Isambard Kingdom Brunel FRS was a British civil engineer[...]

It might be behind much of your thinking. For me it was only one aspect. More important was the question of democracy.

Oddly, you've fled them?

Care to guess what percentage of those who voted leave had that as a priority?

I'm sure you can quote some cooked-up figures from the BBC or the Guardian, Dave. Post them by all means; you know you want to.

Not my thinking at all, I voted remain.

My chief concern was policy freedom, since it became clear to me following the renewable energy money trail, that the EU was a corrupt source of rent seeking.

But IU certainly would welcome selection by value for immigrants, ratehr than selection by woke tickbox self-defined victim status.

It it's woke, its broke, mate.

Unlike you I don't rely on figures that simply can't be checked. Hence asking for a guess. Which tends to show a great deal about the person doing that guessing.

That's not the choice; it's value *or* victim status instead of EU citizenship *or* victim status. We're not about to stop taking refugees, and the EU has never had a great deal of influence on this policy.

For me it was overwhelmingly about sovereignty and democratic accountability of those in public life. The best form of government is small, efficient and local to those it serves - everything the EU isn't.

That'll be why the Tories cut funding to local authorities, then?

So, you have no problem with refugees from a country in civil war from coming to England and marrying a citizen?

No problem at all, so long as it's balanced by someone like you or Dave leaving the country permanently.

I don't class local authorities as "government" Dave. They are at best administrators and overseers.

arr, NO. There are elected Councillors. as well. It's called "Local Government".

Whatever. They still don't get to make *real* laws. Deciding to make a street one-way only doesn't count for anything in my book.

but much more deserving of the term when more of their spending was from taxes and charges /decided/ locally. Rates started off that way but became ever more centralised. The disastrous "poll tax" was a well-intentioned attempt to reverse that trend but ended up with LAs being ever more dependent on central government grants.

Maggie should have pressed ahead with that. Got the water cannon out on those rioting hippies in central London back in '92; looked like they needed a bloody good wash the lot of them.

Our LA doesn't receive a penny from central government.

In article snipped-for-privacy@davenoise.co.uk>, "Dave Plowman (News)" snipped-for-privacy@davenoise.co.uk> writes

But no one guessed.