Let me see if I can convert you to my point of view in a way which jumps over the legitimate debate as to how much of the road mending is either necessary or competently executed.

It is 2011. Nearly a year has passed since Gordon Brown was ejected, his 13 years of trashing the economy coinciding with a worldwide recession. His commitment to improving public services amounted to little more than throwing money at them, as if the mere spending were enough. An expansion of the role of government included a mass of new roles and regulation, most of them quite unnecessary, requiring the recruitment of additional staff. The number of publicly-employed people rose from 5.2 million to 6.1 million in 13 years, increasing the wage bill by 29% to £157.7 billion. In the decade after Labour’s election, town hall spending rose by 53% in real terms to £164 billion per year. Few discernible benefits resulted, beyond Labour’s re-election at the hands of those grateful for the largesse and willing to suspend belief in the normal forces of economics in return for the barrow-loads of money which kept on coming their way.

As an aside (well, almost an aside) it is not clear where all these new state employees came from. The civil service proper has always attracted some high-calibre people, but few people emerge with a good degree from Russell Group universities with their ambitions set on joining the paper-shufflers in local authorities down at the bottom of the public services pond. We used to pay peanuts and get monkeys; we now have a lot of extremely well paid monkeys.

The consequence of Brown’s extravagance was that there was no slack in the system when the economy crashed. As always, the private sector was first hit, with businesses going under or reducing their wage bill. Public sector workers have had more than a year’s grace before the government axe falls on them. Whilst real businesses have slashed their expenses and recast their budgets, local authorities seem to have carried on literally as if there were no tomorrow.

Tomorrow has now come, but you would not know it to look at Oxfordshire Highways. Consistent with my opening remarks, I will avoid the question whether any of the recent works were actually necessary, and will merely observe neutrally that major roadworks at Headington continued unhindered by the recession; there are now confirmed plans to apply the same loving care to the Iffley Road. I may think them a waste of money, but I acknowledge that there are Keynesian arguments in favour of keeping in work people who would otherwise be unemployable. I have a much clearer target in sight.

A report appeared in the local news on 12th of March with the heading Council pays for plush resort for meeting and overnight stay instead of choosing its own HQ. It appeared from the article that more than £4,500 was spent on sending seven highways officers to a two-day workshop at a luxury resort out in the country – 15 miles from County Hall. Facilities include a swimming pool, health spa and golf course. This took place in January, the same month as the county council agreed £119 million of cuts, including £13 million taken from the transport budget.

Challenged on this, the highways department apparently said that “an important part of building integration, rapport, trust and joint understanding, is to have time away from the day-to-day interruptions of the office”.

Well, whilst I doubt that anyone employed by Oxfordshire Highways is capable of “understanding” in any meaningful sense, I can see that the other skills have a value. It is interesting that they do not “trust” each other – do they nick each others’ wallets perhaps, or fear that their colleagues might run off with their wives? How will that be fixed by a couple of days away? “Integration”, in local highways terms seems to mean screwing up the traffic flow equally all round, so perhaps some chat in the spa pool will help there. “Rapport”, what’s that do you think? Learning to laugh at each others’ jokes perhaps: “Did you hear the one about the perfectly good underpass we filled up at Headington shops?” – that sort of thing could keep them in stitches for hours.

Most companies in the private sector stopped going on jolly outings like this two years ago. Only those with a lot of spare money would now be able to justify sending its people out when they had perfectly good offices of their own, unless there was a geographical reason for bringing people together from a wide area. These are wasteful people with absolutely no idea of the responsibilities which come with control of public money. The Leader of the Council says it will not happen again.

There is some fun, nevertheless in imagining people of this type at a luxury hotel. I picture it like Attila’s hordes gaping at the splendours of Rome before they wrecked it – an apt metaphor, in fact, for a department whose mission seems to include the ruin of every street and view in Oxford.

You can imagine them caught out when asked to sign their names at reception: “No Darren, you spell your surname D-Y-M-M”; or puzzling over the possible uses for the “bidette” in the “on sweet”; or putting the caviar on bread and complaining that the blackcurrant jam tastes of fish; or whining when the smoked salmon is not coated in batter and served with chips in newspaper like the fish they are used to.

Unfair? I don’t think so. It is some time since I actually heard a highways officer speak and, as I have recorded elsewhere (see Go and Play in the Traffic), I decided to keep away in future lest I do myself or them harm at the idea that low-grade people like that could simultaneously waste so much money, vandalise the streets and deliberately impede the traffic. Those who would spend £2.5 million tarting up the Iffley Road whilst libraries are threatened and youth activities closed down AND who then take themselves off for an expensive jaunt at the tax-payers expense deserve all they get in the way of opprobrium.

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Dymm: Wossa librey Whine?

Notbright: It’s a libr-ery, Darren, not librey. And it’s not “wossa”, it’s “what is a”. And my name is Wayne.  It’s a place with loads of books and things in it. Posh people go there, and old people and kids. My mum used to take me in there, when it was raining like. I think people can take books out without paying.  What makes you ask about lib-reries?

Dymm: My mum’s friend said it’s all my fault they’re closing them down. Why’s it my fault Whine, Wayne?

Notbright: All them bloody bankers have lost all our money so the county is closing lots of things down if they’re not really necessary.

Dymm: They won’t close us down will they?

Notbright: Nah. We’re necessary. We got to do all them works down the Iffley Road, so they can’t close us down.

Dymm: My mum’s friend’s a banker. I’ll tell her it’s all her fault. She’s a counter-clerk.

Notbright: I don’t think it’s those sort of bankers who lost all our money.

Dymm: Well, she works at the branch where the county’s account is, so if the county’s lost all its money it could have been her.

Notbright: It’s the government’s fault. It’s because of the cuts. Bloody Tories. There was always plenty of money to spend when Labour was in, so where’s it all gone now?

Dymm: Perhaps there was no money left because Gordon Brown spent it all.

Notbright: Don’t go there Darren, just keep off it mate, or your lib-rery lady’ll have your guts – and mine and the boss’s. We’ve had a good run, haven’t we? Botley Road, Abingdon Road, High Street, Cowley Road, all that stuff we did in Headington, them fancy lights at the A34 roundabout. Looks good on your CV doesn’t it? “Sub-Deputy Assistant Director responsible for spending bloody millions”. Just don’t ask where the money came from.

Dymm: But it all looks really nice now.

Notbright: Christ, I can see why you’re called Dymm. Yeah, of course it all looks nice. So it bloody well should after all the money we spent on it. But if you ask yourself if any of it was necessary…. would you have spent like that on your house?

Dymm: Nah.My missus wanted a new kitchen an’ all that, and I said it all works, still looks OK, didn’t she know that we ‘ad a recession on, an’ we ought to just patch it up till it was over.

Notbright: So why didn’t we do the same with the roads? Why have we been spending millions like some bloody TV makeover programme, tarting up streets which just needed a few holes filled?

Dymm: Don’t blame me, mate! You all said it ‘ad to be done. That’s what you told that councillor bloke, the bald one, what’s ‘is name, the one who looks like Mike Myers with the cat in Golddick, what’s it, Dr Evil. Why did he agree to spend all that money if it wasn’t necessary?

Notbright: Goldmember not Golddick. Yeah, I can’t remember his name either. He’s that sort of bloke. Just think about it will you? No, all right, don’t try and think, just listen. He had some business up in London and gave it up, just another little bloke who couldn’t hack it in business. So he gets to be a councillor instead. And we turn up and say we want to spend a few million quid here and a few million quid there, and he rather likes that. One minute he’s a nobody, and the next minute people are asking his permission to spend millions of someone else’s money, and he’s on the telly and in the papers. And Gordon Brown’s shovelling dosh at him cos its “front line public services”.

Dymm: I like that “front line” bit. That’s why I became an officer. My dad was always potty about the First World War, all them officers in the front line going over the top. And now I’m an officer in the front line….

Notbright: Oh you had choices did you? What were you before you became a highways officer?

Dymm: I worked in transport for Tescos. I pushed trolleys round the car park. Then one day I blocked up the car park exit for three hours with the trollies by mistake, and they sacked me. I thought I’d like to be a traffic warden.

Notbright: Was it you in charge when we trapped all those cars in the hospital car park a few weeks ago? No? Another of the bright little sparks we keep on the payroll, was it? Just as well we don’t sack people in local authorities. What happened when you applied to be a traffic warden?

Dymm: I failed the entrance test, an’ they said why not go an’ work in the offices, if you can push a trolley round a car park you can push paper round a desk like the other highways officers. An’ you was  just starting a big job, Cowley Road it was, an’ the council wanted a Sub-Deputy Assistant Director. It looked like a secure job, and it paid really well, my old woman couldn’t believe how much it was. And when Cowley Road was done we did something else, then something else, always another big project on the go.

Notbright: And now it’s Iffley Road. Can you see why you ought to keep your trap shut about where the money comes from? Just get on and do the job, and the boss will work out what we do next, and next and next and you’ll get through to early retirement and a nice pension. Piss off too many lib-rery ladies and they’ll start looking at whether we really need to do these big jobs.

Dymm: Headington was the best one though – filling in that underpass they all liked. It worked a treat, that. I was up there a few days ago, an ev’ry time the cars moved up a bit, some old lady pressed the lights to cross the road. It’s pissed off the pedestrians, pissed off the drivers, pissed off the shops, proper job that was. Why did we fill in the underpass?

Notbright: Dunno. Er, well I do. Someone forgot to show it in the drawings, and someone else thought that meant it was going, and by the time we all spotted it, it was too late, we’d gone public with the plans. Then everyone made a fuss and said it was stupid, but they’re always calling us stupid so we couldn’t back down.

Dymm: Why do they call us stupid, Wayne? I heard a couple the other day ‘aving a row, and she said to ‘im “You’re as thick as a highways officer”. Why’d she say that, Wayne?

Notbright: It’s just an expression, Darren, like “as black as night”.

Dymm: You’re not supposed to say things like that! If that EDDSHiT woman ‘eard you say that, you’d be in trouble. Dave Plank said something the other day, what was it? That’s right, he said “I had a blackbird in my garden yesterday”. God they made a fuss. Immorality in public by an officer of the council, disrespectful term to refer to a woman, and irrelevant and discriminatory use of race, colour or religious belief to describe a person. He said he had to show them his bird-table before they understood what he meant.

Notbright: Dave’s been employed by the council long enough to know better. He’s lucky they didn’t have hidden cameras and all that to try and catch him at it again.

Dymm: I still don’t understand, Wayne. He’s not married. I don’t understand about the bird-table either – I know they have a little roof and all that, but how did him and this bird get up there?

Notbright: Why don’t you go and play in the traffic, Darren?

Dymm: Oh, thanks Wayne! I’ll get some of the lads and we’ll go and stick up some signs somewhere.

Notbright: Not the High Street, Darren. The hotel bloke will be out making a fuss and the boss has had enough of him. Not George Street either – there is no room for more signs there. Why don’t you go down Longwall? If you get a move on you can have that blocked before the evening rush hour. Dave’s doing something down the Abingdon Road, they’ve got the lights working again in Frideswide Square, and between them all we can probably bring the whole city to a halt. That’ll teach them to say “as thick as a highways officer”. Oh, and Darren: if you want a new sign, with different words like, for Christ’s sake ask the consultants how to spell it all. I’m still getting complaints about the “Whitney” one.

Dymm: I looked that up in Google and that’s how you spell “Whitney”.

Notbright: It is if you are talking about the singer Whitney Houston. It is if you mean the engines company Pratt & Whitney. But I don’t think your sign was about either of those. You meant Witney, Oxfordshire, and apparently that doesn’t have an ‘h’ in it. I didn’t know that either, but that’s why we have outside consultants, so we can ask them how to spell things. Perhaps that’s why your mum’s friend thinks lib-reries are important.

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This is all invented, of course, except that Oxfordshire Highways really did once dig up Longwall and the Abingdon Road at the same time; they also filled in a perfectly good pedestrian underpass in Headington, and the county council actually is planning to close libraries whilst allowing extravagant and unnecessary works in the Iffley Road, the only main artery which has not been dug up at vast expense during the recession. County Highways officers have recently been on an expensive junket at a country house to bond with their consultants – the sort of thing which most private sector businesses gave up a long time ago.

One of the most eloquent and consistent critics of Oxfordshire Highways has been the hotelier Jeremy Mogford. Oxfordshire Highways recently blocked the exit to the John Radcliffe Hospital for three hours, trapping drivers inside. They said it was unavoidable, but they say that a lot about the delays they build into motorists’ journeys generally. That coincidence of stupidity and power to affect peoples’ lives is not, of course, unique to highways officials from Oxfordshire; the rest are no brighter or better, and this seems to be true of anyone involved in wheeled transport in Britain – look at the railways, for example.

There has been correspondence in the Oxford Times as to Councillor Ian Hudspeth’s resemblance to former Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev. Hudspeth gamely offered Phil Mitchell or Eric Pickles as alternatives. I offer my own doppelganger for him. He is quoted on the County Council website as saying of the role of councillor that “You don’t really need to have any specific talent”, and after his years in charge of transport and infrastructure, we know exactly what he means. One suspects that he might usefully have spent a little more time in libraries when he was young.

It is also fair to say that I have not heard highways officers speaking for some time. I had to stop going to public meetings on highways matters after I once found myself clenching and unclenching my fists when listening to some proposal to spend our money on some expensive plan to screw up the traffic flow. I feared I was either going to burst an artery in rage or actually advance on the platform and break a chair over the heads of the deeply stupid people speaking on it. It has seemed safest to stay away ever since.

I have invented the titles and names used for the officers – they just sounded right. If by mischance I have got one right, do let me know and I will change it – almost any permutation of relevant words in almost any order will do for local authority job titles, and if we do in fact employ a Wayne Notbright or Darren Dymm, that wouldn’t surprise me but I lighted on the names by accident. Brian Thicke, Dave Runt, Bill Spender – there are endless possibilities of apt-sounding names to choose from.

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The most puzzling part of the whole exercise was the filling in of the well-used pedestrian subway which  allowed people to cross the road without impeding the traffic. Impeding traffic is what highways officers do best, of course, and there is now an extra set of lights to replace the subway. If other junctions are anything to go by, the lights will be phased with others to maximise the number of times a motorist has to stop and start. I am never sure whether this is deliberate perversity or just stupidity, but it does not do much to cut pollution.

So far as I am aware, no reason was ever advanced for blocking up the subway. I don’t suppose they read much economic theory at Oxfordshire Highways, but perhaps someone heard that Keynes advocated the digging and refilling of holes as a fix for recession and decided to take him literally. Quite how you get from there to filling up a useful and serviceable subway, I am not sure. There are plenty of other holes in Oxfordshire’s roads which need filling. Many residents of Headington were extremely cross about it, and signed a petition. I doubt that Oxfordshire Highways even bothered to get someone in to read it to them.

It is not that they don’t change their minds there. They like, however, to do the works and spend the money first. The cobbled bicycle lanes were deemed a mistake, as were all the speed bumps in Longwall, and there were those lights by Boswells which came and went and came back again. I gather that they are now planning to redo Frideswide Square, adopting the roundabout which everyone except the highways officers knew to be right at the time.

The test, I always think, is whether they would be so ready to spend their own money on analogous works at home – spending fortunes with no obvious application of thought or intelligence, knowing they can always redo the work a few years later. Unless they are even better paid than I think they are (and local government is one of those areas where there is no discernible relationship between pay and ability – you get monkeys whether you pay peanuts or fortunes), I am sure they devote more thought to their kitchens or house extensions than they do the very expensive works which they commission at public expense.

It is interesting also to see another example of the contempt which highways officers show towards those who are trying to run businesses in Headington. A group of five or six shops, including two charity shops, is still fenced off from the pavement. As so often with works like this, those who plan the works give no thought at all to the need of businesses to attract passing trade and to be accessible. If you are a public servant, of course, your money just drops into your bank account each month whether you are any good at your work or just like the rest. You also despise anything outside the public sector and do not really distinguish between a charity shop and a branch of an international bank – they are all representatives of evil capitalism. It could be, of course, that nothing so coherent informs the decision to cut these premises off from the pavement for so long; it could just be selfish stupidity.

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There are several elements here, but let us begin by making it clear that I do not particularly approve of people carting off armfuls of wood from nature reserves, that I am glad to know that we still have the occasional warden to look after places like this, and that I have some sympathy in general with under-resourced police forces.

That sympathy, however, speedily evaporates when you read stories like this and, indeed, almost the worst aspect of it is the fact that Thick and Plank have undermined any case which their superiors might have made in support of claims for extra funding or as excuses for failure to deal with real crime. Even if you ignore the £350 spent on the helicopter, one assumes that four officers in two cars could have been doing something useful whilst they were instead investigating the loss of a few twigs.

The excuse for scrambling the helicopter was, apparently, that no ground unit could arrive in less than 15 minutes. This reveals some interesting priorities. The last time I called out Oxford’s finest, it was because I saw a man trying to break in to the garages of the houses opposite mine, testing each in turn in the hope of finding one which opened. It took 30 minutes for Thick and Plank to arrive; they listened very politely to my account and moved off very smartly when I pointed to the dark corner where the villain had gone – very smartly back to their car, that is, leaving me standing open-mouthed in the dark street where Bill Sykes presumably still lurked unseen. There were two possibilities – either health and safety regulations required a better ratio than two to one, or some ludicrous targets system meant that the police got more points by the number of incidents attended (as opposed to their outcomes), and needed to clock up a few more before their shift ended. If I had taken on the burglar myself, you can bet that Thick and Plank would have been back at once – to arrest me for assault.

However important the twigs, most of us would reckon that apprehending burglars is a more useful allocation of police time. Every individual story of police stupidity undermines public support for the force generally, particularly where it involves obvious waste of resources – obvious, that is, to everyone except those involved. A more proportionate response would have been for the warden simply to note the vehicle’s registration number and report it to the police if, indeed, he thought it worth doing anything about it at all, for them to follow up if they thought it justified the use of their stretched resources.

And that is the other point here – was this incident worth doing anything about? The problem is that we now have too many unnecessary regulations and far, far too many people invested with apparent authority to enforce them. The warden may well have been a decent chap seeking to enforce a duty imposed on him by a legitimate authority for good reason. The last twelve years, however, have seen an enormous rise in the number of petty officials with powers to exercise petty powers, and it has become hard to distinguish between legitimate demands by duly authorised people and excessive authority wielded by power-crazed nobodies – see my recent stories of the Bristol park officials demanding that a windbreak be taken down and of the arbitrary curfew imposed by Manchester police who, like Thick and Plank when they came to my street, lacked the guts to do anything about the villains.

It is difficult to make an instant assessment of one’s rights as the ordinary citizen confronted by this sort of thing. My own reaction varies. Am I on public or private land? What will the officious little runt in the Hi-Viz jacket do if I politely ignore him? Is it worth the argument even if I believe I am in the right? Every so often, a story comes along which subtly alters the balance to the detriment of the citizen and of liberty – a police bully strikes a passer-by to the ground, causing his death, and is not charged with any offence; now, a helicopter, four policemen and two cars are mobilised in defence of a few twigs. It becomes easier, to say nothing of safer, to comply.

The helicopter was out yesterday evening as I walked the dog on what was otherwise a peaceful evening. Back and forth it went above the tree-tops of Jericho and North Oxford. Down below, bicycles were being stolen, and old ladies mugged; Bill Sykes was getting ready for another night spent safely burgling garages; perhaps the Chief Constable was penning yet another letter to the Home Secretary about the cuts he must make on his reduced budget. I used to assume that the police sent out a helicopter only when it was vital to do so. Yesterday, I assumed that the Pigs were just out looking for twigs.

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Clover says this:

Motorists caught at traffic lights itch to floor their right foot. If you take away the channelling and, where possible, traffic lights, and introduce risk by making it clear that pedestrians and cyclists share space, motorists instantly behave better. Risk is good. And the paradox is that when you lower speeds, journey times improve because there are fewer stop-starts.

I have written before about the chances of this catching on in Oxford (see Traffic lights dawn on Keith Mitchell amongst other articles). It seems unlikely, somehow. There is more to it than the fact that these tiresome little people are risk-averse and see the lights and barriers as essential for protecting us from ourselves, with its paradoxical outcome that your thinking about road safety is being done for you by people whose judgement you would not trust about anything else.

It is also a matter of control, of very small people needing to feel important. Try and imagine what it must be like to be a county highways officer. There – you would want someone to take notice of you if  you were like that, wouldn’t you? Insignificant, despised even by other council officers, you would take every opportunity to assert yourself. I’ll teach them to sneer at me, you would say. I’ll screw up their journeys to work, and force them to sit in queues. These streets which they think are beautiful – well, I don’t see it myself, but let’s stick up a few more sign-posts and railings and watch them moan. Those capitalist pigs who run shops – we’ll see how long they last when we stop people parking near them.

Another element is job-creationism – the more works the highways people can persuade gullible councillors to order, the bigger their budgets, the grander their teams and the longer they will all have jobs.  That may, in fact, become a motive for moves towards the more open streets advocated by Charles Clover. Oxfordshire County Council has major schemes running in the city at the moment, none of them necessary by any standard, and a criminal waste of money when recession, and the need to pay for Gordon Brown’s expensive follies, means that there is no money anyway. But what about when those are finished? They will need more schemes to make sure they have jobs, and one possibility would be to start undoing all the work of past schemes – taking down lights, removing railings and signs, painting out existing white and yellow lines and replacing them with new ones.

We have had previews of this – speed bumps put in down Longwall and then taken up; expensively cobbled cycle lanes removed; lights put in, taken out and put back at the end of Cornmarket; lights replaced with a roundabout near the castle and then restored. There could be years of work for them in this. These people may be thick, but they are not stupid.

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I had reason to come past the allegedly “smart” lights three times last week in the middle of the night, when no other traffic was around. Each time, we approached lights at red and got right up to them before they were “smart” enough to recognise our presence. That meant we had to slow right down and then accelerate, which is exactly the opposite of the accepted advice on fuel economy and emissions.

I suppose that if you are a highways officer, everything seems smart to you. I suppose also that if you have just blown £450,000 on some unnecessary road works at a time when schools are having their budgets cut, you might grope around for a word like “smart” to justify the waste. On the evidence of my journeys, the new lights are no smarter than the people who installed them.

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Here in little Oxford, meanwhile, senior executives at the city council have pocketed enormous pay rises to add to their already extravagant salaries. The city council’s chief executive, Peter Sloman, had an increase of 11.6% to £141,031 (the Prime Minister earns £142,500). A couple of other senior officers, Mel Barrett and Tim Sadler, are now paid £109,080, after increases of 28% and 15.45% respectively.

This has led to an unprecedented unanimity between all sort s of people with whom I usually disagree more or less on principle – the local branch of Unison, the Labour MP for Oxford East, and the Green Party – who have made common cause against the increases. You can find many of their comments here.

The most entertaining spectacle, however, is that of Oxford City Council’s Labour councillors defending the increases and voting them through despite a formal challenge from other parties. Council Leader Bob Price says that the increases “reflected the market rate for the jobs and had been agreed following independent advice”.  That sturdy man of the left, John Tanner, supported the increases with a comment about paying peanuts and getting monkeys.

Taking Price’s comment first, how do you arrive at a “market rate” for a public sector job in times like these? At the best of times (and the last decade has certainly been the best of times for the senior people in local authorities) the marketplace was limited to other public sector jobs – no commercial enterprise was ever likely to want an overpriced bureaucrat tainted by years in the unreal world of public authorities. The idea that you paid a fortune for such people was one of the success stories of the Labour years, at least from the viewpoint of the recipients. Local government became so bloated that no one really noticed the transition from worthy town clerk to expensive chief executive, as a corps of highly-paid men and women appeared from nowhere. Its members moved from one place to another on a rising spiral of pay and benefits – every council, it seemed, had to have an expensive mascot at the top, and there were more such jobs than there were credible applicants. A small pool of low-calibre people found themselves able to command salaries beyond the dreams of most people doing proper jobs which mattered.

The excuse was that local authorities had large budgets, with ever wider functions and payrolls to match, and needed a substantial figure at the top supported by highly-paid department heads. Able people could only be recruited, so the logic ran, by offering competitive salaries, with the implication that these were necessary to entice good people into local government from the real world. Peter Sloman, however, seems to have been in local government all his life, rising from Director of Housing at Slough to another chief executive post before taking the top job in Oxford. Tim Sadler came from one of those non-jobs described as “transforming service delivery in local government and working successfully with a wide range of stakeholders” (what does all this bollocks mean?) at an unspecified authority. Mel Barrett came from the London Development Agency, a quango of poor reputation and indeterminate value, which London Mayor Boris Johnson is scrapping on the grounds that those few of its functions worth keeping can be absorbed within the Greater London Authority.

Who would take any of these three off our hands if we decide to dispense with their services or if they went off in a huff? Equally, who would notice if they went? Oxford is a small regional cost centre and about to get smaller – as Green councillor David Williams said “In view of the Government’s plans to reduce funding to local government by 25 per cent, and a 25 per cent decline in services, there will be less to manage.”

The Oxford Times carried an observation to the effect that no one would choose John Tanner to manage their PR. His comment about getting monkeys if you pay peanuts was doubly inappropriate – in terms of achievement, we seem to have got monkeys anyway, and the comment was inevitably understood by council workers (whose pay has been held down) as implying that they were monkeys.

These men are presumably not entirely useless, at least when judged in the context of a public sector in which 25% of the jobs are unnecessary and are staffed accordingly. Someone has to push the other pen-pushers to push their pens (or even to turn up to work at Oxford City Council, where the “sickness” rate is appalling). What is required, however, is people who understand that there is no money left because Gordon Brown pissed it all against the wall in the good years, not least by his expansion of public services.  It does not matter now whether you are for or against the idea of the big state – my own position is probably clear -  we cannot afford to do more than the bare minimum whilst we recoup our losses and rebuild our economy.

The senior officers at Liverpool City Council have recognised that. Those at Oxford have not. That makes them unfit for the purpose for which they are employed.

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I have no idea whether the lights have made things better or worse, but at a time when cuts are so deep that we will have to close schools, is this really a priority? We managed pretty well without! Something terribly wrong here.

The first real phase of unnecessary traffic lights and other obstructions began in the early 1970s. There was a popular rumour in Oxford to the effect that “commissions” were paid to those responsible for ordering street furniture. A more plausible reason lay in the kind of people who scurried to take jobs in the newly enlarged local authority sector. At the upper end of schools, careers masters were saying “I don’t think he can aspire to Balliol, but we might get him into St Peter’s”. To those in the less academic classes they would say “He won’t get into the rubbish collection department with grades like that, but Highways are always looking for people with his, er, talents”.

Little men with disappointed wives and children who despised them, people who could not get served in pubs and were ignored in shops, found a way to be noticed. Budgets seemed infinite and the sense of achievement derived from the inconvenience which they caused with their artificial impediments to the traffic-flow was matched by the self-importance which comes from spending other people’s money. The pattern was set, and New Labour’s conviction that the mere spending of money was a benefit is what leads us to £450,000 schemes whose effect is to cause delay.

There is the sense that this is a last hurrah for the big spenders. We have recently seen a bus lane laid down at the northern entrance to Oxford by Oxfordshire County Council and almost immediately pulled up again. I was myself a victim of a recent traffic light experiment in Bicester; perhaps the dull-looking little men standing around watching in their hi-viz jackets sensed the hatred pouring out of the cars stuck in their artificially-introduced tailback near Bicester Village and got cold feet

When you look at expenditure like this, it is easy to see how George Osborne can save millions without touching essential services. It is inevitable that people will lose their jobs, and that is always a cause of regret. The fact is, however, that much of the spending has been of the same kind as we see here. The wasted £450,000 and the extravagant salaries and pensions of those who commission them are only the beginning of the savings to be made. Every worker (real worker, I mean, not a public service drone) who wastes 10 minutes per day at an unnecessary obstruction is simultaneously not contributing to the economy and pumping particulates into the air. Every highways authority has scores of dim people dreaming up schemes like this; their removal will do more than merely remove the direct costs of employing them.

The main point, though, is that we do not have the money to spend on schemes like this.

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That may be because some of the victims, like one known to us, are still undergoing hospital treatment to have the stones removed from their legs, where they lie deeply buried after a skid on the loose surface. The John Radcliffe Hospital has apparently seen several such injuries. I do not approve of ambulance-chasing lawyers, but there should be work for them as the pain subsides and thoughts turn to compensation.

It is not clear whether the county’s “spokesman” is a member of the Highways Department and, if so, whether he is any brighter than the rest of them.  For the 30 years or so of my time in Oxford, that department is where the less clever of the council officers collect. Stupidity has been a kind of hereditary badge, passed from generation to generation, suggesting either that they mate to produce exaggerated versions of themselves or (more likely) that they never recruit people likely to challenge them intellectually, leading to an ever-downward spiral.

The article implies that scattering loose stones on the road surface is a cheap way to repair it. This is not a department which generally seems to care very much about how much it spends. All those unnecessary schemes of recent years – Cowley Road, the High, Summertown, the biennial works in Longwall – seemed driven by a desire to waste as much money as possible, with no concept of the difference between those which are “essential” and those which are merely “nice to have”. I suspect, in fact, that these were funded from different budgets, with kindly Uncle Gordon pouring gold into the pockets of anyone who came up with a scheme which ticked the right boxes. I wonder sometimes if it might have been cheaper for Brown to shovel the gold straight onto the road in molten form. Mere repairs, however, are a different matter – small budgets and nothing to show for it on the CV, so a cheapskate job will do.

What is really puzzling about the approach which just scatters stones onto the road is that it is so obviously going to cause damage and injury. WhinyRunts (this slang term combines the status of a certain kind of council officer with the ghastly noise which they make when they speak) are generally very nervous of anything which might conceivably cause harm, and they impose restrictions and penalties on anyone whose activities bring them within the wide remit of the armies of health and safety officials which infest every corner of life. Yet they happily throw down stones where vehicles will inevitably kick them up, and in a way which both brings cyclists down and guarantees serious injury when they fall.

Although, as a rate-payer, I will pay my share of the cost, I very much hope that people will claim, and sue if necessary, for injury and damage caused by this cavalier approach to safety. If the county council rebuffs your claim, be persistent and keep up the pressure. I don’t want to know about your every scratch, but I would be pleased to hear from anyone whose claim is successful. I am not at all in favour of claims for mere accident or for the outcome of your own foolishness, but where there is an obvious nexus between the conduct of the council’s dimwits and an otherwise avoidable injury, the council should pay.

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The day job involves electronic disclosure or e-Disclosure of documents (electronic discovery, or e-discovery in every common law jurisdiction save England & Wales). My role is to educate and inform judges, lawyers, clients and suppliers about the law, the practice and the technology involved in e-discovery, and in marketing the ideas and services to others. The primary medium for this is a blog for the e-Disclosure Information Project, whose 250 or so posts in 2009 sometimes generated several thousand words per week. There is more than enough to write about on that subject, and optional things fell by the wayside. In addition to work in the UK, I spend about a month each year at conferences abroad. These trips simultaneously gave me a wider range of subjects to write about and less time to do so. It seems worth having a go at reviving the non-work blogs.

The subjects which I used to air in them – dishonest politicians, the creeping power of civil servants, the expensive stupidity of local government officers and the incompetence of railway companies – have worked their way into my e-Disclosure writing. This is not a drawback – I like comparisons and parallels, and my readers seem to appreciate the leavening of the rather dry legal and technical subject-matter with examples pulled from other areas of everyday life. There is, nevertheless, plenty to write about which cannot be turned to didactic purposes in my work blog and, besides, it is refreshing for the brain to cover other things from time to time.

The two non-work blogs have distinct purposes. Oxford Inciter relates to the city in which I have lived for over 30 years and in which I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s. It is a beautiful place, gradually being eroded by the actions and non-actions of the useless people who run it – with a handful of exceptions, the councillors are the usual run of jumped-up nobodies whose belief that they were elected to engage in continuous activity is matched by their patent unsuitability for it. Their policies are executed by the regiments of dumb animals which you find in local government everywhere. Paper-shufflers in the planning offices recommend ghastly developments to councillors who (as I put it in one of my posts) “could not differentiate between Wren’s plans for St Paul’s and a child’s depiction of a Wendy house”. Here in Oxfordshire, if we wish to signify that someone’s intellect is not all that it might be, we use the highways officers as a yardstick. Their mission is to screw up the traffic-flow as best they can, filling every view with railings, signs and notices. Intellectually-impoverished they may be, but they have been adept throughout the recession at extracting funding for useless projects by whispering “a child might die” into the ears of impressionable councillors who are scarcely brighter than they are and whose own ambitions are met by disbursing large budgets. Our household waste is collected under the supervision of a councillor who seems keen to show that his intellectual prowess compares unfavourably with the contents of the bins for which he is responsible.

The name Oxford Inciter is explained in section About Oxford Inciter. Briefly, the purpose is equally to incite opposition to the largely destructive activities of the councillors and their pen-pushing cohorts and to incite admiration for the many fine things which survive in this city.

Oxford Agenda has a wider purpose, recognising that only Oxford residents and visitors are interested in the city and the inadequacy of those who govern it. Oxford Agenda’s purpose is recited on its face: for old liberties, against the new morality, and in the hope that my children’s generation will undo the work of this one. There is much in it representing my visceral hatred of the New Labour government which ruled us for 11 years – it’s economic and administrative incompetence, its ceaseless interference in every aspect of our lives, and the sheer unpleasantness of some of its members.

That infected every other area of life. It became clear that mass immigration was not simply a policy thought to be beneficial, nor just the result of Home Office incompetence, but a deliberate strategy aimed at angering Labour’s political opponents, as well as a way of building an army of client voters. The practical implications – shortage of space, jobs, housing and infrastructure resources – were deliberately ignored, it appears, in pursuit of this strategy and were not, as we thought, merely the result of oversight and incompetence. The ban on fox-hunting owed nothing to any goodwill towards Foxy Woxy; it consumed many more hours of Parliamentary time than any other issue, including the decisions to go to war. The decline of education, the ruin of the landscape, the failure to control crime, and the constant erosion of civil liberties all have their place in Oxford Agenda, but it is home also to any miscellaneous matters which attract my interest, save for those which more obviously belong in Oxford Insider.

There is pleasure to be derived from dancing on New Labour’s grave, but a new focus now appears – putting pressure on the coalition government to reverse or undo as much as it can of the damage done by its predecessors.  It started well with the abolition of Home Information Packs and of the General Teaching Council, but there are deeper ills to cure: the relationship between the police and those whom they exist to protect; the power of that pervasive enemy, the thick jobsworth, with clipboard, rulebook and authority far beyond his brain; bloody notices everywhere; the whole apparatus of state power which prompted one lady to write to the Times asking the last government to publish a list of things which we are still allowed to do. I was not wholly convinced that a Conservative government would have the will to tackle all this; it will be even harder with the Lib Dems hanging on to their ankles like a ball and chain. Liberal Democrats are lovely people, some of them, but they do think they know what is good for us in a way which mocks both parts of their party name.

Both Oxford Agenda and Oxford Insider were published anonymously. This was not because I was embarrassed to own my opinions (far from it) or for fear of facing those whom I upset or angered by what I said (that is pure pleasure so far as I am concerned). I kept my name out of them because I wanted to establish it (in Google as well as in real life) as primarily associated with my professional subject. That objective is now achieved and I am happy to put my name to my other sites. So far as I am aware, only one person guessed at my identity, having cleverly spotted stylistic and subject-matter similarities between posts in Oxford Inciter and the letters which I used to write to the Oxford Times.

My e-mail address is oxfordinciter@hotmail.co.uk. My Twitter name for these purposes is OxfordInciter, kept distinct from my main Twitter account (which is chrisdaleoxford) in order to spare my professional followers my non-professional ruminations.

The rules of engagement – in particular my policy on fair comment and corrections – are set out in the editorial to Oxford Insider.

I do not promise constant attention to either of these sites but I hope to make more use of them in the coming year than I have done in the recent past.

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