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.

The reaction from those whom they patronise in this way is wholly predictable. Sabir Hussain Mirza, chairman of the Muslim Council of Oxford, is quoted on the Oxford Mail web site as saying: “I’m really upset about this. This is the one occasion which everyone looks forward to in the year. Christians, Muslims and other religions all look forward to Christmas. This is going to be a disaster. I’m angry and very, very disappointed”.

The same site quotes Rabbi Eli Bracknell, who teaches at the Jewish Educational Centre, in Cowley Road, as saying: “It’s important to maintain a traditional British Christmas. Anything that waters down traditional culture and Christianity in the UK is not positive for the British identity”.

I describe the reaction as “predictable” because it is the consistent reaction of those who represent non-Christian faiths when the dim little drones of Britain’s local authorities do this sort of thing. Many of them positively value the traditions of their host country. The more serious thinkers are well aware that this kind of contrived inclusiveness is anything but in reality – it positively encourages differentiation, and gives food to extremists on all sides, both the non-Christian zealots (who see a step on the road to their conversion of their hosts) and the British National Party and their kind, who find easy recruits amongst those who see a further erosion of their national identity.

It is no good, of course, trying to explain this to people like Oxford Inspires (who came up with the idea) or the non-thinkers of the Oxford Labour Group. Gordon Brown may be making heavy weather of his campaign to promote Britishness, but it is based on no mere sentiment – he is well aware that we promote division by this sort of nonsense. As fast as he tries to shovel national pride into the hole, little people on the dung-heaps of local authorities shovel it out again.

Some dozy little cow from Oxford Inspires is quoted as saying “We changed the name to be more inclusive” The robotic Ed Turner, said: “We are not Christmas killers. Among councillors there’s certainly no desire to downgrade the importance or the prominence given to Christmas”.

There probably was indeed no such desire. People this stupid really cannot see what they are doing when they make gestures like this. I suspect they think, if “think” is not too grand a word for the process, that minority faiths are like other minorities – of colour, ethnicity, gender, sexual preferences, disability or age. All you have to do, in their bigoted world, is legislate to alter the balance, and if that does not work you legislate some more.

Religion does not work like that. Those whose faith is expressed with Diwali or Hakkunah do not expect the rest of us to join in. We are welcome, no doubt, just as they are welcome to share in both the religious and the secular sides of Christmas, but they would despise themselves if they compromised on their traditions for our sakes. They despise us when we do it on their account.

Both Oxford Inspires and Oxford City Council are in what one might call attacking retreat mode on the subject today. The words “inclusive” and “diversity” have gone missing in action as more senior people elbow their subordinates aside to damp down the fires.

As so often with Oxford City Council, the problem lies with people who are all heart and no brain. Anyone capable of the slightest thought would have seen the animal-trap in the path ahead and avoided it. All that was needed was a little care with the choice of words used to describe the plans. After all, like Christmas itself, this story recurs every year in a handful of councils across the country. You would think by now that someone would keep the announcement out of the hands of dim PR girls and leaden-footed plodders like Ed Turner.

The expressions “Labour-led council” and “barrow-load of monkeys” are not necessarily synonymous. One does not expect too much intellectual rigour from Oxford Labour Group, but they owe it to us, if not to themselves, to try and avoid making Oxford a laughing-stock.

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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.

Oxford City Council imposed a new scheme of rubbish collections in late 2006. As with other councils, this was driven by EU requirements which DEFRA, the relevant Government department, bogged up in the way that DEFRA bogs up most things. The Oxford plans were originally devised under the then-incumbent Labour Group, but were implemented under a new Lib Dem council. They were not popular, as was the case everywhere else, mainly because their actual execution, and the accompanying information campaign, was the responsibility of that inept sub-species, the Oxford City council officer.

In May of this year, as Labour fell everywhere else, the Oxford voter in his wisdom restored the Labour Group. Out went the intelligent Jean Fooks as rubbish supremo, and in came John Tanner. He has just announced changes to the collection days, and could not resist saying “at the moment, we have got a higgledy-piggledy mess that we inherited from the previous Liberal Democrat council, with lorries moving across the city in a very inefficient way.”

Even John Tanner is not so thick as to believe that the collection rotas were devised by the Lib Dem councillors. They would have taken advice from the officers – it is one of those paradoxes of local government that we employ the sweepings off the employment market’s floor but then have to take their advice. In any event, it is hardly surprising that a council should review a new rota after two years and make adjustments borne of experience.

Politicians affect surprise and concern that they are so despised by those whom they govern. Much of that contempt derives from the continual sniping at a political level. Oxford’s Labour Group was deliberately unhelpful as the new system – and which, as I say, they approved when in office – was rolled out in 2006. Politically, the way they undermined their Lib Dem successors is doubtless seem as a success – the new rubbish arrangements undoubtedly contributed to the Lib Dems’ loss of control two years later. Tanner’s attack on the Lib Dems do nothing for the city, its residents, businesses and visitors. As with Gordon Brown, all we see is a ghastly little man making political points.

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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 correspondent asks me if all the traffic wardens in Oxford carry cameras. I don’t know, I am afraid. Appeal anyway – between the traffic wardens and the rather less intelligent little men in the council offices who impose the restrictions, paint the lines and stick up the notices, a high proportion of tickets is invalid.

Before you all write in to say that traffic wardens are an essential service to the community, city would grind to a halt without them, fine body of men unmatched in calibre since Monty thrashed the Hun at Alamein and all the rest, I do accept that they are a necessary evil. I know we cannot expect recruits capable of discretion. I know that they are only obeying orders. I accept that they are an inevitable concomitant to busy streets, like the rats which they resemble as they scuttle along the gutters.

They are, however, the visible part of a system which has failed in Oxford to provide the balance between car users and others who wish or need to visit the city. We do not get to see the bureaucrats whose thinking (there, I can be generous if I try) is limited to screwing up the traffic, building artificial bottlenecks, filling the streets with barriers, signs and notices and creating jobs for themselves with unnecessary tampering with the road layouts.

As the pen-pushers cower behind their desks, it is the traffic wardens whom the public sees. It takes a particular type of person to choose to be a traffic warden and it is not a type one much admires. They get lumped together with their kind – all the growing army of petty little people enforcing petty but increasingly onerous and intrusive regulations – and we rather lose the distinction between those which are necessary and the majority who are not.

Perhaps we would mind a little less if we ever saw a policeman or had any sense that any of this vast army of officials was actually on our side.

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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.

Graffiti says something more. It does not just say that no-one cares, but it adds that you can do what you like around here with impunity. Now, in this over-regulated, health’n’safety, New Labour, world, I am usually only too pleased to find somewhere where you can do what you like without some dim Plod or whining official or man in a hi-vis jacket telling you to stop, or filling in a form, or dragging you away in chains. There are limits, however, even for me.

Close by the bridge is the spot where the drug dealers meet their clients. Most evenings you can play a game – is the obese youth in the silver Peugeot the buyer or the seller? They have driven up a dead-end to get here and would be boxed in, caught red-handed with no escape route if the police came along.

Why should they fear that? The graffiti shows them that no-one will interrupt them and that no-one cares. Residents – me for example – who strongly deprecate what they are doing and the misery they are causing at both ends of their transaction will not report them. One of New Labour’s contributions to society has been to drive decent people away from any involvement with authority. For some this is the logical conclusion of Labour’s view that the State is responsible for everything;  some fear each entry made on Big Brother’s database;  some can’t face entanglement with under-educated policemen struggling with forms. Me – I fear wasting my time trying to get Mr Plod interested at all.

How do you convey shades of grey to a policeman? Once he establishes that no, you do not know what exactly changes hands in these transactions, or even that anything does change hands, Constable Plod will weigh the chance of getting some points towards his weekly target and decide not to bother – unless he hauls me in for wasting police time by making the call at all.

Master Obese Peugeot knows that. He knows from the graffiti that no-one in authority will care enough to come by. Authority is too busy fining motorists driving at 31 mph, chopping down trees which might one day fall on someone, beating up Westgate protesters or handing out parking tickets, to have time left for drug-dealers.

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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:

“Having read your article about graffiti may I suggest an alternative view as a nearly sixty year old.

Some of the graffiti on the wall and bridge at Aristotle lane is some of the best I have ever seen and I regard the path over the railway as the finest modern art gallery in Oxford.

If the critics would care to look at the last picture on the wall on the right as one enters Port Meadow they will see that the tiny plants growing out of the mortar have been carefully spared the application of silver paint. It is beautiful. It is benign and as one of the graffiti says on the other side of the bridge I don’t bite – or somesuch. I dread to think what the council workers will do to the plants when they apply their expensive chemicals.

I have today photographed one, written above it is the graffitio nom de guerre Posh Hosh. It is a beautiful hybrid between a sort of oriental straw script and a depiction of bamboo formed by paint run.

If Oxford were to challenge any other city in Britain for quality graffiti it would win hands down.

It is a free and vibrant social art.

Look at it. Enjoy it”

I think I can accept that there can be such a thing as “quality graffiti”. I think I can recognise that I am not city’s expert in modern art. I can, nevertheless discriminate with reasonable accuracy between art and the mindless scrawlings of an under-occupied yob. If this is indeed the best modern art in the city then Andrew Nairne (the recently retired head of MOMA) has laboured in vain.

I am not sure that its status as art or not, or any qualitative assessment of its status relative to any other local collection is really relevant anyway. Youths have sprayed paint all over the bridge, along the path leading up to it, and on the bridge piers. Unlike other art collections in the city, I have no choice as to whether I gaze on it. I am reasonably sure that most of the passers-by and all of the residents preferred the paintwork without graffiti. That was certainly the view of all the political parties standing for election in May, since they all made commitments to the effect that, if elected, they would deal with graffiti. Labour won, and it is always hard to tell with the local Labour party whether they were consciously lying as to their post-electoral intentions or just not able to read the promises which the copywriter made on their behalf.

Whatever your views on the artistic merit of the graffiti on the bridge at the end of Aristotle Lane, the failure to remove it is symptomatic of a wider rot in Oxford’s public services and in policing priorities.

Neglected graffiti is of a piece with other aspects of the decline of the city. Domestic rubbish bins overflow in front gardens and streets, thanks to an “improvement” in that most basic and visible service, the weekly collection. It is weekly no longer. Public bins overflow, and the city’s reiterated assurances that they take it all very seriously are at odds with what our eyes tell us. Grass grows in the streets as in a city abandoned ahead of a siege. Autumn’s leaves will lie where they fall, or clog the drains which are no longer cleared.

Apart from the neglect, we have the positive steps taken to degrade the visible environment. From that same spot whence my reader so admired the delicate tracery of his heroes’ al fresco artwork, you can see a new mobile phone mast, slipped in one evening when no-one was there to protest, and not even placed vertically. A succession of planning decisions is quickly blighting the southward view from the bridge. The dim little men of Oxfordshire County Council’s Highways Department use Aristotle Lane as a repository for all the sign-posts and yellow paint they cannot find a use for elsewhere.  What is the difference between the ignorant vandalism of the yob with a spray can and the ignorant vandalism of the pen-pushers in the council’s planning office or the highways department? The yobbos will grow out of it eventually. One day we will have an administration which actually does things instead of merely promising them, and the bridge will be cleaned. The formalised vandalism of the planners will continue for as long as democracy can be thwarted by developers’ money, and the results – the shoddy buildings and the ruined views – will be with us for ever.

So while I cannot agree with the commentator’s analysis of the cultural and aesthetic value of the graffiti, it is not the worst addition to the view from the bridge. Nor, indeed, are things aesthetic the only downside of authority which neglects its responsibilities. Just by the Aristotle Lane bridge, the drug dealers ply their trade with impunity, well aware that no-one will disturb them except their customers. I will write separately about that.

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An article on my Oxford Agenda site called Speed cameras and statistical ignorance had as its twin targets the use of false statistics to justify restrictions on the roads, and the fact that highways officers are good examples of high-spending bureaucrats who plough on with wholly unnecessary road works while the rest of us tighten our belts.

Living in Oxfordshire, I do not have to look far for examples of both. I cite the panic-struck rush to put barriers down Oxford’s Eastern By Pass following an accident which was patently caused by the misjudgement and stupidity of a woman who was jailed for it. I might have added the enormous sums lashed out on the Cowley Road following a bus-cyclist accident which again had an obvious cause unconnected with the road layout. That one had also the use of retrospective statistics as to the percentage drop in accidents which, on examination, derived from a sample too small to mean anything and devoid of any analysis as to the origins of such accidents as there were – this being the point of the speed camera study which my article is about.

As to the pointless road works, Oxfordshire County Council has just finished fiddling around with a traffic island in St Giles, and is now busy altering the pavements in Summertown. Nothing about this work can be described as necessary, and in economic times like these, work must surely be necessary to warrant its expense.

We know why they are doing it, of course. The Department of Transport has dammed the largesse which Oxfordshire County Council had come to expect for the next round of pointless buggering around in the High Street. All those little pen-pushers have to have the semblance of a purpose, and can keep their in-trays full and their large teams of workmen in occupation by tampering with the pavements.

Meanwhile, Gordon Brown gapes at an empty Treasury, wishing he had something left in there to bribe the electorate with. Its all gone, Gordon, along with your reputation for prudence. A great deal of it has gone to keep local government officers off the streets by fiddling with the paving on them.

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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.

The use of this word is not new – I came across it in an article called What do you call it when people ban everything? by Tim Worstall in the Times (July 12 2007). I don’t really go for it, mainly because it makes these people sound rather more exciting than they actually are.

The idea, though, of Oxford’s Lib Dems actually coming out against prohibition is an attractive one – they might have held on to power in the last local elections if that had been their banner. The constant erosion of our liberties in big things and small is one of the (many) reasons why New Labour is heading for the U-bend at a great rate.

There is a contradiction, is there not, in the names of each of the political parties? The Liberal Democrats are neither liberal nor democratic. The Greens seek power over private lives that Red Lenin would have killed for – indeed did kill for, but never achieved to the extent that the Green Party aims for. Labour isn’t working (and nor are increasing numbers of those it governs). And the Conservatives keep banging on about “change“. Only the Raving Loony Party has a name which accurately describes its purpose.

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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.

The laurel-wreathed victor in this account is the egregious Lib Dem Councillor Alan Armitage. Leaving his personality on one side (as, indeed, he has) what does he actually say in support of his case for the 20 mph speed limit?

“This is all about saving lives and reducing injuries in Oxfordshire, where there are an estimated 30,000 road accidents of all types each year. In 2006…there were 68 deaths in our county from road accidents and 304 people suffering “Serious” effects.”

The Lib Dems announce their dramatic win against an open door

I don’t know how many miles of road there are in Oxfordshire. They include parts of a motorway, a major north-south trunk road, several other major roads and miles of winding lanes. Almost none of the fatalities and serious outcomes to which Armitage refers took place in Oxford, and those which did occur derived largely from stupidity or errors of judgement, not from speed per se. Oxfordshire County Council officials pull statistical stunts like this to justify the vast amount of money they spend – “accidents down by 40% since road-works”, you might read, and discover that there were five incidents in 2005 and only three in 2006, with nothing offered either as to the severity or the causes of those which did occur.

I saw a yobbo yesterday push his souped-up banger to 60 mph between Worcester College and the corner with Hythe Bridge Street. He has no fear of being caught – the police are all busy pulling in people for cycling across the pavement or are filling in forms. Master Yobbo would behave the same whatever the limit, and probably can’t count to 20 anyway with his Blair-Brown apology for an education. He is the one to go for, not busy people trying to get from A to B.

Highways officers are both thick and self-serving – they too stupid to understand the concept of causation, the idea of determining a relationship between cause and effect. They have to justify past money spent and money which they intend to spend. Vague, unsubstantiated references to accidents seem a powerful argument which keeps them in their jobs.

Armitage does not have the excuse of being thick, not that thick anyway, and his job is not under threat in a ward which would vote for anyone in Lib Dem colours – as they showed in electing him. Why does he push so hard to screw up Oxford’s traffic flow?

After 11 years of New Labour, the wind is behind people who want to ban everything. We have seen the elevation of the little people to a point where their views count. On the whole, little people are little people for good reason, and multiplying their voices by thousands does not make them any more worth listening to. The Oxford Times is full of articles about, and letters from, nobodies who cannot contain their delight at being listened to. There was an article a few weeks ago with a photograph of some dull little man who had languished in well-deserved obscurity all his life and who suddenly found a reporter and a photographer keen to hear his views and snap his characterless visage. There was no suggestion that he was qualified in any way, or had any relevant experience, statistics or knowledge to support his “demand” that everyone else be made to crawl around town in second gear.

The political parties tap eagerly into this. Of the thinking parties, the Greens like to look all soft and cuddly, but give them a whisper of power and their interference in your life will be uncontained as they try to make you be like them; 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; the Conservatives have no interest in Oxford City because none of the brighter ones live here. The non-thinkers of the Labour Group, from East Oxford’s MP downwards, do not need the motive of doing you good – centrist control is part of the philosophy and anything which imposes rules and restrictions is ipso facto a good thing.

What of the highways officers who will plan and execute the new restrictions? Risk-averse, like all civil servants, and too thick to question where risk really lies, they will be all for it. They love signs, mainly, I think, because their own lives would be unimaginably unstructured and directionless if they did not have frequent reminders as to what they should do.

They have a more compelling motive, though. Generous Uncle Gordon has poured money their way over the last eleven years, motivated, as in so many areas, more by the wish to spend than by any calculation as to the value of the spending. Whatever Oxfordshire County Council’s highways officers may lack in raw intellect, they are adept at making cases for major road-mending exercises. Now the money has dried up, and we were beginning to wonder what the rows of plank-like dullards would find to do to justify their jobs and salaries. Now we know.

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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.

It is easy to predict that we will see all the burdens and none of the incentives. Who is going to choose to live in Flintgrad if they are to be caged in by their dependence on public transport in a country with a track-record of under-investment in transport and with a culture in which transport is the preserve of the dimmest officials?

This goes to the viability of the whole project. To fund the enormous capital spend on infrastructure which will be required, to say nothing of the ongoing “free” public transport which is promised, the developer must anticipate a substantial profit on the houses – houses which will have to be built to stringent (that is, expensive) eco-standards if the eco-towns are to begin to justify the ruin of greenfield sites which is involved.

Who will choose to go and live where Caroline Flint can – literally – dictate your every move?

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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.

Their criticism is at best based on an assumption that the developers will actually provide the transport infrastructure on which their plans are based. The reality is that the provision of anything outside the town itself is dependent on unreliable third parties – Network Rail for the promised regular train services to London, Birmingham and Oxford and the Government itself for the road links. The badly-designed A34/M40 junction and the A34 towards Oxford are already over-loaded. If the promised transport links come up to the promises, then Commuterville it is; if they do not, then the eco-town becomes just a dormitory town feeding thousands more into an over-stretched transport system. The whole idea of dumping a 2,000 acre housing estate in some fields and hoping for the best does not amount to a housing strategy.

But then one does not hope for a strategy from Housing Minister Caroline Flint. John Prescott’s departure from government leaves Flint the undisputed holder of the title Minister least equipped to think Prescott too had great plans for dumping swathes of housing all over the south of England without regard to infrastructure implications – not just transport, but hospitals, schools, jobs, water supply all conspicuous by their absence from the schemes. Flint has presumably inherited the same officials and certainly brings no greater intelligence to bear than Prescott did to addressing the problems.

Flint famously has room for only one thought in her head at a time. This week it is affordable housing, and she drones on in her curiously flat, dull tones about affordable housing as if it were a stand-alone imperative which outweighs all practical considerations. An imperative it certainly is, largely thanks to a decade of government neglect and uncontrolled immigration, but the actual houses are only part of the problem. Multi-dimensional solutions are not likely to come from this one-dimensional minister.

These Ceausescu towns, or Flintgrads as they are being called, are flawed in principle anyway, the “eco” label being mere window-dressing for what a writer to the Oxford Times called “the antithesis of planning”. Quite apart from its dependence on an infrastructure which is unlikely to be provided as specified, this particular one conflicts with the local plan for growth at Bicester and Banbury.

Caroline Flint promises full compliance with the usual planning process. “Let me be absolutely clear: eco-towns will go through the planning process, and suggestions otherwise are wrong”. This is not likely to impress in a region well-used to broken government promises on this front. Beverley Hughes, when Immigration Minister, made the same promise over the proposed immigration centre near Bicester in 2002 shortly before the government ignored a planning inspector’s recommendation against the plans.

Hughes was later forced to resign when caught lying about another aspect of immigration policy. One of the protesters said of her “I thought she was a patronising, short-sighted woman. She was of the old school where she knew best and what was good for you”. Knowing what is best for you is Caroline Flint’s most famous trait. The problem is that she doesn’t know anything else.

The reference to “the planning process” is deliberately disingenuous anyway. The “process” in matters like this allows the Minister to call in a planning decision and reverse an inspector’s finding, just as Prescott did over the immigration centre. The government will want to deliver on this before it is kicked out of office less than two years from now.

New Labour is also, as we know, a babe-in-arms when it comes to dealing with skilled private-sector negotiators. Property developers, like IT providers, doctors and big consulting firms, can run rings round a bunch of career civil servants and the unworldly amateurs of government in contractual discussions. Nothing in Flint’s experience as bar maid, council equalities officer and Westminster researcher will equip her to secure a deal which ties down a developer adequately to its promises, quite apart from her lack of any obvious intelligence.

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