Time is running out to bring football home

It sparked one of the most passionate debates in recent development planning history in the district.

We can read what he thought at various times, in a world very unlike our own, about a plan for European co-operation and whether we should or should not be part of it.

The point is, that is a parlour game which has no relevance to us today. We might as well pick characters from history at random and ask what they would have thought about Brexit; I’d suggest that Wellington would have been for out, William I for in. It’s meaningless to guess. We might as well ask what Martians would think of it.

Of the 20th century’s greatest politicians, the only one close enough to have made an informed choice would be the late Margaret Thatcher and she had become a convert from in to out in her lifetime as she saw how the European Economic Area which we joined morphed into the nascent European Union empire.

As to the referendum campaign, that was run by politicians on both sides; as an experienced democracy we look behind the headlines to make up our own minds.

We know what politicians are like, that’s why project fear failed, we didn’t believe it, but then neither did we believe everything the Leave campaign told us.

We’re not stupid, but we are freedom-loving and that’s what the vote came down to - freedom to run our own country and not to have it run from Brussels.