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.

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:

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.

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.