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.

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.

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.

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.

A rat in an Oxford street

I nearly tripped over a rat in Walton Street this evening as I walked back late from the station.

He did not look on top form, as if he had gorged too well on the rubbish which Oxford City Council now leaves festering outside our houses for two weeks at a time. Or perhaps it is the reverse – that the wheelie bins are so effective that the rats are starving.

Either way, rats in the street are evidence of a civilisation in decline. Like the grass which grows in our gutters, they indicate that the authorities don’t care any more.

I am not sure that I will be frequenting the restaurants at the top end of Walton Street for a bit, if even the rats look peaky.

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Queuing at the council tip

The recent “improvement” to Oxford City Council’s kerbside rubbish collection means that we have to go to the tip more often than we used to.

As well as leaving us with our fish bones for a fortnight, they operate a sort of apartheid for both plastics and paper – some plastics good, other plastics bad, some types of paper in the blue box, some in the green box. If you guess wrong, they either leave you a patronising, officious, threatening, semi-literate sticker or they throw your box and its incorrect contents on its side in the road with the contents in the gutter.

Oxford’s Rubbish Politics

ThisisOxfordshire quotes Jean Fooks, the Executive Member for a Cleaner City, as saying that she is “not for turning” on the issue of fortnightly waste collections in Oxford.

I had intended to stay out of this debate save in respect of the contribution which the horrid green bins make to the decline of the streetscape, and I am willing to let the city council have a go at mitigating that before pitching in on the subject. My guess, however, is that the Hancock Prize for F***ing up the View (current holder a councillor “for his contribution to arboriculture in Osney”) will this year go to the Oxford City Council Rubbish Department (the one that’s actually called that as opposed to all the others).

Plastic Bags from Oxford shops

What ideas do you have for making Oxford a better place to shop?

I got a Comment from a man who had visited Oxford today and been impressed by the fact that the book and music shops (he named Blackwells particularly) did not assume that he wanted his purchases put into a plastic bag – indeed, assumed the opposite.

At first sight this seemed a bit off-subject, as my correspondent acknowledged. Our role here is to show you the attractions of Oxford and to castigate the authorities when their actions (or lack of them) threaten the fabric or the feel of the place.