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.

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.

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.

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).

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.