A button marked Help on a computer screen usually means that the developer is offering you assistance. Here it means the opposite. I need your help. This is a request for assistance in compiling some of the elements which will make up Oxford Inciter.
By way of reminder, the broad purposes are to firstly to encourage you to come to Oxford and appreciate the place and secondly to urge you to fight to keep it as a place worth visiting. The verb incite helpfully covers both, as the section About Oxford Inciter explains.
Collecting of a sample of Oxford’s attractions – what I have described elsewhere as “a kind of subjective, informal, haphazard, illustrated Baedeker” – is, relatively-speaking, the easy part of the two main functions of ths site. It is 33 years since I first came to Oxford as an undergraduate living in Oriel Street. Free from the the conventions of the usual guide-book approach I can be as subjective, informal and haphazard as I like, constrained only by the time taken to write it all up and sort out the photographs.
Part of the second function, the exposure of Oxford’s administrative defects, is also reasonably straightforward. I first started collecting cuttings about administrative defects in 1985; technology brings a lot of it to my desk from other on-line sources; much of it I trip over outside my front-door – literally sometimes, since my patch, by Aristotle Lane, has been a hot-bed of maladministration recently.
I need help in three respects:
- pointers to relevant things which you have seen or read about which I may have missed
- information from the inside which deserves a wider outlet
- corrections to my facts and challenges to my apparent prejudices.
This overlaps to some extent with what I say in the Editorial section – that I will correct errors if convinced that I am wrong and that I will not ride every passing hobby-horse. What I am interested in is becoming an authoritative source on the things which matter, and a focus for comment on them. I don’t want to know of every trifling matter which upsets you unless it says something wider about decision-making generally or the waste of public money and will be of interest of others.
That said, it is not just the big issues which matter. Things like Westgate, the 2006 parking “consultation” and huge plastic bins outside every house will be covered here, but what concerns me as much is the slow, unnoticed slide towards lower standards and a lower quality of life. We are offered excuses based on utilitarian factors, on the unthinking application of alleged “equalities”, data protection and health and safety requirements by people too dim to understand either what the actual requirements are or what the implications are of an unthinking application of half-understood principles. Local authorities are the prime deliverers of this sort of idiocy and I want to know about instances of it in Oxford.
Oxford is badly administered, in part by Oxford City Council, one of the least competent authorities in Britain (“weak” according to the Audit Commission), and in part by Oxfordshire County Council, which is little better in the respects which affect the appearance and fabric of the City.
Oxford has local examples of the big themes which seem remote as headlines in the national news – the pursuit of alleged “improvement” at the expense of quality of life and the dissipation of public money without public benefit. We have a dull sense that nothing we can do as individuals can change things, derived from two apparently contradictory fears – that government control extends continuously and, simultaneously, that no-one is actually in control of the factors which most affect us.
I think that this is a mistaken view or, rather, that it is not too late to arrest the decline into apathy. Whilst many local changes, good and bad, derive from factors beyond local control, many of the decisions which affect us are made not by “the system” but by individuals – councillors and bureaucrats.
Part of the purpose of this site is to examine decisions which appear to me to have been wrongly made, to criticise where relevant and to invite – and capture – comment on them. The formal “consultations” undertaken by Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council are an expensive fraud, full of leading questions aimed at getting apparent support for decisions already made, and ignored if they do not get the “right” answer. The local newspapers are full of trenchant comment, but it is forgotten by the following week, buried beneath the next wave. A Blog can jump over both these difficulties, capturing comment, attempting to draw a genuine conclusion from it, and preserving the facts, the comment and the outcome – perhaps to await the next local elections.
