It occurred to me afterwards that the collection (that is, the non-collection) was the first one after Labour's John Tanner had taken control of Oxford's waste collection from the estimable Jean Fooks. Perhaps he had had a meeting with the rubbish officers (what a meeting of minds that would have been!) and ordered a tougher approach to excess waste. Tanner is the sort of old-style leftie whose enthusiasm for bettering the lot of mankind never seems to show a benefit for any identifiable group, and we wait nervously to see what autocratic plans he has for screwing up our lives a little more.

A fortnight later, I put the same bag out beside the recycling box. Perhaps someone had read my article, or had had it read to him, because this time the bag's contents were collected. So the message seems to be that if at first you don't succeed in encouraging Oxford City Council to do its job properly, try, try and try again.

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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.

The wretched Prius was the cause of much bitter wrangling in 2004. The then Mayor, a Labour man, wanted to replace the car with a second-hand BMW on the perfectly reasonable basis that BMW was the heir to Oxford's traditional car-making industry. He did not put it like this, but those of us who still try to be proud of Oxford despite its gradual erosion at the hands of ignorant planners and thick highways officers would like to think that our civic representative, of whatever political party, goes about in a decent car.

The vote for the BMW was called in by some Green councillor with twigs in his beard to match those in his brain. Months of wrangling followed over whether Oxford should buy the BMW or the Prius. A drawn vote was settled eventually by casting vote. I don't suppose anyone kept a record of how many hours of discussion and debate went into this, but it is quite certain that the hot air generated by the argument eroded any of the (anyway largely specious) environmental arguments advanced on behalf of the Prius.

Green politicians are not all stupid, of course, or not entirely stupid at least. What they lack is any sense of proportion. One Green clod (Twig Beard I imagine) boasted about how buying the Prius would send a strong message, as if anyone takes the slightest notice of silly little Toy Town politicians. The Green contribution to sensible debate on any subject matches the contribution to environmental health made by the purchase of a car imported from the other side of the world.

Talking of hot air, if Susanna Pressel were to think and speak as fast as her motor car goes up the A34, we might get through more council business. She would also have time to walk to meetings like the rest of us have to, instead of parking on yellow lines.

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As I predicted (see Labour's win is Oxford's loss) Tanner is claiming credit for thinking this up. Aside from the obvious oddity of putting "Tanner" and "thinking" into the same sentence, the plans were well under consideration under the former Lib Dem administration. It does not really matter whether the councillor in charge is a thoughtful one like the previous incumbent, Jean Fooks, or a non-thinker like Tanner. The rock on which these things founder is the herd of dumb animals at Oxford City Council who actually administer the scheme.

Their most recent contribution to building good relations with the populace was to leave on the pavement a bag full of plastic bottles which did not fit into my blue box (see Just empty the f****ing bins). The next step, no doubt, will be some helpful advice about reducing the quantity of milk we drink.

I am not sure that having to separate our recyclables is the worst part of the new regime - it seems a minor act of good citizenship, particularly now that the dumb animals have at last agreed on a consistent description of what goes in which box. What is deeply unpopular is the amount we are left with each week (rubbish does not diminish by being sorted), the coincidence of large council tax increases with a reduction in services, and the attitude shown towards us by the nobodies whose large salaries are paid for by our taxes.

The improvements which Tanner has inherited from the Lib Dems may attend to the first two of these. It seems unlikely that a Labour administration will do much to fix the officers' unwarranted contempt towards those whom they are supposed to serve.

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[For the benefit of those educated under Tony Blair, the quotation comes from a speech by Mark Antony after the murder of Julius Caesar, in a play of that name by a chap called Shakespeare]

Another of my principles is that I try to get my facts more or less right and to base my opinions on the facts. If I assert, as I often do, that the highways officers of Oxfordshire County Council are ignorant, insensate oafs without the cultural hinterland to understand what it is that they ruin with their street clutter, then I can back that assertion with an example or a photograph - several photographs in that particular case.

So I am put in a quandary by a correction received yesterday to my asserion that the ghastly Maureen Christian used her casting vote as Mayor to inflict on us the Islamic Centre on Marston Road (Labour's win is Oxford's loss). My correspondent tells me that Christian did not have to use her casting vote because the relevant motion - to re-open the already-granted planning consent following a change in the composition of the council - was tied anyway, and therefore failed.

The writer was clearly involved in the fight, and has no love for either the Islamic Centre or Maureen Christian, so I have to take some notice of what he says. I have watered down my original wording. I was, however, quite clear in my recollection that a casting vote was involved. Back to the sources or, at least, the next best thing, which is the Oxford Times.

Oxford Times - 21 July 2000

The go-ahead for Oxford's controversial Islamic Centre was secured by the wafer-thin majority of one vote on Monday night.

The Lord Mayor, Mrs Maureen Christian, used her casting vote to allow the scheme to go ahead.

Oxford Times - 15 December 2000

On July 17 the new council split 22-22 over whether the matter should be referred back for futher consideration. The Lord Mayor, Ms Maureen Christian, used her casting vote in favour of the plan being approved

Oxford Times - 26 January 2001

Maureen Christian....said she gave her casting vote in favour of the Islamic Centre on planning grounds only.

So, I have some authority for the proposition that Maureen Christian used her casting vote and that her vote went against re-opening the debate over a development which was was strongly opposed - "This centre will change the skyline of Oxford forever, create more traffic and destroy a valuable site", as Councillor Barbara Burgess said at the time.

My correspondent, however, may be right to say that casting vote (whether used or not) was not needed - the motion was to re-open the question and, the vote being tied, the motion was not carried. Whether she used her casting vote or not, Christian was the dominant - dominating might be a better word, or perhaps domineering - force in imposing this monstrous building on a hostile city.

The Islamic Centre is a blot on the skyline, monumental, out of place, uncharactistic of its environment and of the context and culture into which it was dumped. It could have been refused permission on any of those grounds and half the council thought that it should be. It was - and is - bitterly hated by those who lived near it. Maureen Christian's contempt for the views of those whom she claimed to represent was entirely characteristic.

Socialist politicians seem to feel the need to upset those who like the status quo - offending them becomes an end in itself, quite separate from any benefits which may flow from the proposed change, just as Greens think that making other people feel uncomfortable is objectively virtuous. Maureen Christian seems to cherish her reputation as a fighter. Perhaps she genuinely thought that the Islamic Centre was a good idea, but the fact that many others disagreed was reason enough for her to push it through. Besides, like Oxfordshire's highways officers, she is ignorant of what she destroyed.

Revenge is a dish best eaten cold, and her voters threw her out in due course. Now, alas, the Caeucescu of Oxford politics is back.

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His comments on those he leaves behind are worth quoting:

My pet hate is meetings of Full Council: five hours of torpor in which councillors grand-stand to no purpose in the unrequited hope of being quoted in the local paper. It is an oddity of Oxford politics that most councillors rub along together pretty well, and can find more to agree on than disagree... until they sit in the Town Hall council chamber. At which point, some form of collective guilt takes over in which councillors fear they’ve betrayed their principles by cooperating with opponents, and decide to turn into mindless, partisan morons.

I only once attended a council meeting, when a decision in which I was interested had been called in. There was nothing to be achieved by the calling-in – the decision could not legally have been reversed – but that did not prevent the, um, less thoughtful of the elected members from raising the issue. The spokesperson began by accepting that she could not carry the objection, but rambled on for ages making – or rather not making – her point. There were perhaps a dozen councillors there, some of them quite intelligent people who could have been doing something useful for the city, but convention required that they sat there listening to this dim little woman trying to get her name in the papers. If I had to do it more than once I would have strangled her.

I am sure that some of the Oxford Labour Group are brighter than that (oops, I didn’t mean to identify them, too late, damage done), and Labour do not have a monopoly on time-wasting stupidity at Oxford City Council. It is always a source of regret, however, when a good councillor goes.

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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).

Being absent when trouble occurs is, of course, Gordon Brown's one big political skill, and not one which is open to him any more. Oxford Labour has made no positive suggestions for improving the scheme over the last two years - not practicable ones, anyway - and it will be interesting to see what they actually do now the power is theirs again. One thing to watch out for is that there are new plans in the offing anyway, developed under the Lib Dems and making use of resources which were not available when the current plans were implemented. Labour will claim them as their own and disparage their predecessors. The Lib Dems would do well to publish them as widely as possible (here if they like) before Labour implements them.

Some of the on-line comments today show that many people are simply ignorant of the issues. Most of these, to judge by their syntax, are people who would be pushed to understand a bus ticket. Their vote is as good as anyone else's, of course, which is why Labour is now the largest party in Oxford.

So, another two years of financial ineptitude before we have had the chance to recover from Labour's last and very long tenureship. The attitude is well summarised in the blog of Antonia Bance, Labour councillor for Rose Hill and Iffley. Bance describes herself as a feminist and democratic socialist and (I think I read somewhere) is proud to be interventionist in other peoples' lives - and if I didn't read that, it would not be hard to deduce. She appears somewhat brighter than the average in Oxford's Labour Group, but seems to treat the whole business of running a city as an extension of JCR politics.

One of her posts of yesterday includes this:

Expect a city council that sorts the finances; invests in play areas, playschemes and youth football; pays its employees a living wage and pushes all local employers to pay a living wage too; makes the rubbish and recycling system work better, especially in places like Greater Leys and Jericho; builds more houses and argues hard for an urban extension to Oxford to help solve the housing crisis in the city.

It is that easy, is it Ms Bance? Just swing open the doors of the city treasury and pull out some money? It is like watching kiddies finding the keys to the sweet shop. I particularly like the bit about pushing all local employers to pay higher wages.

Bance's blog tipped me off to something I had missed, something even more appalling than the Labour win. That old bat Maureen Christian is back. Her voters gave her the heave-ho in 2006 but have now got her back again. Doubtless she is assiduous on their behalf, but the objection to her was on the wider Oxford stage - she was Planning Chairman for years, and her domineering manner and vulgar taste gave us much of what Oxford is today. There were big sighs of relief when the old Planning Committe was replaced by Area Committees, but she went on as mayor to impose on us the Islamic Centre in the teeth of strong local opposition  Even out of office, she continued to inflict her mark on Oxford by driving through the plans for garish flood-lighting in the city centre. If much of Oxford now looks like Slough crossed with Stevenage, Maureen Christian is to blame.

The intellectual balance is remedied to some extent by the welcome return of Stephen Brown as Lib Dem councillor for Carfax.

It remains to be seen how much damage Labour can do in two years. The hope, as with Gordon Brown, is that they will harm themselves more than they harm us, and disqualify themselves from serious contention for a decade or two.

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The Conservatives appear to have lost the two who defected to them. I guess the Independent Trots or whatever they call themselves have lost two, and the Greens are down one, with all but one of those seats going to Labour.

The Greens and the two surviving Trots hold the balance. Another two years of Toytown infighting between juvenile gangs more interested in making political points than in making progress.

Now, I guess, they sit down in smoke-free rooms to decide who gets the big chair. Please don't let it be Labour's John Tanner - John Prescott's brain combined with Ken Livingstone's charm, the fingernail down Oxford's blackboard, the old-style Socialist whose Socialist ideas never seem to benefit any identifiable group.

How do you lose seats to Labour in this election?

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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.

I am watching the BBC map as I type. Each refresh so far has brought more blue shading at the expense mainly of Labour as to councillors and, as to councils, in places which previously had no overall control. No bloodbath yet

We won’t go blue here in Oxford. I have seen more rats out in the streets in broad daylight than avowedly Conservative politicians. Indeed, rats are the reason why we have a Conservative councillor standing here at all this time. Dr Frances Kennett is standing in North Ward as an extension of her feud with the Lib Dems’ Jean Fooks over the change to fortnightly rubbish collections. Kennett attributes the presence of rats in and around her home in Jericho to this policy, which was in fact agreed by all parties (see Fish-heads for Fooks not fair ) and would have been executed in much the same form by whichever party gained control at the last election.

It is good to see a Conservative candidate. Was it tempting to vote for her? It would perhaps give the Conservatives some incentive to push harder next time if Kennett got a reasonable share of the vote this year and it would add a jot to the pressure on Gordon Brown if the Conservative were seen to make progress – even if that fell short of winning a seat - in a city which presently has no Conservative councillors at all.

On balance, I decided against making such a gesture. I do not wholly trust people who turn to politics to right a private wrong. Kennett has no track record as a Conservative and has the whiff of the single-issue fanatic about her. In addition, the possible national benefits are not worth the downside local risk. If too many put their votes Kennett’s way, it might split the vote enough to let the Greens in to North Ward.

Ah yes, the Green Party. They are, of course, easily mocked, but I don’t think we would be laughing if they actually got power. If you find the present rubbish collection system overbearingly dirigiste, just wait till the Greens find themselves in a position to tell you what to do. There are already council officers (in another city) who have taken it upon themselves to tell citizens that they should avoid eating fish until just before the next rubbish collection as the way to reduce the smell. Centrist, controlling intrusive New Labour will look positively non-interventionist by comparison with a Green authority.

Besides, their manifesto includes a pledge to pedestrianise half of St Giles, the main thoroughfare northwards from the city centre. They don’t say which half – north or south – nor do they say where the traffic is to go. Perhaps it will just disappear. There are lots of other things which strike a nice balance between being impracticable, unaffordable and irrelevant.

It was never going to be the Labour candidate, partly for national reasons and partly because Sue Ledwith suffers from Balls-Cooper syndrome, defined in my post Hit or miss the Labour candidate as a strong desire to help the disadvantaged at the expense of others whilst avoiding the burden for oneself.

So that left only the Lib Dems. The party locally includes one who appears a sandwich short of a picnic, one who looks as if he has reached the blanket-over-the-knees-and-Werthers-Originals stage, two who are plain rude and I few others I have never seen, but also has a few who seem capable of rational thought. They stand the best chance of gaining overall power and will not, I feel, exercise it entirely for the bad.

The map still shows nothing too dramatic, with most of the movement being from and to No Overall Control. The Conservative did well last time, which limits the scope for big gains this time. Still waiting.

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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.

All the candidates for the forthcoming council election claim that grafitti is on their list of problems to solve if elected. All are short of concrete proposals for achieving this worthy aim. One obvious one is to sack the officers who claim to be responsible for keeping the city clean - the photograph above was taken on 28 March, a month ago today.

Another is to find a senior policeman, show him these photographs and ask him what his proposals are to solve the problem at source. Remind him of the large increase in the amount of Council Tax diverted to his use and write down his answer.

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The policy in question is the one to collect domestic rubbish once per fortnight, using the alternate week to collect glass, plastics, cardboard etc. My reservations about the attempted ambush, I suppose, conflict with my general view that every such decision is made by real people and that those people should be held to account for them. Mrs Fooks is Oxford’s Rubbish Supremo (Executive Member for a Cleaner City in the clunky lingo of bureaucracy) and if the outcome is unsatisfactory then the buck stops with the office-holder. The fact is, however, that the situation for which Jean Fooks is responsible was not of her making.

The problem originates with a 1999 EU directive requiring member states to cut the amount sent to landfill and imposing substantial fines for failure to meet the targets. In the case of the UK, the potential fine is £180 million. Responsibility for compliance falls on DEFRA, an organisation whose senior staff add a whole new depth to the meaning of the word “rubbish”. DEFRA would have known well before 1999 what the implications would be. The Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, Edward Leigh had this to say in October 2007:

"Faced with the 1999 EU Directive limiting the amount of biodegradable waste sent to landfill, DEFRA issued no fewer than four vaguely worded consultation papers and strategies on waste management - but did little else. The Department must now take the tough decisions and practical steps needed to promote large-scale recycling. This will involve making it clear who is going to pay for the initiatives outlined in its latest strategy, in May 2007.

It will involve updating its systems for determining just how much progress is being made against targets. And it will involve giving members of the public - over half of whom are committed to recycling - clear guidance on what they can and cannot put into their recycling bins.

Waste treatment centres around the country will be a critical factor in reducing the UK's reliance on landfill. The Department must start seriously engaging with the obstacles in the way of bringing them on stream."

As Leigh said, apart from its woolly consultation papers, DEFR did nothing tangible to prepare for compliance with the Directive. The government simply passed the buck to local authorities very late in the day, making them responsible for compliance and for any fines resulting from their shares of the shortfall. Jean Fooks took responsibility in Oxford just as the resulting obligations were about to bite.

Had DEFRA done its bit in a timely fashion, we would by now have a national scheme to which each local authority could have subscribed. As it is, each one had to make its own arrangements. Food waste is one example of a problem for which the UK had no unified scheme, and this from a Government which imposes controlling, centrist schemes for almost every other aspect of our lives.

So much for the national situation. The local context made it unlikely that anyone could have done a better job than Mrs Fooks. The Lib Dems may have taken nominal power, but the reality was that no party had real control. Labour declined to continue its leadership, the Greens were not in a position to take it, and the Lib Dems filled the vacuum, losing seats by defections almost at once but stuck with the leadership. Both Labour and Greens, both constitutionally incapable of non-partisan politics, failed to back the implementation of the policy they had previously supported and contented themselves with sniping from the sidelines.

It might yet have been possible at least to bind Oxford’s citizens into this unpromising situation and make of them understanding allies. A high proportion of the populace supports recycling; just as many despise a government which imposes expenses and duties whilst abnegating responsibility and which lacks any management skills; the kiddies playground which is Oxford politics attracts similar contempt.

Enter stage left the last player in this entertainment - the local government officer here, as always, in the role of Dogberry, scratching his head in bewilderment at it all. The mechanical part of the new rubbish collection scheme was rolled out very efficiently, with large and hideous green bins dumped outside every house in no time at all. What’s to complain of then?

A parallel might be found in Rommel’s sweep through Northern France in May 1940. It was conducted with exemplary efficiency and achieved most of its objectives in a very short time. The populace had long been aware of the likelihood that this would happen but were nevertheless caught out when it happened. It found no popular support and caused much grief, but Rommel trampled on or ignored local opposition, feeling no need to advertise his coming or to explain the benefits of the new scheme of things.

That was the bit Oxford City Council missed out as well. We all knew that our rubbish collections were to be halved and that recyclables were to be collected on the alternate week. Three things were missing: one was any clear description as to what could or could not be put into which of the nasty plastic bins which had been dumped at our doors; another was a coherent explanation as to what circumstances made all this necessary; the third was any anticipation on the part of Oxford’s Dogberrys as to how to handle the circumstances which did not fit neatly into the plans.

A hail of criticism was aimed at Jean Fooks’ head. It came from or on behalf of the old or disabled, those with nowhere to store their rotting rubbish, houses with several occupants and so on. The bins themselves were eyesores in attractive streets, and that was before two weeks’ rubbish was stacked around them. Pavements were blocked, people dumped their rubbish for want of anywhere to put it, and rats scurried around the streets. Rats scurried around the Town Hall as well, as the frankly unpleasant political opponents who would have done exactly the same in Jean Fooks’ position, made all the political capital they could out of her difficulties.

So what could have been done differently? It really comes down to the lack of explanation on the part of the council. Officers diligently produced loads of words on the subject and all of them were published in one form of another – glossy leaflets, stickers on bins, letters, notices, web pages and so on. Every piece of the first phases of information said something different as to what went in bins. The bin sticker was barely literate and contained a further variant on the list of box contents. The first web pages were not only inaccurate but full of typos and mis-spellings. The standard form letter which went out to householders who got it wrong was a masterpiece of the bureaucratic pen – ploddingly patronising, offensive, and threatening in one.

Nowhere appeared a unified coherent explanation as to why all this was necessary or as to how exceptions and local difficulties would be handled. Fooks found herself permanently on the defensive, unable by convention to blame the officers, and compelled to defend piecemeal a position whose essentials had been fixed beyond her control. The government was most certainly to blame for the debacle, but local authorities blame the government for everything, and retrospective attempts to explain the role of Belgian civil servants and the incompetence of DEFRA cut little ice with those who had rats romping in their basements.

We are now told that there are further changes coming – food waste is to be collected, other recyclables will all be collected in one go, and weekly collections will return for the landfill waste. Or so I was told on the doorstep by a visiting politician, and I tend to discount what I am told in the run-up to an election. We shall see.

My starting-point was the feeling that it was unfair of a television presenter to chase Jean Fooks round the Town Hall with a box of fish-heads, despite the fact that I strongly believe that politicians should be pinned with their responsibilities, that I loathe the blot on our streets, and that I deeply resent the fact that I now have to drive to the tip whilst paying over £2,400 per year in local taxes.

How much power do local politicians really have under NuLabour? The primary problem – the lack of national preparation for recycling – can be laid firmly at DEFRA’s door. The passing of bucks to others without funding or support is New Labour’s norm. Local authorities have been made tax collectors for money they cannot control and their duties have increased beyond their means and their abilities. Councillors have to depend on officials, whose quality may be politely described as “variable”, and whose advice they must rely on – “must” because that is their duty and because they cannot do it all themselves.

It is pointless to “consult” on things which cannot be changed by the outcome of the consultation. The error here was to imply that there would be meaningful consultation and then to appear to ignore what was said.

A better set of officers would have identified the hard cases in advance and tackled them BEFORE the new scheme was rolled out, instead of leaving Jean Fooks to field the fish-heads. A decent lot of opposition politicians (“decent” in the proper sense of that term) would have worked with the newly-incumbent administration and shared the load of getting the message over instead of making cheap political points. There might then have been time to work on the literature to produce a single set of clear explanations and instructions for the public – the “clear guidance on what they can and cannot put into their recycling bins” which the Public Accounts Committee demanded.

What we have now is tolerated because it cannot for the moment be changed. None of the political parties standing for election next week has put forward a better and more credible solution than the one we have been dumped with. Not all the officers are thick or useless, and there is opportunity yet for the existing scheme to be fine-tuned to cope with specific difficulties whilst we wait for the next expensive plan.

Other articles on the subject of recycling in Oxford

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I yield to none in my contempt for Oxfordshire County Council's highways people, but the one sensible decision to come from them was the one to make their own park-and-rides free some time ago.

The long dominance of Labour in the city's politics always made it difficult to introduce concepts like "incentive" and "encouragement". They have moderated a bit now, and there are only one or two left of the old-style Pre-Silurian Marxist-Leninist councillors, but for years the idea of a consensual approach to traffic problems was seen as woolly liberalism. Whether many of them can spell "incentive" or "encouragement" even now is a different matter.

Lib Dem councillor Jean Fooks may permit herself a wry smile. She was highways chairman at Oxford City Council when, in June 2001, it was proposed to increase the park-and-ride charge from 50 pence to £1. She opposed the increase on the sensible grounds that it was a disincentive to using the park-and-rides, and was sacked by the ineffectual Corinna Redman, then Lib Dem leader.

Smarmy Alex Hollingsworth, then leader of the newly-dispossessed Labour group, and a man who never missed a chance to make a political point, described this as "punishment for standing up for what the majority of local businesses thought was common sense". What the majority of local businesses thought at the time was that if we had not had 17 years of Labour rule, we might not have had to worry about filling budget black holes with increased parking charges.

The spendthrifts at Oxfordshire Highways have had their pocket money taken away by the government, as Gordon Brown tumbles to the fact that the sight of highways officers scattering bank notes along the gutters is not likely to win votes. Aside from the money saved, that should put an end to the infinite sequence of unnecessary road works which has gummed up the traffic for year after year. The highways people will have to settle for the mundane task of filling in holes in the road and similar useful activities, and this, combined with greater park-and-ride use, may begin to let the traffic flow again.

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"Sorry we missed you", it said. The last time I saw Sue Ledwith, I nearly hit her, so it as well that I missed her this time.

She was then (this was back in 2003) a vociferous advocate of the skate area then planned for Aristotle Lane Rec, and she stood up at a North Area meeting to speak for the yoofs who would benefit from it. The strongest ground of objection (there were several) was that its noise would make life a misery for those who lived near it. That was a point of no importance for Sue Ledwith. The people living on the estate beyond the proposed skate area should not mind the noise from the skate-boarders, she said, because they already had the noise from the railway.

The same stupid comment had already been made by a rather dim Labour councillor from another Ward. There is, of course, a world of difference between the occasional rumble of a train and the sharp crack of skateboards being flung to the ground for 12 hours a day. That was not the main reason for wanting to hit the woman. That was because she lives in Southmoor Road, comfortably out of earshot of the proposed skate area. The misery she was so keen to impose on the residents of Waterside would not have affected her.

This is an example of what is now known as Balls-Cooper syndrome. Balls-Cooper syndrome is a strong desire to help the disadvantaged at the expense of others whilst avoiding the burden for oneself. It is named, of course, for NuLabour's "golden couple", the unpleasant Ed Balls and his wife Yvette Cooper, the architects respectively of tax credits and home improvement packs. They are enthusiasts for tax impositions on the middle classes whilst having their own noses so deep in the trough of public funds that they are immune from the effects. The £600,000 they drew between them last year is, I assume, the reason they are called the "golden couple". I am sure they were entitled to every penny under the generous terms which MPs give each other. £600,000 is anyway small beer compared with the money they have wasted on "initiatives" of one sort or another.

Waste is, of course, a good reason for voting for anyone except Labour in Oxford. Another is that what we really need here is a rise in the average IQ of those who make decisions on our behalf. I have no idea if Sue Ledwith is any brighter than her comment would suggest, but she teaches labour and trade union studies and women's studies, which may be a pointer.

Her little bit of yellow paper, whilst full of the same anodyne guff as the rest of them, does at least identify the candidate. Today's post brings six sides of paper from the Lib Dems which leave me no wiser as to the name of the person who is soliciting my vote. I think the Rat Lady is standing for the Conservatives - she is Dr somebody or other which presumably means she can at least spell her name, an advance on some of those who stand in the Labour interest. I imagine that sooner or later some Green will shake the twigs out his hair, identify himself as a candidate, and tell me how he plans to force me to live by his standards.

It is no wonder that we have all lost interest in politics. Like last time, the winner will be the one who is despised least by those few who bother to vote.

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The Greens and the police are the front-line troops in the war occasioned by the cock-ups of greedy developers and the supine, acquiescent little men from Oxford City's planning department. If either of the latter had approached this problem properly, a much-needed development would be half-built by now and new trees would be growing away. As it is, the police and protesters are left to slog it out on the ground.

This is, of course their job - the Greens to wave their banners and the police to keep the peace. Two things are interesting about the video.

One is that is took three burly policemen to carry off one little woman. Perhaps the Greens run street-fighting classes, or maybe this is one of those health and safety requirements we read about, where the police are not to get involved unless they are sure they won't get hurt. I am not a natural supporter of Ms Glass Woodin, but she fights a good fight.

The other is the point in the video where a Plod holds his hand up in front of the lens to try and prevent filming. By coincidence, we saw quite a lot of that on television that week, as Chinese soldiers were beating up Tibetan monks. You are our policemen, not the developers' policemen or the planning department's policemen. Everything you do is for us, we pay for it, and we are entitled to see you in action on our behalf.

It is also interesting to see how many of them can turn out when they feel up to it. The police have more or less withdrawn from the centre of Oxford now, and you are unlikely to get help if you are mugged or have your bicycle stolen or goods nicked from your shop. If, however, you are a developer and you want a middle-aged woman beaten up round the back of the car-park then Plod's your man.

By the way, I am a capitalist, conservative libertarian, generally to be found mocking eco-warriors and urging stronger street policing. Look what a botched planning exercise can do for me.

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It was apparently promoted by Councillor Clark Brundin and Councillor Alan Armitage fuelled respectively (I would guess) by naivety and ambition. This time around, the council officers are not backing the idea – a whipped cur shuns the fire or whatever the expression is. Even council officers can get a message if you kick them hard enough – but not, apparently, some of the councillors.The first skate area was plotted between Councillor Jim Campbell and an official in the Parks department known locally as Dim Cow. It killed Jim Campbell’s reputation – someone told me, I hope correctly, that he was a “broken man” when the diggers destroyed his creation in March 2004 with £50,000 wasted.

Campbell had adopted the Blair approach – once you have convinced yourself that something is right, then opponents must necessarily be wrong, and any tactics can be used to win the day. Dim Cow obligingly produced a dossier which purported to show widespread support amongst residents for a noisy skate area a few yards from their homes. The statistics and the conclusion were patently false, but Campbell ignored or glossed over the difficulties in his representations to the voting councilors. The thing had to be built before it could be shown what everyone else had predicted was true – that the noise would make it a statutory nuisance, as well as a practical one.

Dim Cow lay low for a couple of years – so does Aristotle Lane, incidentally, and with the drainage money wasted on the abortive skate area, the Rec was waterlogged and useless for much of the time. Dim Cow’s chance came when she was asked to put together a plan for a second go at improvements to the Rec in the summer of 2007. No-one spotted until very late in the day that she had slipped a hard “street sports area” into the budget at a cost of £47,000. It makes you wonder what the quality of supervision is at Oxford City Council that a junior official can casually bid for sums of this order (the biggest single budget item by a long way) on an issue on which blood had so recently been spilled, and get it as far as being an agenda item at the North Area Committee before she was stopped.

Neither Dim Cow nor anyone else turned up at the meeting to argue for the street sports area – she presumably hoped that it would just slip through unnoticed as her falsified dossier had done in 2003. The NAC councillors blew it out of the water (the expression is apt given the soggy condition of the Rec), as much because of the way that it had been put forward as because of the inherent stupidity of the proposal. So what makes Clark Brundin and Alan Armitage think it worth another go now?

The provision of entertainment for yoofs is seen as a big issue here. Modern yoof must have its entertainment made for it, and the sort of people who work for councils, both the paid drones and the elected dummies, think it their duty to provide it. There is cash available – although Jim Campbell pissed the first tranche of developer’s money up against the wall, there is a second large sum to spend from the same source. The Spinney (ugh) is exactly the sort of area which council pen-pushers hate – it is unkempt, dark and wooded. Where you and I (and the children) see somewhere untamed to play, the council mind (if you will pardon the oxymoron) sees the risk of children falling off or tripping over things, being stung or bitten, or being carried off by wicked men who pay no heed to equalities legislation, health and safety regulations or council by-laws, and certainly not to policemen, who are much too busy with vital paperwork to guard the streets.

What council people like is regular shapes, lots of lighting, council-approved play equipment, hard surfaces (but not too hard of course, just none of this nasty natural stuff), and plenty of signs and notices to say what is not allowed and what the opening hours are. There was in fact the chance to have exactly that in the large development of flats now rising (rising, rising) a few yards further south. The developers saw off any suggestion that their precious profit might be diluted by the provision of a play area or anything else for residents. They told the planning officers it was unacceptable, and the planners loyally passed that message on to the councillors - it wouldn’t do to fall out with a big developer, would it? I mean, who is in charge here?

There is no possibility, I hope, that a street sports area will be built on the Spinney. It is closer to homes than the one which had to be destroyed on Aristotle Lane Rec. It lies by a railway line, a road, a canal and the unpoliced area at the end of Walton Well Road where the drug dealers and car thieves gather after dark. Despite its proximity to houses, there is no secondary supervision – passers-by who supply the observation which we used to get from beat policemen. And besides, it will be bitterly opposed.

I do not think either of the enthusiastic councillors seriously expect this to happen. Clark Brundin is a nice enough fellow and was a good thinker in his day. He has, I am sure, a genuine conviction that it would be a really nice thing if the kids had somewhere to play, preferably well away from Observatory Street where he lives. In his idealised, Lib Dem-y sort of world, minor practical objections can surely be got round, lions can live with lambs and everyone be, you know, understanding about what may at first sight be incompatibilities. Surely we can talk this through and find a middle course which doesn’t hurt anyone too much?

Alan Armitage is a different kettle of fish. He is ambitious – he wants to supplant Ed Vaisey as MP for Wantage and I suppose that any Lib Dem who thinks it possible to erode the 15% lead which Vaisey won in 2005 is not going to baulk at trying to dump a noisy skate park next to the well-drilled and vociferous voters of North Oxford. I would guess that this is part of his CV – when you aim to abandon your Ward voters anyway, you can afford to pad out your record with a few bids for the soft social vote at their expense. I suppose also that a man whose claimed political obsessions include both democratic accountability and promotion of the EU is unlikely to notice the equally obvious incompatibility between skate-boarders and the residents of quiet suburbs.

I wonder if his CV will say anything about his fearless stand for the view from Port Meadow. He expressed concern that the aforementioned block of flats would spoil the view of the city from the river – and promptly voted in favour of it. What about the willow trees of Osney? No sooner had officers mentioned concern about their condition than Armitage had most of them chopped down, justifying this with an hysterical explanation that he might have to go to prison if someone was hurt. A subsequent investigation concluded that some of the trees could have been saved and an inquiry condemned the lack of consultation.

Wantage is welcome to him. The best scenario is that he has to resign his Ward seat to contest the Parliamentary one and ends up with neither.The last skate area had three adverse consequences for residents, and not just for those whose houses immediately abutted it. One was the sheer noise as the yoofs threw their skate boards down on the concrete. One was the stream of hulking boys (no girls incidentally) racing down narrow pavements and roads on their skate boards to get to and from the skate area. The other, and in many ways the worst, was the fact that younger children and their parents were driven out by the influx of older people from outside.

Campbell has been heard to say that he still bears the scars of the first attempt to foist a skate-board park on the area. Dim Cow presumably kept her job – incompetence is no disqualification for working for Oxford City Council. What will be the fate of Brundin and Armitage?

I must make it clear that I accept the responsibility of local authorities to provide facilities for young people. Compared with many of the stupidly unnecessary things on which councilors waste our money, it is a worthy cause. The fact that a cause is worthy or desirable does not, however, entitle its proponents to ignore the interests of others, nor relieve them from the need to engage the brain before acting.

I am not, I have to say, a natural ally of fluffy-headed Greens or unwashed tree-campers, nor would I dream of arguing that the present Westgate and its hinterland are worth preserving. But they are as ghastly as they are because an earlier generation of city planners and city councillors made exactly the same mistakes as this lot are about to make, and with the same uncaring ignorance of aesthetics, unthinking servility towards big business, and unwarranted contempt for democracy.

The present Westgate was opened by the Queen a couple of weeks after I first came up to Oxford as an undergraduate in 1973. The old residential area of St Ebbe’s and the mixed residential and industrial area known as Oxpens had been bought up and swept away by Oxford City Council and its population dumped in Blackbird Leys. Let me say at once that no-one can seriously argue against the idea that this area had to be redeveloped and that a civic authority was best-placed to do that. Not by these people, however, and not in the way they did it.

Oxpens was tackled by first laying out the roads on the newly-levelled riverside. The highways officers were cut from the same mould as their modern-day successors at Oxfordshire County Council – deeply stupid, immune from any awareness of an aesthetic element in their role, convinced that cities were the servant of the roads, not vice versa – and utterly incapable of designing a workable traffic flow, even where, as here, they had a clean sheet of paper. The area remained a waste-land for years with no plans made for it. The biggest single attribute – the river frontage – was blocked off by some shoddy flats, and the whole enormous potential of this vast acreage was utterly wasted. That same generation of planners also sterilised the inner end of the Cowley Road by announcing – but then not following through – large-scale redevelopment plans, a direct cause of the decline of that area as well.

God knows what Her Majesty thought as she cut the ribbon or smashed the bottle or did whatever you do to declare a shopping centre open. Westgate did not impinge on me as a neighbour living off the High – I have no recollection of setting foot in it, though I do remember the soul-less car-park and the part-built hotel which stood abandoned for several years by Folly Bridge. I do clearly recall, however, my first sight of it from a distance. I drove up to Boars Hill, and looked back at what still looked like a medieval city from that distance – but with that enormous and hideous bulk overshadowing it. Then, as now, the city planning officers had no concept of scale or proportion, and not the least interest in how a building would translate from its drawn elevations into brick and glass.

“Planning officer” is a kind of oxymoron - it isn’t actually, as every grammarian in Oxford will hasten to point out, but I couldn’t resist putting “Ox-“, “moron” and “planning officer” into the same sentence. An oxymoron (sharp/dull in Greek) is an expression which contains contradictory terms within it. What I mean is that both parts of the expression are inappropriate to describe the dull little men whose tastes and decisions shape our city.

There is no element of planning in their work. They are wholly reactive, shuffling paper from one side of their desks to the other, rubber-stamping developments which tick enough boxes and rejecting those which do not. As with their predecessors who made Westgate and Oxpens what it is today, there is no overview, no vision of a city which its residents, businesses and visitors will be proud of, no aesthetic feeling at all. And as for these spineless little creatures being called “officers”….

And so we get Westgate 2, hideous to look at, and unwanted, in this form at least, by most of Oxford’s residents. “It will benefit the city” cries the unthinking rabble whom we have elected to represent us. Really? Who exactly in the city will it benefit? Me? – I go to Bicester or London if I want to shop, defeated by Oxford’s hostility to cars. Some existing local business? – name me one who will be better off. A homeless family? – but there are few homes in this development. You, councillor? – perhaps we had better not ask.

No, the chief beneficiaries will be the developers and most of the money will leave the city. Oxford, as landlord, will receive capital, rental and business tax, but there will be substantial outgoings and anyway, Oxford’s and Oxfordshire’s ability to piss money up against the wall is legendary. Oxford with money will be like a drunk on pay day – hideous and hideously expensive benches in Cornmarket anyone? £5 million to resurface Cornmarket? £50,000 to put down and immediately take up the Aristotle Lane skate-park? Give it to the highways officers, perhaps, for lots of signs, lines, barriers, and other ugly and unnecessary road-works. Let’s have some more Equalities Officers, Health and Safety Advisers and Outreach Co-ordinators.

I doubt very much that we will get back a few of the public lavatories and the care homes, those soft targets for closure when the city or county have over-spent elsewhere. In fact, we are not even going to get a proper public transport hub out of it. The developers will not give up their rental space. The planners couldn’t plan a Chinese takeaway. And the highways officers think that their job is to **** the traffic up not make it flow.

We are about to see a repeat of the planning disasters of the 1960s and 1970s. The creators of other cyclical disasters at least have the excuse that time heals the wounds of the last – the material evidence of flood or recession fades. Here, the evidence of the last Westgate planning disaster, the legacy of dim, dull, plodding planners, remains for all to see; the history of botched transport initiatives by stupid people is with us every day. And we are going to do it all again.

I wish the protesters well, but I will not be joining them in person in their campaign of disruption. I don’t want to be beaten up by thuggish policemen, nor share a Black Maria with people I wouldn’t be seen dead with in any more conventional social context.

I think perhaps I might if we were losing anything tangible of value. Apart from the Bonn Square trees (on which I write separately) no-one will mourn what is due to be demolished. What is being wasted here is an opportunity to make something of this corner of the city – a second opportunity in my time. It is being wasted by incapable planners and supine counsellors, the dim, unfocused, over-active, undemocratic little people to whom we have surrendered our world.

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The principle was a good one. Oxford City Council (presumably the dreaded and dreadful City Works) announced in October 2007 that it would tackle graffiti and similar visual eyesores. Residents were encouraged to send in photographs and the council committed to deal with obscene and racist graffiti within one working day and other graffiti within 14 working days.

The photographs go up on the council's web site along with a statement as to when it was or will be fixed. This splendid commitment (I mean that - this is in theory how local government should work) was coupled with a statement that a major culprit in North Oxford had been apprehended by Mr Plod on one of his rare visits to the area.

Since then, the amount of graffiti near my house has doubled and the council's remedy - splashing green paint over the mess - is not only a cure worse than the problem but provides a splendid canvas for the next spate.

Have a look at the city council's web page for October 2007. The second photograph down is, it says, of a stretch of wall 50m north of Walton Well Bridge. It is covered in graffiti. There is a proud note saying that the graffiti was "removed" on 17 October 2007. Scroll down the page, however to 25 October, and there is a photograph of the same stretch of wall. By now, however, it has been painted a lurid shade of green - and the green is covered in fresh graffiti. We know it is fresh because the earlier mess was only "removed" eight days earlier according to the first photograph. Except it was not removed - it was covered in green paint.

Take another example. On the page for November 2007 is a photograph of grafitti on the brickwork at the Port Meadow end of the Aristotle Lane bridge over the railway. It is shown as having been removed on 16 November. What the workmen actually did was again to paint the brickwork green - or, rather, to paint part of it green.

You can see from the photograph that they left a strip of brickwork - and rather nice old brickwork it was - unpainted. There was a weed tree there at the time, which they hacked down later. Not long afterwards, the graffiti gangs came and sprayed some more purple paint on the green.

You can also see that these dedicated men from the council did nothing about the graffiti on the bridge itself - that may belong to Network Rail, and debates over ownership seem more important than actually achieving anything which improves the neighbourhood.

What is the point of picking off one little bit and leaving the rest? What sort of dim, unfocussed little pusher of council pens imagines that the green paint is either an improvement or a solution? The paint will never go away - a decent piece of brickwork is now permanently spoilt. The ghastly little oik who ordered this could have left the graffiti for a future generation with more brain and aesthetic sense willing to tackle the whole problem properly instead of picking off bits of it. Graffiti can at least be removed by someone with the right equipment and the will to do the job properly. The paint cannot be removed.

Here is a longer view of the botched job.

And this is what it looks like from across Port Meadow.

What we have here is an illustration of Bagehot's famous indictment of pen-pushers:

It is an inevitable defect that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results

The dull-minded little plodder in charge of this is only interested in being able to report that something has been done, and to attend to a percentage of the reported incidents within the requisite period. He is unconcerned about the overall visual context, doesn't give a toss if the actual effect is better or worse, and does not think (we could end the sentence there really) about anything beyond ticking his boxes.

The real solution here is not to have thick oafs from Oxford City Council slapping on green paint to selected bits of the problem in order to meet their targets, but actually to tackle the problem. The problem is youths with spray-guns. The present strategy of police and city council is to drive low-level nuisance away from the city centre with CCTV and local alcohol bans. It seemed obvious to the rest of us that this would simply drive the problems outside the central circle of bright lights and out into the suburbs. The bureaucrat cares not - his routine task was to clear the city centre.

I have thought of a way to get the bridge cleaned. All I have to do is to spray racist and obscene graffiti over it and the council is bound to fix it. Their green paint will look fine on the bridge metalwork. The flaw in this plan is quickly pointed out to me - the night I do that would be just the night that PC Plod would give himself a rest from all that important paperwork and catch me at it. I think I'd better think it out again.

I don't expect much thinking from the dozy yokels at Oxford City Works, but will they please stop painting the town green.

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I watched it turn, backwards and forwards as one has to now at the end of Aristotle Lane, thanks to the mess of bollards and posts which Oxfordshire County Council has dumped there (I often wonder how much pollution that causes) and I wondered idly if it would take the easy route into Aristotle Lane up the wrong side of the bollards.

No. It did not go up Aristotle Lane at all, but just drove off. So, this council, which is always nagging us about vehicle pollution and fining us for litter offences, drives a bin van within 40 yards of two overflowing bins and drives off without collecting the rubbish. The bins remained full all through Sunday and were still overflowing on Monday morning.

It is probably not the fault of the drivers who, I imagine, have to follow a rota drawn up by some unthinking wally in the council offices. It seems nonsense to me. Can anyone offer a rational explanation?

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Kevin Penpusher of Oxford City Council said: "After 14 phone calls of complaint and the Oxford Inciter article, we knew we had to act to avoid a serious threat to the public perception of our competence. We don't have the resources within Oxford City Council to deal with major gutter clearances like this, but we were lucky to have Maczysz Kosciuszko seconded to us by Wallsall Council (are you sure he said "Wallsall"? Ed) to lead the team for the operation".

Within days the team had sourced the necessary equipment from all corners of the yard and had undergone the rigorous training course which is the way they do things in Wallsall. Meanwhile my colleague Darren Fileshuffler and I dealt with the formalities. A union meeting was convened and, after several hours of discussion, approved a resolution which permitted the work to be done subject to suitable safeguards for the workmen, compensation for the unsociable hours, stress etc.

Our 28 page risk assessment was approved by Derek Clipboard of Health & Safety, whose report had to be approved by a meeting of the full Council. The composition of the team had to be checked by the Oxford Discrimination, Equalities, Disabilities and Diversity Directorate (OxDEDDD) to ensure that the team was ethnically diverse and included people representative of all minorities – the team had to be expanded from three to five to make sure that all shades of colour, religion and disability were included. All this was achieved within 48 hours of the problem being made known to us for the fourteenth time this year.

The operation was carried out under the grimmest conditions imaginable – only one catering van was available, and the weather turned a little chill, forcing the team to put on protective pullovers at one stage. Maczysz was a hard taskmaster, allowing the men only one 20 minute break in every hour. It is a tribute to Maczysz and his team that they achieved the clearance of all 30 foot of gutter in under a day."

I tried to interview Maczysz Kosciuszko but was told he had already flown back to Walsall to be ready for the next tough assignment, wherever the call came from. "You wouldn't have understood a word he said anyway" said Darren Fileshuffler. "Walsall is only just beyond Birmingham but it might be a foreign country when you hear Maczysz speak. You should see the translation bill we got for this job!"

I asked Kevin Penpusher when the residents might expect to see another stretch of their gutter cleared. "Not this year" he said. "You can't mount two operations like this in a hurry". He added that the reports of children getting lost in the gutters on their way to school were much exaggerated. "There have only been three such incidents to my knowledge" he said, "and two of the children got out safely eventually". He hopes to find the third when the rest of the street is cleared some time during next year. "It will have to be done in stages" he said. "This operation cost £23,760 and that's without counting my overtime".

The real issue, he says, is one of resources. The residents pay only £2,250 per year in Council Tax and could not realistically expect cleared gutters for that. Many officers have been diverted into fining residents for putting out their rubbish in the wrong box, on the wrong day or in too great quantities which, Penpusher says, makes the streets look very untidy. "Besides", he added "Derek Clipboard is on indefinite sick leave suffering from the stress of having had to make a decision about our risk assessment. There are only 345 trained officers in the Health and Safety department and it is not possible to adjust their workload for this sort of thing. The union made it clear that this was a one-off and that they would not approve of repeated applications for their members to engage in demeaning gutter-cleansing operations".

I left Penpusher picking his nose and looking at the clock. Four o'clock. Soon another hard day at the desk would be over and he could go home to tell his wife and admiring children of his exploits in the abandoned streets of Oxford. "Tell them we did it" he said to me as he led me past the rows of support staff and showed me to the door of his outer office. "Tell the Council Tax payers of Oxford how we work for them. 'Pride in our City' it says on our letter paper, and we are proud to have done our bit to clean up the city".

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I illustrated the post with a photograph of a gutter whose knee-high weeds had been untouched for over a year. Within two days, the gutter is immaculate - not the whole street, just the 30 foot section I illustrated.

Maybe someone read the article and decided that the gutter should be cleared before someone started organising charabanc trips to see it. Perhaps it is coincidence - this just happened to be the day when Kevin Penpusher consulted the sacred clip-board and announced in his adenoidal whine that the auguries were just right for this particular stretch of gutter to be cleaned.

I fear that what has actually happened is that a resident became so pissed off with the neglect that he or she just got on with it. I picture someone wading through the jungle on coming back from posting this month's Council Tax payment, and deciding that the time spent trying yet again to persuade Oxford City Council to do its duty might be better spent just getting on with it.

I wonder how far this private enterprise will go. We already have to drive our own rubbish to the tip. Now we weed our own gutters. Anyone any good at unblocking drains? How about a vigilante group to police the streets? If you have a C or better at GCSE maths you could do the city's accounts without losing £4 million on a single project. I'd like to be a highways officer - all you need is a brain and no experience whatsoever of the standard local authority approach to transport.

Just in case Oxford City Council were in fact fire-fighting the problem because it was illustrated last time, here is the stretch across the road.

I will keep publishing them until it has all been weeded.

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One can see why planners do not like grass. Planners like regularity and consistency. The ideal is that everywhere looks the same, neat and squared-off like it is on the developer's plans. Grass is offensive because it grows unpredictably. You cannot impose a directive on it nor make it fit to a pattern. To a timid little pen-pusher in the Planning Department, grass is slightly threatening, implying that there are forces of nature beyond human power.

Besides, people are unaccountably fond of grass and will go to great lengths to defend it. There is a certain amount of fun to be had in upsetting such people by threatening to dump concrete on their precious grass, but the fun soon palls under the pressure of the work which ensues. It is jolly hard to explain to a developer that his block of flats must be held up because local people have a sentimental attachment to raggedy green stuff. They can always go out into the country - there's plenty of grass out there.

In fact, you can find grass quite easily in central Oxford, growing in the neglected streets. See my post Oriel Square put out to grass for photographs of a once-beautiful city square now looking like the courtyard of a tenement block.

It is not just the city centre which is neglected like this. Here is a photograph of a suburban residential street whose gutters have not been weeded for a very long time.

There is a very basic point here. Cities are like people. Once they stop caring about the details - their hair, their fingernails, their shoes - people go downhill very quickly. The state of a city's gutters tells you a lot about the people who run it - they have no pride in their city, whatever their logo may say.

There is more than a little hypocrisy here. If a resident of this neglected street were to put his rubbish out on the wrong day, or put it out in a plastic sack instead of a council bin, he would be fined for breach of the rubbish by-laws and for making a mess. Who would notice some mess here?

Just down the road, a huge development is rising. One or two of the better councillors argued that the developer should find room for a play area within the development. The weak little men of the planning department would not risk crossing the developer over this. It was argued that children could find grass on Port Meadow if they really wanted it, and a majority of the councillors seem to have agreed.

Mind you, if this street is left for much longer, it will revert to the condition of the playing field which it was before the road was laid.

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Then it was just a few old buildings in a field, the plots and streets clearly delineated, evoking a clear picture of how it used to be and how far it had fallen, the grass pushing up through the old stones redolent of a lost civilisation.

You get much the same feeling of lost civilisation in Oriel Square now. The square is ruined anyway by the ugly monuments beloved of uncultured bureaucrats, in this case the bollards and other street furniture erected by the insensate oafs of Oxfordshire County Council's highways department (see What a load of bollards in Oriel Square), an act of vandalism by people too thick to understand what they are ruining.

The sad-looking air in Oriel Square, however, derives as much from neglect as from official barbarism. As at Ostia, the grass pushes up through the streets. The cobbles are damaged, cheaply mended by rough and ready filling. It looks as if it was last swept about the time I graduated in the 1970s.

The posts are put there to prevent cars parking. You can just picture some little pen-pusher, charged with keeping cars out of the square and deciding that some wooden posts would look appropriate - wood's old-fashioned, know wot I mean, that's heritage innit, like, they had wooden posts in them old days, know wot I mean, so they'll look OK against them old colleges.

Yes, thicko, there is nothing like a few wooden posts to complement 17th and 18th Century stone. The fact is that they look as much out of place against the metal bollards as they do in the context of the square as a whole. If it really was necessary to block off Oriel Square, it could have been done in a manner which fitted the context - a striking modern scheme with some thought behind it could actually have enhanced the place.

Instead, they dumped metal bollards and a nest of wooden posts - and then just abandoned Oriel Square to sad dereliction. The photograph sums it all up - a City Council notice board to encourage visitors above a gutter filled with weeds and litter.

It is not just the historic centre of Oxford which is neglected in this way. My own suburban street has weeds growing knee-high in the gutters. Oxford City Council make much of Oxford's attractions for visitors, who bring millions of pounds of revenue into the city. I pay well over £2,000 a year in council tax and they cannot even weed my local streets.

The cultural vandalism of the bollards and the shabby neglect of the streets are as bad as each other. Both come together in Oriel Square as a monument to official incompetence. Perhaps it is not even anything so positive as incompetence, just no idea as to what is right, and no-one whose contract requires them to care.

They have the excuse at Ostia Antica that the inhabitants largely abandoned the city in the 11th Century. It became a place visited only by tourists for whom the faded ruins were the attraction. That is not, as I understand it, our councillors' ambition for Oxford.

I do not, honestly, expect much better from the council officers. It seems odd though, does it not, for the elected councillors to have pitched for the title Capital of Culture whilst letting our own cultural heritage decline in a way so easily capable of remedy?

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It is a soulless place now, dragged down by the dead hand of council bureaucrats for whom it is just a street, by dim, dull little people with no cultural roots, no sensibility or sensitivity, no faculties to appreciate beautiful things.

You can't stand back and look at Oriel now. What you see instead is an ugly, utilitarian set of signs, boxes, poles, posts and bollards. They were put there as part of the Oxford Traffic Strategy, a £20 million scheme to screw up the traffic flow around Oxford.

The OTS simply dumped traffic management on Oxford. To the ghastly little men of Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council, Oxford was just a map onto which were scattered lines, signs, barriers and all the other detritus so beloved by highways officers. Its quirky little streets and architectural gems were just units in traffic control.

Only a council officer could do this to Oriel Square. Only a thick pen-pushing dolt, trained to walk the council corridors at the regulation pace and on the correct side of the corridor, could think it right to ruin a pretty place like this. Anyone else would say that if the OTS needed this then the OTS was fundamentally flawed.

As I have noted elsewhere, the council oik would simply not understand the objection. It is just a few buildings to him, old buildings at that, in winding inconvenient streets, not a bit like Stevenage where his cultural roots lie. He would boast of having removed traffic from the streets, too ignorant to see that it is traffic which gives the streets their life, too thick and uncultured to see that his street furniture is hideous. These are separate points, of course - even if you accept the removal of traffic, you do not have to replace it with things like this.

Oxford came top - that is, bottom - in a survey conducted last year by English Heritage, for the amount and quality of its street clutter. Oriel Square is the worst example, partly because it was so particularly lovely, partly because the bollards are particularly hideous, and partly because of the sad air of dereliction which hangs over the place now.

We do not just have ugly street furniture here. We do not even weed the streets. I have written about this separately - see Oriel Square put out to grass.

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One of the chief culprits was the Environment Agency, on two counts: they could have stood more strongly against flood-plain development (they could not bar it, but they could have opposed it) and they could have kept the channels clear.

The Environment Agency inherited in 1996 (via an intermediate bit of the function-shuffling which passes for government management now) those responsibilities which had until 1973 been performed by the Thames Conservancy. Any which were too expensive, or not susceptible to target-setting (and therefore bonuses), were abandoned. These included the dredging and other channel clearance operations which the Thames Conservancy had done as a matter of routine.

The Environment Agency's paymaster is the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs - DEFRA - a bureaucratic black hole where also-ran ministers and dead-beat civil servants go to sleep their way to retirement.

In a post of March called Oxford Canal - the alternative view, I showed some photographs of the channel which lies beside the southern end of the Oxford Canal, just above Hythe Bridge Street. Here are some more:

As you can see, the channel was completely blocked with branches and rubbish. I expressed concern not only as a rate-payer being terrorised by Oxford City Council for the slightest breach of the rubbish regulations, but as a house-holder living upstream from the blockage.

A walk up by Kirtlington earlier in the winter had revealed that the River Cherwell above Oxford was similarly blocked by branches and other rubbish.

This is basic house-keeping. You don't need to be intelligent or knowledgeable to see that water-courses must be kept clear, nor be particularly diligent just to get on and do it.

So why wasn't it done? And is it going to be done from now on?

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