The gloves are off.
I don’t like bullies and I feel Mr Lammy like most MP’s is boxing above his pay grade.
You champion the services of a West Ham affiliated Intellectual Property solicitor to wheel out some theoretical hogwash about Spurs being ‘sued’ if they moved don’t change the name? Masterstroke.
By the same logic you could take legal action against numerous individuals passing themselves off as Santa Claus – whilst balancing small children on their laps – in department stores globally every December.
Lammy you’re precisely the sort of guy I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a lift with you self promoting schmuck.
Lots of people waxing lyrical about the past. This little gem isn’t a cherished memory though, is it Dave?
You’re a London MP, with a constituency only 28 minutes away by Tube from Parliament, yet you claimed £12,041 for a second home. Sounds a straight-forward case in the long line of London MPs who had their expense claims widely publicised and heavily criticised during earlier this year? Except this time, there was one difference.
Wasn’t there, Dave?
Watch Tottenham Hotspur live streams
The expense claim was published back in October 2004, got a bit of local media coverage and that was that.
Lucky man, that David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham.
From the Haringey Advertiser, 27 October 2004:
HARINGEY taxpayers have been forking out for Tottenham MP David Lammy to rent a second home in south London.
Mr Lammy admitted the expense in the first published account of MPs’ spending, and is among 32 outer London MPs claiming the second home allowance, worth up to £20,333 a year…
Mr Lammy said he stayed at the second home for three nights a week when he was working at Westminster, spending the rest of his week at his main home on the Harringay Ladder, 28 minutes from Westminster by tube.
He claimed £12,041 for the home between April 2003 and March 2004.
28 minutes away. You absolute rotter, Dave.
Sorry HH et al,
Patrick Barclay Chief Football Commentator
January 15 2011 12:01AM wrote in today’s Times:-
“The first thing to do about the London Olympic Stadium is to be honest and admit that it is built on a myth. When Lord Coe spoke of a permanent athletics legacy, he may have been impressing himself, and maybe the more idealistic members of the International Olympic Committee, but the rest of us always took the notion of passionate 70,000 crowds roaring on pole vaulters from Peterborough for the mildly amusing sales pitch it was.
To be fair to Coe, he genuinely believes in the sport, or collection of sports, through which he once brought pride and joy to the nation. We believe in athletics, too — in theory. The more children run, jump and generally take pride in their bodies, avoiding obesity, the better for all of us. But actually watch athletics?
What we want is football. Hence the growth in capacity of Premier League stadiums. Manchester United’s holds 40 per cent more people than when Sir Alex Ferguson became manager. Arsenal have had to build a new one to accommodate a 62 per cent increase since Arsène Wenger arrived. So Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United must rehouse or be left behind.
London should count itself lucky that Spurs, in particular, have eyes on the Olympic site because their plan, as the orginal vision of a 56,000-capacity arena next to White Hart Lane recedes, is to knock down the Olympic Stadium, rip up its running track and build a proper football stadium with all the required intimacy.
Moreover, the club will defer to the athletics legacy idea by refurbishing the more realistically proportioned Crystal Palace.
This is a very attractive offer because the best thing to do with an Olympic Stadium is demolish it. There are exceptions, such as those of Sydney and Atlanta, which have been adapted for use by non-oblong sports such as Australian Rules football, cricket and baseball, and Beijing, which can afford to maintain the distinctive Bird’s Nest structure as a tourist attraction. But, by and large, Spurs would be doing London a favour.
Unreconstructed Olympic venues are soulless places. Anyone who followed Liverpool to Istanbul and Athens for the 2005 and 2007 Champions League finals would know that (although some Liverpool fans contributed to the chaos that accompanied the latter), as would the Celtic hordes who travelled to the 2003 Uefa Cup final in Seville.
So the relatively cheap alteration of the London stadium to accommodate West Ham would, while offering a solution to the problems facing David Sullivan and David Gold as they wrestle with the demons of ownership, be against the interests of English football as a whole.
West Ham fans would no more enjoy football with a running track than did the supporters of Espanyol; while Barcelona may have the prettiest of Olympic stadiums, it was too big and the pitch too remote and Espanyol moved out last year with relief. Upton Park is no longer as intimate as it used to be. This would be a step too far.
So let Spurs have their way. It will be painful to leave White Hart Lane, whatever happens, to abandon a place redolent with the spirit of Bill Nicholson’s Double-winning side and the glory, glory nights. But why, given a choice, would they stay in a part of London that contrives to be both multi-ethnic and (at least to the visitor) utterly charmless?”
Part 2
It is not as if most Spurs fans live round the corner, as Nicholson did in a different age. They might as well get used to another route to glory, as their Arsenal counterparts once did upon that club’s relocation from southeast to North London. They might find it easier than getting to and from White Hart Lane, where even a 35,000 capacity tends to entail prolonged congestion on road and rail.
Nor, surely, would Spurs’ support be unwelcome intruders in the east; if the Stratford area needs “regeneration” (to borrow the brother of “legacy”), the locals would hardly complain. Anyway, it looks as if they are to have football one way or another, as Coe’s impossible dream fades.
There is an interesting lesson in this for football people because, when the Fifa executive committee so crushingly dismissed England’s bid for the 2018 World Cup while accepting Qatar’s tender for 2022 on apparently the most flexible of terms, chicanery was inferred.
Scant mention was made of promises broken by the English FA or its subsidiaries. The one about the new Wembley having a running track, for instance; £20 million of public subsidy was pocketed on that occasion. And now it is the turn of the IOC and UK Athletics to watch the goalposts being moved.
They were always in the wrong place. It is as simple as that and only through bid goggles could it have been seen otherwise.
do you have a summary of the above old chap?
Summary:
Let’s all go to Stratford if Haringey prove to be problematic.
Everybody breaks bidding promises.
West Ham will have a crap stadium if they move in (squat)
Anything else I can do apart from putting this on voicemail?
Porn Baron squatting plans not a good business model. Seb Coe’s hair is made of badger down.
I think the Anne Summers Stadium has a certain ring to it, how about the West Ham Anne Summers Stadium otherwise known as the WHAMASS?
I see this guy the same as I’d see Satan coming up from the depths of hell to destroy Arsenal……. detestable guy, but him getting his way helps us out.
Better the devil you know….
Just read this on another blog Harry, shows Lammy doesn’t know what he is talking about.
——–
Sadly the legal opinion Lammy got is out of step with reported case law. TOTTENHAM have defended their name against allegations it is just descriptive of an area and won, opening the way for them to use it elsewhere.
Here’s the decision should you wish to read it.
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/tm/t-os/t-find/t-challenge-decision-results/o15002.pdf
This is very interesting. Particularly if you scroll down to 29) and read the bit about ‘relevant class of persons’.
To me – and I am not a lawyer (no, really I’m not) this distinguishes the cobblers of Lammy’s IP solicitor and what your average punter thinks.
‘Passing off’ has to be to some purpose. Usually to deceive. THFC was formed in Tottenham. No trickery if we move and continue to trade as THFC.
If you wanted to call a new football club based in Essex Manchester Football Club, this aside from anything else would fall squarely into ‘passing off’ as there no legitimate connection other than to trade off the successes in football associated with that city/region.
“Scant mention was made of promises broken by the English FA or its subsidiaries. The one about the new Wembley having a running track, for instance; £20 million of public subsidy was pocketed on that occasion.”
Right. I suppose that helps to pay off sacked England managers/current Italian England managers? Assuming the quote to be accurate – that is a fucking joke.
They should pay it back, but it’s not going to happen though, is it?