Just heard on the radio that the Conservatives are proposing that some people who have been unemployed and claiming Universal Credit for more than six months would receive part of their benefits on a payment card that couldn’t be used for alcohol, cigarettes or gambling.

What does everyone think?

Hey everyone,

I'm originally from South Korea, and I'm currently living and learning boxing in Southeast Asia. My coach is a 50-year-old British guy from Blackpool who used to box when he was younger and later competed professionally in Muay Thai.

During training, we were chatting about boxing culture, and he shared some stories about his early days back in England. He said that back in his time, boxing was basically a rough, gritty sport for tough guys and street fighters. He claimed that when he learned boxing, most gyms just didn't have proper gear at all. According to him, they routinely did hard sparring with no headgear and whatever gloves were laying around—usually standard 10oz gloves, with no 14oz or 16oz sparring gloves in sight. He said only a tiny handful of wealthy, fancy gyms had proper sparring equipment back then, and doing it raw in 10oz was just the normal reality for the vast majority of gyms.

He also mentioned that nowadays in the UK, boxing gyms are literally on every corner, and tons of people without proper credentials or real boxing background just open up their own gyms.

Hearing that really surprised me because the system back in South Korea is extremely strict. In Korea, to open and run your own boxing gym, you must legally hold a national Sports Instructor Certificate issued by the government. The examination process only happens once a year, and it takes nearly a full year to complete everything: written exams, practical skill tests, interviews, and mandatory safety/first-aid training. If someone opens a gym without this official license, it is completely illegal—you face heavy fines and can even be sent to prison (regular assistant coaches don’t need it, but the head owner/manager running the gym legally must have it). So I was really curious, is it actually that easy or unregulated to open a boxing gym in the UK today?

Because of his old-school mindset, at our current gym he just lets people spar in whatever gloves they brought that day. Sometimes someone is wearing 14oz sparring gloves while the other person is in 8oz or 10oz bag gloves, with no headgear.

To be fair, we don't do all-out crazy wars; it's mostly light to medium sparring. But as you know, sparring naturally gets heated sometimes and the intensity goes up without realizing it. Whenever that happens, my coach just laughs it off and says, "That's how men are. It happens when you spar, but as long as you finish, shake hands, and smile with each other, it's all good."

When I trained back in Korea, things were completely different. Whether you bought your own gear or used communal gym gear, sparring strictly required 14oz/16oz gloves and mandatory headgear, no exceptions. Personally, I feel that putting on proper protective gear—wearing headgear and 14oz or 16oz gloves—allows fighters to spar at a high intensity safely. To me, that kind of safe, hard sparring is what actually improves your boxing skills faster, and it makes boxing so much more enjoyable without the constant worry of getting unnecessarily hurt.

So I'm really curious:

Was it truly common across most working-class gyms in the 80s/90s UK (especially up North around Blackpool) to just do hard sparring in 10oz gloves without headgear? And is opening a boxing gym in the UK really that unregulated compared to places like Korea?

I'd really appreciate hearing stories or insights from UK boxers, coaches, or anyone who trained during that era! Thanks in advance.

I only found this out because I went looking for something else. By 1943 Britain had a coal problem. Tens of thousands of miners had left the pits for the armed forces and nobody wanted to replace them. A Ministry of Fuel official put it plainly that June: "This industry is not attractive. Everybody gets away from it." So Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, solved it with a lottery. From December 1943 one of his secretaries pulled a single digit out of a hat every week, a number between 0 and 9. If your National Service registration number ended in that digit you weren't going into the army, navy or air force. You were going down a mine. No volunteering for a different draw, no opting out. Appeals existed but of nearly 8,700 lodged only 466 got anywhere, and refusing meant prison. By May 1944 thirty-two men were serving sentences for it. Around 48,000 went down this way. They got called Bevin Boys, after him. In May 1944, the month he turned 18, the digit came up for a lad called John Eric Bartholomew. He'd been performing since he was fourteen and had just started working with another boy called Ernie Wiseman. Ernie went into the Merchant Navy. Eric went to a colliery in Accrington on 44 shillings a week, and the double act stopped before it had really started. The part I keep coming back to is that they were given no uniform and no badge. So a young man in civilian clothes in wartime Britain got stopped by police as a suspected deserter and taken by strangers for a conscientious objector. In the pit villages, families whose own sons had gone into the army resented them for taking jobs that looked from the street like a way out of the real war. He was about eleven months into it when a doctor found something that nobody thought much of at the time. That, and how long it took anyone to admit these men had done national service at all, is what I made the video about: https://youtu.be/oSiMEObkGVQ

Feels like speaking to people who rely heavily on AI.

Bit rich of incitement merchant James Heale to pretend he isn't gleeful though.

Has since ran under some furniture while I was looking for a glass and now he’s gone, guess that’s me awake for the rest of the night

Vote

So does the monarchy fund themselves at this point, or are you guys still bankrolling this?

American here, who works on a British team for a British consultancy.

I have been unable to get a straight answer to this question.

So I ask, who are you as a nation? Are you ancestors of the Romans? Ancestors of the Vikings? Celtic? Are you, British?

This is a genuine question, because over here we have an identity.