

Meanwhile Tamplin has agreed a takeover of Ryman Premier side Billericay Town instead. That agreement came just days after the collapse of the Daggers deal, with the completion subject to contract.

On The Boundary

Oldham Athletic have admitted that they are under a transfer embargo after several years of financial struggle at the League One club. While the club did not disclose the reason why initially, they later admitted they had not handed over money from a recent away match at Rochdale that the club sold tickets for.

12 months ago the club admitted it was late with wages for the third month running and it was hauled in front of the judge by HMRC in June for unpaid taxes, but the problems have gone on for longer. Back in the late spring of 2012 the club admitted it stopped playing defender Zander Diamond as they could not afford to meet the terms of his contract and trigger a new deal due to budget cuts due to be implemented for the following season.

In 2010 they warned they were just two postponements away from financial catastrophe, just weeks after posting a £1.5million loss for the previous season, yet land around the club's Boundary Park home has been quietly squirreled away from the club and redeveloped including a housing estate and a car park housing 1,000 cars daily.

A lengthy article in the Independent claims that a separate company called Brass Bank now owned the land. Companies House shows that Brass Bank is run by two former Oldham Athletic directors that arrived at the club with chairman Simon Corney, who is listed as owning all the shares in the club save for the 3% owned by the Supporters Trust. All of their shares are non-voting, with Corney's 97% all voting.

Corney says he is owed £6million in loans into the club, adding that he won't ask for repayment unless the club reaches the Premier League. As it stands, the club is facing relegation to League Two, having last scored five League games ago before Tuesday's draw with Port Vale, and just eleven times in nineteen League matches in total. Gates are down 20% from last season, and nearly 50% on ten years ago when they were seeking a League One exit through the top door rather than the bottom.

Last season, they were struggling to appoint a first team coach on just £18,000 a year, with the prime candidate turning the job down as it was not 'financially viable' for him to travel the 120 mile round trip each day on such sums. Players are reported to be paid a top end of £2,000 at the club, which is a median figure for players in the division overall.

In a video interview Corney, sitting in a knackered looking chair, noted that the club were to face paying out a combined £300,000 over the next week in wages and a HMRC bill, calling the cashflow at the club 'tough' and that they had higher priorities than paying Rochdale. He went on to name a series of message board users, after accusations that some people were being 'negative', calling on them to meet him in person for a recorded interview.

The likelihood of Oldham slipping out of League One after a 20 year stay is increasing by the day.

Kick Start The Jams

Figures released last week by the BBC show that Councils in Britain spent £3.5billion on temporary accommodation for homeless families over the last five years. The annual cost has, over the entire country, risen 60% in five years - with huge rises especially seen in London.

That is clearly an unsustainable position.

For that money, you could easily build 35,000 houses - 40% of the entire need at the present time and the same amount of social housing as in the entirety of Nottingham. £3.5billion is also a similar figure to that being spent on the refurbishment of the Houses of Parliament - as the bottom end estimate. The true figure could be double that.

There are now significant areas of  London that are no longer affordable to the average family in minimum wage jobs looking for private sector housing, and the problem is now creeping to several other parts of the country also.

Difficult decisions need to be taken, not just by the state but by the individuals involved. Some people have to accept that their lifestyle - whether by choice or whatever - is no longer sustainable in the place they are currently living.

There needs to be an acceptance that just as people move to London for higher paid jobs, those in London that are employed for lower wages must move outside their family's traditional area for a sustainable life.

According to home.co.uk, a three bedroom house in Hackney - considered to be the poorest borough of London - is at an average of £2,500 a month in the private sector - £30,000 a year. Deposits are often 6 weeks rent - £4,000. Working London Minimum Wage 40 hour jobs, a couple would have £150 a month left after rent. Then there's the Council Tax, utilities etc that would mop up that little bit left. Where would they dream of getting the deposit from?

People rely on benefits in this situation just to get by. They have no choice. There's nothing wrong with them, no illnesses or disabilities. They just can't financially stretch to their needs.

So why not take the £3.5billion, and the benefits paid out to those stuck in a hole, and build new housing stock in affordable areas? You'll stop making the already rich private landlords richer, and start making the country rich instead.

A ten year building plan, producing 3,500 homes a year. If the temporary accommodation bill was reduced by just 4% for each year of housebuilding, £28million in year two, £56million in year three etc etc, the project would become self-funded within a quarter of the lifetime of the newly built houses.

And then we could carry on, funding further building with the 'profit' of the savings. By the end of a ten year building project nearly half of it would have already been funded by savings on temporary accommodation costs.

Then, in Year 18, we will have saved enough to cover the entire cost of the project. With the houses still to give value back to the economy for another 70+ years and producing £280million of savings a year in money not spent on temporary accommodation.

And that's assuming we stop at ten years of building. Go for 100% of current demand, and the project breaks even on Year 14 and is in profit by Year 26 - generating £700million of savings each and every year thereafter on current spending rates.

These figures, of course, assume that the current housing crisis doesn't get worse. And there aren't many experts predicting an improvement.

Spireites Looking For A Handout

Chesterfield FC are the latest club to be looking for new investment after Chairman and majority owner Dave Allen quit the club at their AGM.

Allen, a former Sheffield Wednesday Chairman, says he originally invested £4million into the club for a majority shareholding but the cash demands meant he put in millions more after his 2009 arrival.

The local press reports he put in £200,000 last month to cover the wage bill, and his sudden departure left the rest of the board, and supporters, stunned. Vice Chairman Dave Jones, asked by local paper The Star whether the club would fold, could only manage a less than confident: “I don’t know, I don’t think so.”

Allen says he walked out after his fellow Directors apparently declined to waive interest payments on their loans to the club and not seek repayment of the loans: "The interest alone amounts to just over £150,000 per annum, so it would be a considerable saving."

With a £2million mortgage also outstanding on their six year old stadium and a string of outstanding charges registered at Companies House, it is difficult to see anyone bailing the club out unless Allen - or the rest of the board - have a sudden change of heart.

Debts totaling more than £500,000, in addition to unspecified charges in the names of current Directors (or their companies) and Allen's A&S Leisure, appear at Companies House in 37 separate charges recorded against the club.

The Star estimates that it will cost £9million to clear out Allen's majority shareholding and loans but, with the club rooted to the foot of League One and facing a bleak winter, it will be a brave 'investor' that steps into Allen's shoes at that price.

The BBC's Price Of Football Is Lazy Journalism

The BBC has, annually, released its "Price of Football" survey with the latest being the largest ever done.

It has been, and remains, the laziest piece of journalism the BBC has done. Ever.

Despite the BBC sending reporters to just about every club on the survey at least once a fortnight, it relies on the clubs to respond to the survey and provide accurate responses. There appears to be no check on the information provided.

Plymouth Argyle are noted to be the only club to refuse to participate despite BBC Radio Devon attending every match. They, presumably, could find out ticket prices, visit the Club Shop, and the Tea Bar. That would take an internet connection and five whole minutes of their time.

But they don't.

It was a three day fanfare on the BBC website. The survey was coming. Released at 10pm on Wednesday night.

It was actually available hours earlier as someone posted the link on the "National League" heading on the football page. And the statistics were - as usual - badly skewed.

At the top end, Premier League clubs claimed £9 entry fees. Hull's own Supporters Trust called bullshit first. In the Championship, Derby County claimed £17.60 tickets - an unusually odd amount - but their ticket site noted the cheapest Adult ticket available to be £25.50.

In the National League, Sutton United claimed a season ticket of £85 but doesn't list any such thing on their website where the only Adult ticket available is £169 with extra for seating - suggesting that both their cheapest and most expensive figures weren't exactly true.

Many clubs claim tickets are available to away fans cheaper than home fans. 26 of "The 92" claim away fans can get into matches by as much as a third less than home supporters. That's some way to encourage your own support.

And then BBC Sport Wales post the following:

Don't be silly, BBC Wales. It's the cheapest in your 'study'. Nothing more.

Clubs lie. We know that. They will do what they can to not be depicted as the desperate financial basket cases they quite often are.

For the BBC to class this 'survey' as a newsworthy headline item and to treat it as 'fact', without the proper journalistic input, is deplorable.

Guilty Pleasures

A great loss to the music world occurred this past week.

The vast majority would have never heard of him, nor heard his work. Most would probably have been put off by his stage name. He wasn't for the shy.

"Kunt And The Gang"

Back in the early 1980s a quartet from Basildon brought a electronic new wave sound to the nation which, over the years, has influenced a huge swathe of musicians. Twenty years later it was a bloke in tracksuit and hi-vis rattling tunes out of a tiny Casio keyboard that the Essex town churned out.

I first came across Kunt through a Facebook post from a local paper of young mothers, who were picking up their offspring from a nearby Primary School, complaining of a pub advertising the act for a forthcoming gig with the name clearly displayed.

His songs were vulgar, but funny and usually catchy, the first album title 'I Have a Little Wank and I Have a Little Cry' should give some idea as to the content. Some were parodies of existing songs. "I think you'll find that any resemblance between my song Fucksticks and Chas and Dave's Gertcha is just a massive coincidence... " Kunt told one magazine in 2013.

Some of the songs deal with subjects that are - or were at the time - not usually the subject for comedy. Serial killers and pedophilia were reoccurring themes alongside sex and an obsession with Countdown that produced love songs for both Carol Vorderman and Rachel Riley.

He took two swings at actual chart success, reaching no. 63 and 66 with two of his crowd pleasers - Videos here - but any thoughts of widespread fame and fortune were usually hampered by the choice of stage name, let alone the material. Mainstream attention was fleeting at best, Charlie Brooker once name checked him in a column. A couple of his videos made it to late night YouTube compilation shows on TV.

He referred to himself as a 'minor internet hit singer' and he will probably forever remain that. But he deserved so much more and leaves a body of work that should stand the test of time. Unless sex goes out of fashion...

New Chief Wants SD Evolution

New Supporters Direct Chief Executive Ashley Brown wants the organisation to evolve, acknowledging it has been 'too idealistic' in its approach as the game has moved on.

In an excellent article for The Guardian's Owen Gibson, Brown says SD still needs to focus on supporter ownership of clubs, but that target is no longer achievable at the higher levels of the game: "In the higher levels of the game, outright supporter ownership is probably unrealistic. Part-ownership is something that is relevant but it is has to come with a voice, it has to come with a reason."

The article highlights the issues at FC United of Manchester and Swansea. At Swansea, their minority Trust ownership has almost entirely been pushed into a corner by the new American owners. At FC United, as previously noted here, there has been a bitter conflict that has seen most of the incumbent officers leave over the summer, with Brown noting:

“You need strong leadership. You don’t need dictators, but you need strong leaders. People who have the ability to bring people together around a table. That’s the most difficult thing in football. All the FCUM fans want a successful club. But they need to get behind a leader and a small group of people and trust them to do that.”

To run a Trust, there needs to be trust.

Bunfight At The FA Corral

The FA have banned former Frome Town manager Nick Bunyard from football until the summer of 2019, but the man in question appears to have no intention of going quietly.

A FA statement claimed Bunyard had bet against his own team 45 times, whilst manager of both Frome and fellow Southern League side Paulton Rovers, over a 19 month period to April 2016. A further 52 bets not involving his clubs were also recorded.

Officials, players, managers, and all employees at clubs at Southern League level and above are banned from betting on football played anywhere in the world at any time. The rule came in on August 1st, 2014. Bunyard's breaches of the rule started six weeks later.

Bunyard, 36, says he is now retired from management, taking a lengthy swipe at the FA in a Facebook post and posting part of the written charges from the FA to Twitter. The charges name Paulton's goalkeeper as having received text messages from Bunyard trying to sign him after he was suspended by the FA, also noting Paulton's Secretary being involved in the reporting of the act to the authorities.

Bunyard has made swipes about 'rats and snakes' in his social media comments. Paulton officials didn't have much choice in the matter, especially considering their Chairman has been a Southern League board member for the past seven years. You can't selectively uphold the rules, we get told that repeatedly. The FA demanded they comply with their investigation - as a Paulton club statement attests - and that the FA had already received information regarding Bunyard's alleged ongoing activities.

The ban also comes with a fine, £3000, which presumably will go unpaid with Bunyard's retirement. He says he's 'never taken a wage' as a manager of either club and hinting that the 45 bets on his own side were actually just eight. He also says he lost many of the bets, only placing the money due to inside knowledge on injury crises but seeing his side draw or win on half the occasions he claimed actually happened. He hasn't provided proof of his responses, and the FA are unlikely to confirm or deny them.

The FA rule on betting is draconian, especially at this low level, but zero tolerance is probably the only route when suspicions of match fixing in football around the world is at an all time high.

However the length of time to resolve the charge - seven months - is unnecessarily long for the person involved and the club. It is difficult to 'move on' if justice is not done swiftly and, as both the club and Bunyard point out, it would have been resolved much quicker at a higher level.

The level of the fine, however, is frightening. Frome Town's current average attendance is 242, which means Bunyard's fine is the equivalent of the takings of two matches for the club.

I doubt a manager at a Premier League club would get such a hefty sanction.

Takeovers Galore

The number of football clubs struggling financially seems to grow by the day. Macclesfield boss John Askey admitted at the weekend that their FA Cup win at Walsall, and the subsequent prize money, would pay off an outstanding VAT bill - "The FA Cup has saved the club numerous times," Askey told the BBC.

Over at Torquay, the on/off takeover by Gaming International may be back on. Dragging on since March, when the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding, the latest development is that the local Council now seem prepared to discuss the freehold sale of the club's Plainmoor ground leading to Gaming International reaching agreement with the club to exchange their loan for existing shares in the club if a sale to another owner isn't completed.

Other parties are reportedly interest in the club with the Board telling a Fans Forum that there are two firm offers on the table, neither of which involves the redevelopment of Plainmoor. The club's Supporters Trust have been, again, ruled out of making a bid with most supporters acknowledging it simply doesn't have the financial clout to recover the situation.

Meanwhile, a step lower in National South, Gosport Borough have confirmed takeover talks with a local consortium after staving off their second winding up petition of the season. The consortium is led by Danny Thompson, a former player turned businessman, with the club having spent most of 2016 in financial turmoil.

Tower Heist

Donald Trump's election campaign was just the same as the Brexit Leavers except without the decorum that just about remains in British politics.

The Leavers branded the other side "Project Fear", accused their opponents of talking down to the electorate and misleading them. Trump did the same, but with the volume turned way up.

Hillary Clinton was "the worst", a "nasty woman". His challengers for the Republican ticket "lying Ted" and "little Marco", they all got a 'brand' from Trump, and that brand was pushed at every opportunity.

'The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.' Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.

Benghazi, emails, Bill Clinton's infidelity, the system being rigged. Again, and again, and again. You may be a terrible candidate, but you must make your opponent appear to be much, much worse.

And that's ultimately what did it. Usually only one or two million people vote for the third party candidates like the Libertarians or Greens. Yesterday, six million did. In far too many swing states the margin between Trump and Clinton was far less than the third party votes. 130,000 votes split the pair in Florida, with nearly 300,000 voting for another option. That alone could have swung the election another way.

People weren't put off voting, they were just put off voting for the mainstream candidates. Trump has been elected with the lowest percentage of the vote of any Presidential Election since Richard Nixon, when an independent candidate - with far-right backing and appealing to alienated white voters - picked up 13% of the vote.

Despite being a tax-dodging abusive sex pest that had his own Twitter account taken from him to stop him doing more damage to the campaign, Trump is here for four years.

If you have nothing to lose you will probably enjoy the pantomime.

Bring Me Sunshine

Morecambe FC have become a staple of League Two over the last ten years having been one of the non-league also-rans for decades before.

Dicing with financial disaster in the 1980's, a steady rebuild of the club allowed a slow but sure climb up the leagues. As the club rose, so did attendances. From a low of a couple of hundred in their darkest days to 2,800 as they pushed for promotion from League Two. However the smaller attendances never left them behind and they would often struggle to pull in 1,200 for some matches.

That is where we find them currently, having seen 1,302 through the gates of the Globe Arena for a 3-0 home loss to Newport on the day after it was revealed the club had failed to pay the wage bill and that they were in talks with the Professional Footballers Association (PFA) for a loan. This wasn't a first for the Shrimpers.

Documents available at Companies House show the PFA agreed a loan with the club, secured on the stadium, in April that remains outstanding. They only settled a previous PFA loan in February that had been on the books since June 2013, pretty much the same time as Barclays Bank also secured a mortgage on the freehold.

The club itself was taken over only a couple of months ago. Diego Lemos, a Brazilian based in Qatar, took over at a point a club statement declared the Shrimpers 'virtually debt free'. Lemos, reportedly a former football agent, was stated to be a relative of a series of high profile Brazilian footballers, including being the nephew of 1974 World Cup squad member Cesar, but the only person he has so far brought in to the Shrimpers is a relatively unknown 24 year old Qatari businessman - appointed as co-chairman alongside Lemos.

The histories of Lemos and co-chair Abdulrahman Al-Hashemi are not easily discoverable and it is difficult to see how either former club owner, Peter McGuigan, or the footballing authorities managed to accurately vet them as owners of the club.

McGuigan, who remains on the club's board after 15 years as Chairman, has been largely silent since the takeover. But when the bills are not being paid just weeks later, questions must be asked.

We've seen clubs - and the authorities - fall for slick stories and faked documents time after time. Salisbury City went under thanks to a Moroccan 'businessman' whose only proof of ID was a United Arab Emirates driving licence and Post Office box. The Munto Finance story at Notts County was a trail of false documents, smoke and mirrors. Even Premier League Watford now stand accused of filing fake financial documents.

Morecambe fans will be hoping for a little bit of Brazilian sunshine sooner rather than later.

The Build A Wall Mart

If the only thing Donald Trump comes out of the US election with is a bucket load of his supporters' money, most of the world will breathe a sigh of relief.

The Donald has not been shy with his merchandising. There are currently 62 T-shirts, hoodies, vests, and Polo shirts on his website, excluding another 18 individual state designs. T-shirts range from $20 to $35, Polo shirts $50. Foam hands for $25, caps - that his campaign finances report cost about $5 - go for up to $30.

48 different badges for $5 each, one for every state he thinks he can win - and a few others thrown in for good measure. $30 for a poster with Trump's signature scrawled across a dozen images of Trump, done in Photoshop's best handwriting.

Holding a party? $315 gets you a bumper pack of caps, t-shirts, signs, and cardboard megaphones for you and some of your five friends. Going as a couple? $95 for caps, t-shirts and pom-poms!

Against Trump's 62 pieces of apparel, Hillary Clinton has 20 - only 15 in stock, though it has to be said her official shop is reasonably well stocked - if a little less generic.

Tote bags, a cushion, and an official "Woman Card" are among the items in her store. While Trump's merchandise is generic, Clinton's has been designed by a variety of artists and designers whose names probably mean more to others than they do to me. Clinton also offers refunds, Trump doesn't, citing the payment to be a donation rather than a purchase. His FAQ's also make a lot of bluster about the deduction of a postage charge from the donation.

The good news for British citizens is that they are excluded from buying any of this overpriced tat by US election law.

Trump has three times the merchandise on offer, and mostly at higher prices. If you can see a Trump supporter coming, so can Trump.

Wage Cut

A cut in the benefits cap kicks in today, dropping up to £115 a week from the biggest claimants.

£20,000 a year sounds like a lot of money to give out to someone that isn't 'contributing to society', but the safety net of social housing has all but disappeared and now the private landlords are milking the system for all its worth. That is capitalism.

The average three bed house in Hereford is now around £800 a month to rent according to home.co.uk, and you can add another £200 for each additional bedroom, with most observers expecting rents to rise another 20% over the next five years.

£800 a month is pretty much half of the new cap. That leaves £200 a week for people to pay their bills, feed their kids, and look to get their lives back on track. Yes, there are a few serial claimants not interested in getting into work and improving their lives, but the vast majority of people don't want to scrape along the bottom for the rest of their time. And it was these people that voted for Brexit. They didn't have much choice.

Jonathan Pie, a comedian, made the strongest argument I heard either way in the vote debate - if your choice was between the shit you're in and something unknown, you'd choose the unknown.

And that's the position that some people have reached.

We had the 2008 financial crisis, and then it was cut, cut, cut. Eight years of slice and dice on the social welfare fabric has left a surprisingly large amount of the country willing to take any 'other' option on the table. Even if that option is a leap into the unknown.

The longer it takes for Brexit to actually happen, the longer the uncertainty - and the pain - for the bottom end of the electorate will continue.

And the longer you torture someone the more likely they are to make desperate decisions.

Expensive Hobbies

Blackpool Chairman Karl Oyston has discontinued libel action against a supporter, surprising many with the late move in what is a long running bitter battle between his family and supporters over the club.

‘We shouldn’t have sued Jeremy Smith.’ said Karl Oyston, chairman of the club, who had already twice successfully sued supporters over comments and claims made as the club tumbled from the Premier League to League Two. One was ordered to pay a total of £40,000 to both Karl and father Owen for comments that had “gone well beyond vigorous criticism” according to a judge. Another was left with a £30,000 damages bill after accusations on an online forum that the younger Oyston had threatened him with a shotgun. Both supporters were left with significant legal bills.

The latest action against Smith, which is reported to have cost £100,000 in legal fees before reaching Court, and would have seen a £250,000 bill at the conclusion of the case, a bill that would have ultimately sat with the loser of the case, in addition to the claim for damages of another £250,000.

Libel action is expensive. The average person, with an average job, kids, and a mortgage, would see themselves bankrupt and their family homeless on the back of such action. Yet the talk that gets ordinary supporters into trouble is cheap and very easy to do.

The Oystons are deeply unpopular with Blackpool supporters, with average attendances plummeting at Bloomfield Road over the past two years from an average of 11,000 in 15/16 to the current 3,500 on the back of successive relegations. The quantity of comments against their ownership has increased dramatically, as have the ones that have gone beyond the pale. A football club Chairman thesedays could fund the gap in the club's balance sheet by taking supporters to court that made comments that are false and libelous after every bad result on the pitch.

With the ability to post comments on the internet in most peoples pockets, individuals no longer seem to be willing to accept the consequences of their actions. Go to a game, drink a couple of pints, team loses, six more pints, smartphone comes out and the comments get nasty.

The Oyston's don't have a lot of other recourse at the moment. A fairly successful fan boycott sees many of the supporters under threat of action not actually attending matches to have a stadium ban, the common - and often only - action enforceable by the club. The boycott, which has seen the Blackpool Supporters Trust take donations to assist FA Cup opponents Kidderminster - who face losing out on their share of the gate. The reasoning behind it, that Kidderminster are fan-owned, is odd seeing as the majority owner is ex-agent Colin Gordon.

It does appear that an unusually large amount of the online abuse comes from people that don't actually attend matches. That they will spend hours each week on forums berating a club they don't actively support is an odd pastime.

And an expensive one.