Oxford has not banned Christmas – just made it sound like that

Oxford City Council has announced that the winter holiday known for 2,000 years or so as “Christmas” is officially to be celebrated in the city as a “Winter Light Festival”.

The aim, of course, is to be “inclusive” and to talk up “diversity”, all those soft, warm, meaningless terms which stupid white people use when they want to show their concern for people of other colours and faiths.

Tanner talks rubbish again in Oxford

Gordon Brown’s big Labour conference speech was described simultaneously (and by the same people) as absolutely awful and the best he has ever made. A group of viewers were given devices which allowed them to record their reactions to the speech phrase by phrase. The clearest adverse reactions were to the passages in which Brown attacked his rivals and enemies, both those within his party and outside it.

To non-politicians, this is obvious. People react best to positive messages, and if you can only convey your own position by running down other people, you betray the weakness of your own arguments. The only exception to this is when the attacks are extremely clever and preferably witty – Vince Cable’s “Stalin to Mr Bean” attack won reactions which were entirely positive except to its target. For the most part, political attacks are dull bludgeons not witty stilettos, and damage the giver at least as much as the subject of the attack.

This is emphasised if you move down from the big beasts of the political jungle to the worms and creepy-crawlies of local politics. John Tanner of Oxford’s ruling Labour Group is a good example. He has the same clunky, leaden style as Gordon Brown, the same commitment to a socialism which benefits no-one, and was once quoted as saying that everything he says or does is political, which must have made his love-life truly scintillating. Unlike Gordon Brown, he lacks a brain – most old-style socialists have chips on their shoulders over some perceived deprivation of their childhood, and where most recall the holes in their shoes or the bread-and-dripping for tea, Tanner seems to have been driven by his lack of any thinking apparatus.

Three traffic wardens for one car

I watched a pack of traffic wardens surround a car in Market Street, Oxford this afternoon. I guess only one gets the bonus and perhaps they had all raced to get there, the fastest getting to do the job while the others stood around and chatted.

Or perhaps it really does take three of them – one to do the reedin, one for the ritin and one to operate the camera, with the reward money divvied up between them.

Leaving the dealers to deal in peace

In a previous post, A different view of graftti, I took issue with Martin Jennings’ appreciation of the grafitti on Aristotle Lane railway bridge. I found no beauty in it and saw it as both a complement to the more official forms of aesthetic vandalism visible from the bridge and as a symptom of the neglect endemic in Oxford. I ended by suggesting that worse things than grafitti flourished when the causes and the visible evidence of the grafitti were untouched.

Graffiti is actually worse as a symptom of neglect than the unemptied bins, the weed-filled gutters and the blocked drains. They merely indicate that nobody in authority bothers – councillors do not believe that their re-election will turn on such things, and local authority officers do not, for the most part, care about very much beyond their pay and pensions and whether the equalities and discrimination handbooks are up to date.

A different view of grafitti

I was about to publish one of my periodic comments on the prevalence of graffiti in my part of North Oxford and at the failure by both Oxford City Council and the police to do anything either to prevent it or to clear it up.

My most recent post was in April (see Oxford graffiti gets worse) and concerned, as before, the track leading to Port Meadow and the bridge across the railway. I was then (and remained) angry that the dullards of Oxford City Council had boasted of a project to clear graffiti quickly but had in fact merely sprayed paint over some of, thus permanently ruining decent brickwork and providing the yobbos with a blank canvas. I suggested that they just left it alone until someone more active, caring and competent took over the job.

My update post has been pre-empted by a comment from a reader which to not be ignored even if I do not agree with what he says. His comment (published, unusually for me, in full) is as follows:

Keeping up the road works in Oxford

An article on my Oxford Agenda site called Speed cameras and statistical ignorance had as its twin targets the use of false statistics to justify restrictions on the roads, and the fact that highways officers are good examples of high-spending bureaucrats who plough on with wholly unnecessary road works while the rest of us tighten our belts.

Living in Oxfordshire, I do not have to look far for examples of both. I cite the panic-struck rush to put barriers down Oxford’s Eastern By Pass following an accident which was patently caused by the misjudgement and stupidity of a woman who was jailed for it. I might have added the enormous sums lashed out on the Cowley Road following a bus-cyclist accident which again had an obvious cause unconnected with the road layout. That one had also the use of retrospective statistics as to the percentage drop in accidents which, on examination, derived from a sample too small to mean anything and devoid of any analysis as to the origins of such accidents as there were – this being the point of the speed camera study which my article is about.

Lib Dems against prohibition

My article Lib Dems succeed in pushing at 20mph open door included a passage on how the different political parties feel entitled to interfere in every aspect of our lives. I said of Oxford’s Lib Dems and local councillor Alan Armitage that “the Lib Dems want to be your nanny, with grim busybodies like Armitage convinced that he knows better than you what is right and good for you”.

That draws a comment from someone who says he is proposing to get a gang together to start a group called “Lib Dems Against Prohibition” with the side comment that it would have been called “bansturbation” but that would have taken too much explanation.

Lib Dems succeed in pushing at 20mph open door

The latest edition of the Oxford Lib Dems circular proudly boasts of their success in persuading Oxfordshire County Council to agree unanimously to impose a 20 mph limit on all non-arterial residential roads in Oxford. The screaming headline “Lib Dems win on 20 limits” and the breathless account of the victory might give the impression that startling flights of oratory and skilful negotiation were needed. In fact, agreement to the measure has long been inevitable. What is more important – and deeply depressing – is why this should be so.

Stiff penalties will enforce eco-town viability

A comment comes in about the transport aspects of eco-towns covered in my post of last night Weston-Otmoor Flintgrad will be Commuterville. It suggests that the fine for driving out of Flintgrad at peak times could be as high as £200.

That seems consistent with the general approach likely to be taken by a government which thinks that heavy-handed authoritarianism is the way to go. My theme yesterday was that we are in fact unlikely to see the transport benefits – the incentives – which the developer is offering. They are out of the developer’s hands anyway, and any scheme which depends on a Labour government honouring its commitments, on the competence of Network Rail, and on the the abilities of the transport officers of Oxfordshire County Council, is doomed to failure.

Weston-Otmoor Flintgrad will be Commuterville

The eco-towns, or Flintgrads as they are known after the not-very-bright single-issue fanatic Caroline Flint who is promoting them, are flawed in concept and far from eco. Weston Otmoor, near Oxford, has more flaws than most. We have seen New Labour’s bad faith in this region before and take no comfort either from Flint’s promise to adhere to the planning process or from our estimate of her ability to hold the developers to their promises.

A report commissioned by the Government to challenge the developers of the so-called “eco-towns” has applauded the “developed transport strategy” on which the plans are based, but foresees that Weston Otmoor, the development close to Oxford, will simply become a dormitory town. Their report says

The transport strategy is potentially transformational and uses tram-train, free travel and demand management for car-use. As residents may simply take the tram to the park-and-ride and drive to either London or Birmingham, how will the town be stopped from becoming Commuterville?

All sorts of questions arise here, not least how a group including a fashion designer and a couple of television presenters can purport to have anything useful to say on the subject, particularly as they do not appear to have spoken to anyone opposed to the Weston-Otmoor scheme.

Excess plastics taken away next time

I wrote a while ago (Just empty the f***ing bins) about a bag full of plastic bottles whch I had left propped up against the blue plastics collection box because I had not had time to drive them to the tip as I usually do. I mused as to what the little jerk from the council expected me to do with them if they did not fit into the box and concluded that, given the choice between giving up milk, dumping the plastic in the landfill bin or driving to the tip, the last was the best option.

Wittenham Clumps theme park abandoned

South Oxfordshire District Council has abandoned its plan to link Didcot with Wittenham Clumps by a country theme park (see Didcot Country Theme Park to cost £2.5m). The council pen-pushers were taken aback by the force of the attacks on their scheme which, to their eyes, had everything going for it – lots of public money to splash about, nasty wild fields and hedges tamed in council-approved manner, and paths, sign-posts and public lavatories (“torlets” in the lingo of the council employee) all over the place.

Oxford Mayor’s Prius goes like the clappers

Whatever else you say about the Toyota Prius, it goes like the clappers on the open road. I had rather assumed that they needed a following wind and a downward slope, but I have just been overtaken by one heading north towards Oxford on the A34, and I was doing 70 mph.

Its numberplate was FC 1 which makes this the second traffic offence for Oxford’s Mayor in a few weeks – a recent letter to the Oxford Times observed that the mayoral car had been seen parked on double-yellow lines. Rules, of course, are for ordinary people, not councillors, especially mayors.

Rubbish talk from John Tanner

A photograph in the Oxford Times shows Labour Group councillor John Tanner surrounded by heaps of the green and blue boxes and wheelie bins into which we now sort our rubbish. I assumed that the story was about storing the vast amount of rubbish which John Tanner utters in a typical week, but it was in fact about new plans for consolidating all the recyclables into a single recycling box.

Just empty the f***ing bins

What can we do when Oxford City Council officers refuse to collect the plastic which won’t fit into our blue boxes? Stop drinking milk?

Like many others in Oxford, I make a trip to the tip every so often to dispose of the excess plastic, glass and paper which accumulates as a result of the current fortnightly collections scheme. It is one of the unintended consequences of the cut in the rubbish collections rota that those who of us who do zealously separate our recyclables from the rest of the rubbish find ourselves unable to store the results over the intervals between collections.

One wonders what the council officers of Oxford’s Rubbish Department think about the number of car journeys now being made for this reason – but, of course, the question answers itself at once. Council officers don’t think – invite them to try, and they scratch their bottoms and dribble a bit with the effort, but nothing resembling thought is likely to result.

Desecrated Oxford in the Times

A letter under the title Oxford desecrated appeared in the Times of 19 May. The writer refers to the honeyed rhythm, curve, quality and dramatic punctuation of the High and says:

The road itself is not a smooth surface sending the eye to the gorgeous gold of the stone, but a pock-marked way, cluttered with signs, part-barriers and the other detritus of modern traffic management. It is as if some monstrous urban planner has, with calm deliberation, set upon a path of destruction. And it is impossible to believe that any other great city would visit such horrors on such beauty.

He wonders if we could engage some Oxford minds on the subject.

What took the police to Port Meadow?

What took a battalion of Oxford’s Finest up on to Burgess Field, by Oxford’s Port Meadow, on Tuesday? It looked, apparently, like the chorus from the Pirates of Penzance having an outing on Emmerdale Farm as they all jumped on the back of a Ranger’s truck and bumped over the track.

Was it the showdown in the turf war between the Albanian drugs dealers and their local rivals? Were they off to get the rough sleeper who craps all over the place, to the delight of the dogs and the deep distaste of everyone else? Perhaps a couple were enjoying themselves in breach of New Labour’s Public Order (Copulation in Public Places) Prevention Act 1999 or whatever it was called.

The Islamic Centre casting vote

One of this column’s principles is that no battle is too old to give up, and that we must keep alive the memories of former mistakes to prevent their like happening again. I will happily keep kicking the corpses of long-dead councillors and officials to remind their successors that the evil that men do lives after them, particularly where planning matters are concerned.

Lib-Dem Tall leaves Oxford politics

Stephen Tall, Lib Dem councillor for Headington in Oxford, has stepped down from Oxford politics. One of the better councillors, it seemed to me. I am not much interested in the politics, only in the general level of intelligence and sense of objective rightness amongst those who spend our money, and Tall seemed to me to bring some applied decency to a largely contemptible local political scene.

Photographing traffic wardens

I did a piece yesterday about a traffic warden who “ordered” a driver to delete photographs which he took of her. The source of that was an Oxford Times Online story which has since attracted some comments.

One is a useful note about precedents for such heavy-handed reactions, making it clear that policemen and their kind have no right to prevent photography or order deletion of photographs which have been taken. There are qualifications – private landowners or private functions can make their own rules, the police may have the right to keep everyone away from a major incident, celebrities may be able to bar publication in certain circumstances, organisations are restricted in respect of the personal data they can keep, there might be protection from extreme harassment, and there are probably certain defence installations where photographs are expressly prohibited by law.