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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

Labour’s win is Oxford’s loss

If, when playing Scrabble, you find yourself with a completely useless set of letters, you can throw them all away and take another set. It is a pity you cannot do that with politicians. There are one or two whom Oxford would miss, just as some of your Scrabble letters are worth keeping, but it would otherwise be great to get rid of them all and start again.

I am not sure what suicidal impulse makes Oxford call back Labour just as the rest of the country is ditching it. The biggest single identifiable cause is dislike of the new rubbish collection arrangements. These were actually approved in all essentials under the outgoing Labour-led administration of two years ago but it fell to the Lib-Dems to implement them. There is no evidence that they would have been any different under Labour, but Labour’s good fortune, as it now appears, was to be able to scarper over the period when the garbage hit the fan (see Fish-heads for Fooks not fair).

NOC in Oxford but Labour gains four

God help us. No Overall Control on Oxford City Council, with Labour the largest party, having gained four seats.

The Conservatives appear to have lost the two who defected to them. I guess the Independent Trots or whatever they call themselves have lost two, and the Greens are down one, with all but one of those seats going to Labour.

The Greens and the two surviving Trots hold the balance. Another two years of Toytown infighting between juvenile gangs more interested in making political points than in making progress.

Now, I guess, they sit down in smoke-free rooms to decide who gets the big chair. Please don’t let it be Labour’s John Tanner – John Prescott’s brain combined with Ken Livingstone’s charm, the fingernail down Oxford’s blackboard, the old-style Socialist whose Socialist ideas never seem to benefit any identifiable group.

How do you lose seats to Labour in this election?

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Waiting with bated breath for Oxford’s elections

So, what will be the outcome of the elections for Oxford City Council? We are one hour away from the results as I start writing.

Local elections are supposed to be just that – you should vote for the individual who, with or without his party, will serve your Ward best. In practice, a preference for an individual usually has to be over-ridden by a party choice since an individual without a majority is of little practical value.

Sometimes, and this is one of those times, national considerations come into play. Since national Government effectively hamstrings local councillors, however good, one has to have regard to the wider picture. Gordon Brown’s Labour is a corrosive force at every level from electoral corruption to personal interference. Brown himself has no personal mandate and is trading on the popularity of the predecessor he knifed. Like it or not, these elections are an opportunity for ordinary people – not politicians, not the media, not the ridiculously small samples used for so-called opinion polls, but people en masse – to send a message.

Oxford grafitti gets worse

I wrote a few weeks ago about Oxford City Council’s botched attempt to attend to the grafitti which plagues the city (Grafitti remedy worse than the grafitti). I suggested that if the best they could do was to splodge green paint over the mess, then all they were doing was providing a blank canvas for the next load of grafitti.

My post showed the brickwork at the Port Meadow end of Aristotle Lane railway bridge. Some new grafitti had already been added. This is what it looks like now.

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.

Oxford park-and-rides to be free at last

The rumours are that Oxford City Council is planning to hand over control of the three park-and-ride car parks which it controls to Oxfordshire County Council, that all park-and-rides will be free, and that more spaces will be provided. The aim, of course, is encouragement to drivers to stay out of the city by offering them an incentive to park on the edge of town.

Hit or miss the Labour candidate

I had a printed note on yellow paper through the door a few days ago. It was from Sue Ledwith, apparently the Labour candidate in North Ward. Perhaps printing her stuff on Lib Dem yellow is a cunning way to confuse the voters and pick up votes meant for someone else.

“Sorry we missed you”, it said. The last time I saw Sue Ledwith, I nearly hit her, so it as well that I missed her this time.

Westgate Plods duff up Green woman

You may like to watch the video of Oxford’s finest trying to arrest Oxford councillor Deborah Glass Woodin as she protested about the felling of trees at the Westgate Centre.

The Greens and the police are the front-line troops in the war occasioned by the cock-ups of greedy developers and the supine, acquiescent little men from Oxford City’s planning department. If either of the latter had approached this problem properly, a much-needed development would be half-built by now and new trees would be growing away. As it is, the police and protesters are left to slog it out on the ground.

Yet another try for a skate board area

A third attempt to build a skate board park in North Oxford has apparently been all but beaten off. Two have already been repelled from Aristotle Lane Recreation Ground, between Kingston Road and Waterside. This one was actually planned for Waterside itself, at the end of Walton Well Road on a patch of rough ground known, with revolting tweeness, as The Spinney.

It was apparently promoted by Councillor Clark Brundin and Councillor Alan Armitage fuelled respectively (I would guess) by naivety and ambition. This time around, the council officers are not backing the idea – a whipped cur shuns the fire or whatever the expression is. Even council officers can get a message if you kick them hard enough – but not, apparently, some of the councillors.The first skate area was plotted between Councillor Jim Campbell and an official in the Parks department known locally as Dim Cow. It killed Jim Campbell’s reputation – someone told me, I hope correctly, that he was a “broken man” when the diggers destroyed his creation in March 2004 with £50,000 wasted.

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.