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.

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:

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.

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.

Data Protection and public photographs

Oxford Times Online has a story about a man who, whilst being given a parking ticket by a traffic warden, spotted that she had herself parked on a double-yellow line and took a photograph of her. She “ordered” him to delete the photograph, saying that taking photographs of her was in breach of the Data Protection Act, and threatened to call the police when he refused to do so.

There are four distinct elements here – the alleged parking offence, the warden’s own parking, the Data Protection Point and the threat to call the police. Of those, three are easily disposed of.

Fish-heads for Fooks not fair

It seemed more than a little unfair of Dom Joly to pursue Councillor Jean Fooks round Oxford Town Hall with a box of rotting fish on his television programme The Complainers last week. Mrs Fooks is the executant of a policy agreed in principle between all parties and which she inherited when the Lib Dems took control (in a manner of speaking) of the city. Having agreed to give an interview, she smelt a rat (as it were) and was filmed politely declining to go ahead with it.

Didcot Country Theme Park to cost £2.5m

South Oxfordshire’s plan to tame Wittenham Clumps into a country theme park are reminiscent of Jerome K Jerome’s caricature of German tidiness. Why can’t these ghastly little people leave the countryside alone, why don’t they leave people to make their own leisure, and why did the planners fail to reserve green space out of the house-builders’ land?

The pen-pushers at South Oxfordshire District Council want to create a 1,500 acre “country park” stretching from Didcot to Wittenham Clumps. There is, apparently a “growing shortfall in green spaces” in Didcot, and a network of paths or “greenways” is proposed.

Westgate War to continue

The Battle of Bonn Square has given way to the War of Westgate, as protesters promise to keep fighting the development to the end. As one who has long predicted a civil uprising in Oxford, I am on their side.

I am not, I have to say, a natural ally of fluffy-headed Greens or unwashed tree-campers, nor would I dream of arguing that the present Westgate and its hinterland are worth preserving. But they are as ghastly as they are because an earlier generation of city planners and city councillors made exactly the same mistakes as this lot are about to make, and with the same uncaring ignorance of aesthetics, unthinking servility towards big business, and unwarranted contempt for democracy.

Grafitti remedy worse than the grafitti

Slopping green paint over graffiti ruins the brickwork permanently. Leave the graffiti there until the day when we have competent people in charge who will address the real problem, not just paint over it to meet their targets.

The principle was a good one. Oxford City Council (presumably the dreaded and dreadful City Works) announced in October 2007 that it would tackle graffiti and similar visual eyesores. Residents were encouraged to send in photographs and the council committed to deal with obscene and racist graffiti within one working day and other graffiti within 14 working days.

The photographs go up on the council’s web site along with a statement as to when it was or will be fixed. This splendid commitment (I mean that – this is in theory how local government should work) was coupled with a statement that a major culprit in North Oxford had been apprehended by Mr Plod on one of his rare visits to the area.

Since then, the amount of graffiti near my house has doubled and the council’s remedy – splashing green paint over the mess – is not only a cure worse than the problem but provides a splendid canvas for the next spate.

‘Pride in our city’ gets a gutter cleared

It now appears that it was Oxford City Council who weeded the 30 foot stretch of gutter illustrated in my post No grass in Oxford except in the gutters . I had surmised in A gutter gets weeded in Oxford that a resident had done it in frustration, perhaps on their way back from posting their Council Tax payment.

Kevin Penpusher of Oxford City Council said: “After 14 phone calls of complaint and the Oxford Inciter article, we knew we had to act to avoid a serious threat to the public perception of our competence. We don’t have the resources within Oxford City Council to deal with major gutter clearances like this, but we were lucky to have Maczysz Kosciuszko seconded to us by Wallsall Council (are you sure he said “Wallsall”? Ed) to lead the team for the operation”.

A gutter gets weeded in Oxford!

I put up a post a couple of days ago called No grass in Oxford except in the gutters which explored a couple of paradoxes – the fact that Oxford’s planners want to concrete all the grass whilst the street people let grass grow through the concrete; the zeal with Oxford City Council pursues you for putting the rubbish out on the wrong day or in the wrong receptacle contrasted with the lack of any enthusiasm for weeding the streets; and the city’s new motto about pride in our city compared with the reality of the run-down streets.

What a load of bollards in Oriel Square

Oriel Square was a bustling, pretty little place when I first knew it, as an undergraduate in the 1970s. I lived round the corner for two years and crossed it every day. Oriel College is beautiful even amongst its peers, in large part because you can stand back and look at it across the square. You could park there then, and the place was alive with cars, bikes and pedestrians.

It is a soulless place now, dragged down by the dead hand of council bureaucrats for whom it is just a street, by dim, dull little people with no cultural roots, no sensibility or sensitivity, no faculties to appreciate beautiful things.

Environment Agency neglects the basics

Many factors contributed to the severity of the recent Oxford floods – a lot of rain fell in a short time; the Government reneged on its flood defence funding commitments; Oxford’s developer-friendly planning officers, too idle to think beyond getting their coats on at 5:00, too thick, indeed, to think at all, allowed unlimited building on flood plains, and so on.

One of the chief culprits was the Environment Agency, on two counts: they could have stood more strongly against flood-plain development (they could not bar it, but they could have opposed it) and they could have kept the channels clear.

Oxford models Health and Safety nonsense

“We have them here in droves at Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council. The councillor who chopped down the willow trees of Osney with no warning or consultation (or, as it turned out, any evidence of actual danger from most of them) is a good example. The officer who plastered the banks of the Thames with big red notices after someone drowned is another. Oxfordshire Highways is entirely staffed by people like this.

When they plead health and safety, what they usually mean is that they are scared of being blamed, too thick to analyse likely patterns of cause and effect, too dim to distinguish between hazard and risk, too idle to take anything but the safe course which allows them to to ignore all arguments. “Elf ‘n safety” they say. “Get a life”, said Bill Callaghan once.”

This is an extract from a post on our sister site Oxford Agenda. Called HSE buries its towels slip it reports on the oft-reiterated claims by Sir Bill Callaghan, the Chairman of the Health and Safety Commission, that the “negative stories about…over-bureaucracy” derive largely from over-empowered and under-brained little prats in local authorities, not from the Health and Safety Executive.

He may be right about the relative stupidity, although the post shows that the HSE has its own share of wasteful intervention in non-issues. Oxford provides some examples of what he is talking about.

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Rubbish and Graffiti by the Oxford Canal

The photograph below encapsulates quite a lot of Oxford’s neglect in one go.

We see a hideous bridge across the Oxford Canal. It is covered in graffiti. Next to it is an overflowing bin. On it are two traffic signs. All around are weeds. The bridge we are stuck with, this generation’s blight on the area for a century or more. The others could be fixed tomorrow with no great application of thought or money.

The story of the bridge, which lies at the end of old Frenchay Road and runs across to the Berkeley Homes Waterways estate, is told in a post called A bridge too big on the Oxford Canal. This post deals with the bin, the graffiti and the notices.

Another go at wrecking the Rec

Following the fiasco of the skate area which was erected and as quickly closed down at Aristotle Lane Recreation Ground (see Wrecking the Rec), Oxford City Council conducted a further survey as to what local people wanted for the Rec. Most wanted the same as they had wanted originally – for the field to be drained, some benches and some kick-about goals. The drainage was estimated to cost abut £50,000 (i.e. the same as had been thrown away on the skate area). Benches cost about £300 each, as does a kickabout goal.

Wrecking the Rec

Aristotle Lane Recreation Ground is a pretty little rectangle of grass and trees by the Oxford Canal in North Oxford. More than 20 years ago, I pushed a pram round it. As my children grew up, we played football and cricket there and threw Frisbees. Now my children go there with guitars and girls.

Signs to ignore in Oxford

The picture below was taken at Medley Weir at the end of June 2007. The bright red sign first went up at the end of January, when a boy drowned in the River Thames just behind the left-hand gate post.

The notice might arguably have served some purpose in January. The river was very swollen and over-ran the path along the river. The path itself had been neglected for years – one of those situations where responsibility was divided between several authorities so none of them did anything.