Oxford

 I don't know what I think about this.  Having only recently got over the shock of hearing my own voice on recordings, now I am challenged to see my "good face for radio" in glorious technicolour.

Anyway, I did promise that if my talk were recorded I'd point people to it.  The idea was to try to introduce "Mutualism" as an anarchist philosophy and as a mechanism for achieving a non-state society.  The discussion goes off into many other interesting issues such as money (see my frustrated post from the other day) and Ponzi welfare schemes.  I'm not sure how successful I was, but it was an interesting experience.

Jock Coats - An Introduction to Mutualism from oxford libertarian on Vimeo.

So, tonight was the big day of my talk to the "Speak Easy" event of the combined Oxford Libertarian Society, the Oxford University Liberal Democrats and Compass Oxford in which I was supposed to introduce "Mutualism".  A number of people managed to miss my opening pre-emptive self-abasement for not being a "lecturer" up to the usual standard of their invited speakers like Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Eric Mack or the many other illustrious names they have hosted.

The ability to take a lecture you have delivered hundreds of times, probably written many papers around and, more importantly, understand your subject in great detail having spent half a lifetime studying it is one to be admired!  By contrast my only real period of doing any "public" speaking was when I was on the city council, or occasionally at party conferences, and I manage to ramble on in just three minutes, let alone a nearly half hour talk.  Still, it was being recorded, so you will soon be able to see for yourselves how awful I must have been, and apologies in advance to anyone I upset with throwaway remarks (such as in particular, that I recall specifically, suggesting that Kevin Carson's books were too long - what I really meant to say was that they were "over my head" and one chapter was enough to keep me trying to "grok" what he is on about for several months - sorry Kevin, if you read this!).

But hopefully having set the ground rules that I was not intending to convey that I was the world's expert on Mutualism or indeed anything I was going to say, and that discussion would be more welcome than searching academic questions that I could not answer, we did have quite a good, and at time vigourous discussion afterwards, even if, as it seemed to me, not much of what either I said or the discussion itself was terribly specific to Mutualism.

Anyway, the reason for writing, and the title of this blog, is to highlight one issue that came up in the discussion.  Whether I had actually made it clear in my talk, I actually doubt, though I had had it in my largely ignored notes, we got onto the subject of monetary reform.  Most of the libertarians in the room including myself excoriate the current system of central banking and fiat debt based money.  For the Individualist Anarchists and Mutualists the state protected monopoly of credit creation is one of or probably the single biggest system of privilege which enables the owners of capital to exploit labour and creates enormous barriers to entry.

Yet twice now in two months (the other was on New Year's Eve) I have got into heated arguments with Lib Dems about the need, or as I see it lack of a need, for a state system of currency.  They seem to see it as an absolutely essential function of the state, the only thing that guarantees honesty in trade, in banking (sic!), in knowing what values we assign to things and so on.  Of course one problem with challenging such an accepted social custom as state backed money, is presenting an alternative defenders of the status quo understand, and one of our problems as libertarians is that we don't, naturally, present a single one.  

Many of course prefer some kind of precious metal backed currency - that poses problems in that people often do not understand how as economies grow they can be "valued" if there's only a fixed amount of the glittery stuff against which to value them.  The answer seem to be roughly that rather than prices always rising because of inflation of the money supply, the same amount of precious metal money buys more.  Money, remember, is not wealth.  The goods you buy with it are wealth, and just because you pay less in tokens for something does not mean you are any the less acquiring wealth.

I probably make life even more difficult for myself, because I do not favour an explicitly "specie" based currency system - I prefer a completely open market in currencies.  What today we call banks, but probably other sorts of organisations as well, issue their own currencies which compete in the market for customers to use them and businesses to accept them.  They are, ostensibly, kept "honest" because they have sole responsibility for the value of their issue and the market will react quite quickly in devaluing that of an issuer who, for example, has made irresponsible loans and has therefore less certainty of the value of the assets underpinning its currency.  In such a free market it may well be that specie backed private currencies will become the most favoured.  I suspect personally that this will only be the case for certain types of trade, and that people will soon learn to accept lots of different kinds of money depending on the level of guarantee of its value over the period they anticipate holding it they feel they need.

So, for example, in very local trades, a local currency backed mostly by your own assessment of the trustworthiness of the people within whose network it circulates may be sufficient.  In this era of rapid global communications where we may also form non-geographic communities, perhaps but not necessarily linked together by some other interest (such as is happening in some online gaming systems now), this level of trust may be sufficient.  But for more valuable trades, perhaps ones with distant counterparties of whose providence and trustworthiness you may be uncertain, you may want to use a currency that carries a better intrinsic guarantee, such as a specie backed one from a major issuer.

But the point is that money, the notion of money, is a really flexible thing and the idea of having some commonly agreed upon medium in which transactions are carried out is probably one of the most obvious examples of human society inventing things as the need arose, and definitely not waiting for states to come along to introduce it.  And the current system, that puts in the hands of a very few people the ability to determine if you like who gets how much of it and at what cost, how much of it exists at all, and issues it as debt, instead of as credit, must surely be one of the worst imaginable.

If you think the central banking system is an essential function of the state to protect the weakest against economic predation by the unscrupulous, you just need to look at the sort of people who demanded this system be created in the first place.  Do you really think that the Federal Reserve system in the US was the brainchild of the two richest men then, or proportionately, since with the intention that it benefit us?  Or that anyone other than William Paterson and his business associates were intended to benefit from the founding of the Bank of England?

At this time of financial turmoil, too few people understand the origins and nature of banking.  Or the amount of control that governments actually do have, in spite of all the claims of "deregulation" of the financial sector, in manipulating the money supply, usually, admittedly, covertly through their friends in the private banking system.  Whilst I am not a "gold bug" I do at least believe that the current system of money perpetrates the biggest imaginable fraud against ordinary people and businesses at the hands of the people we allow to be elected to "serve" us.

Those who have inherited the British Liberal tradition should understand this better than most.  Many connected directly or indirectly with that movement over the past hundred or so years in particular have been prominent skeptics about the debt-based fiat money system.  Why do they now seem to cling so tightly to the myth that our money system is something that keeps either the state or the bankers honest and favours us little people?

Those of us who do see through it may offer wildly different alternatives, but surely the mere fact that so many people do seek alternatives suggests that there might, just, be something questionable about it?

...or how, if we are to change the world, we'll need to change Oxford first.

When I were a lad and doing my "O" Levels, about the same time it would appear as messrs Cameron, Johnson, Balls, Gove, Milliband snr. and a whole host of others now in the upper echelons of government or headed that way, the clever boys, like me, did proper subjects, like classical and modern languages, physical sciences, mathematics, history and the like, whilst the tier who were never quite sure whether they would get five O Levels did economics, politics, business studies, technical drawing, European studies and woodwork.

When it came to deciding on what to apply for at university then, it is hardly a surprise that, apart from the "Philosophy" bit "Politics, Philosophy and Economics" or "PPE" as it is known at Oxford was a bit of an enigma around which we tended to steer a wide berth.  And I have to admit that to this day, whilst I understand more now about the importance of having economically literate people (but that does not necessarily mean schooled by the mainstream British economics academic establishment), I do not really understand why we "teach" politics.

It can't be for the people who really run the country, for the technocrats of course do things like languages for the diplomatic service, town and country planning for the Scottish Executive and things like classics for the mainstream civil service!  Even the City took more "real world" subject graduates as analysts and consultants or Computing and Mathematics nerds as traders.  So it was with great interest that I read this analysis of the networks of Oxford educated power now at or coming to the fore in the Times.  Of those who list their degree subjects, it runs 10:6 in favour of PPE against all other subjects combined.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that I was brighter than them.  They got in, I didn't.  The fact that I was the arrogant petulant little boy who refused all his tutors' advice to choose Theology at Worcester which might have got me a place and still been a "respectable" subject, but rather chose to try for English at New College in the first year they took women and the last year the bigger boys could come back and try the entry exams after their A levels certainly didn't help my chances.  One can't help wondering, however, if choosing PPE might have been an "easier" (none are "easy" routes to Oxford but in relative terms perhaps) option, and then where might I have been now?

But what intrigues me, given, as I say, the penchant for relegating the O Level (and subsequently A Level) in things like Politics and Economics to the second tier boys, why did so many of these folk now reaching the zenith of power choose that course?  The article in the Times to which that graphic is linked makes the point that here wasn't a group of young men plotting their way to high office, but one does have to wonder what their school careers officers had predicted for them embarking on such a discipline.  I somehow doubt that they saw themselves as potential Nobel economists!

Moreover, the worrying question for me is why on earth we seem to acquiesce in electing people like this who appear, for all the world, to have decided at the earliest stages of their lives to aim for political power?  It seems to me that if we are to have political power at all, it ought to be vested only in those who have demonstrated the least desire for it.  As Milton Friedman once put it, "[democratic] government is an institution whereby the people with the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men get into the position of controlling them".

And most worrying of all is how all these people seem to come out the same.  There may be nuances of difference between them, though it is interesting to see how some of them were what one might call political whores during their student days, chopping and changing political affiliation, or even being more than one thing at the same time.  Even today it seems quite difficult to find much to differentiate between politics and economics academe at Oxford, and elsewhere in Britain.  Have we, as Hoppe and others say, got to the point where the intellectuals in such disciplines are so captured by the prevailing statist, and even within that more or less social democratic version of statist, worldview that the cycle of political education to power and thence to a new generation of would be politicians is merely churning out the same vaguely left of centre, always collectivist mudpie that is modern political "choice"?

We certainly appear to have more Marxian influenced types in the newer universities, but we seem to have precious few, anywhere, really promoting proper, old fashioned, liberalism, classical, individualist anarchist or whatever.  Surely, if we are to break that cycle of mudpie middle of the road managerial ideology free politics we need to have people planting the seed of radicalism in our younger generation?  Or maybe that's the point - maybe, if someone has decided aged 18, that they want to know about politics and power and how to get it, they are precisely not the people who will be receptive to anything but that which gains them that power ten, twenty years down the line.  If so, it is the duty of the rest of us to deny them that power at any opportunity.

As many will know, I rarely write about work related issues on here. It's probably generally a good idea not to associate one's employer with my diverse and eclectic other opinions. And, since I am also a governor of the university, I don't want to put myself in the position of making any indiscretions, perhaps where I am in receipt of privileged information.

However tonight's an exception. And be warned, that this post is going to be a real monster - for which I make no apology.

Last week a planning application for a key part of Oxford Brookes University's redevelopment of its campus at Gipsy Lane in Oxford was refused, having been "called in" to full council after it had been approved by the City Council's Strategic Development Control Committee on the recommendation of planning officers. Coincidentally (or not, as one actually suspects) news went round of a meeting of local residents' groups in East Oxford and the Headington area which, in its own publicity was:

"intended to be constructive by bringing together the communities from Headington and East Oxford ,their elected representatives and Brookes University and start a community debate about ways how to restrain the presence of Brookes University in East Oxford."

Well, with such a neutral (not!) intention (I understand that university management were not, in fact, specifically invited, which itself does not bode well for "constructive" debate) this was clearly an event not to be missed, even if I was only going to sit and listen. Now, one would not characterize the meeting as "heated" since most of the people there were of a similar opinion - that Brookes has to be "restrained" in the area, and those of us not of that opinion seemed collectively to decide that discretion was the better part and so on...

But the main impression I got was that, whilst there were some good arguments, quite a lot of the people with the most to say were not, shall we say, in quite the fullest possession of the facts. That is not entirely their fault in many cases (though I suspect some of invincible ignorance because I've heard them previously) - the university cannot always disclose information that might be commercially sensitive to a public audience, and some aspects, such as "what constitutes a student" in counting student numbers, are and have always been, open to some interpretation - a former registrar at the university would always say, if someone asked him "how many students do we have", "well, it depends what you call a student" and indeed, with Brookes in particular with its many modes of delivery through partnerships and so on, it is a tricky question.

But I will try and address the issues I remember from the meeting as best I can, and without disclosing any confidentialities, because this is crucial to countering the campaigners' initial contention - that Brookes needs to be "restrained".

So first, student numbers. One speaker produced figures that purported to show that Oxford University has about 11,000 students and Oxford Brookes around 18,000. He stated that these were taken from publicly available sources. And indeed they are, however it was completely disingenuous of him to make a comparison between those two figures. Brookes does have just over 18,000 students enrolled. But this figure includes everyone - postgraduates, people studying for Brookes qualifications overseas or at partner colleges, part time students, people away in any one year on year out "sandwich" courses, mature students living at home and so on. The equivalent figure for Oxford University is just over 20,000 (pdf).

Brookes has in fact, just over 12,500 full time higher education students enrolled (at all levels, and including "sandwich" courses whose students will be away from Oxford for a year in their course) compared to Oxford's nearly 19,000. Of these 12,500 full time HE students, some 7,000 are based at campuses within the city with the remainder based at other campuses or at partner colleges some way from Oxford. Of these totals, some 3,700 are accommodated in halls of residence or a few (this point was raised, and overplayed I feel) leased houses - 3,500 or so really are in halls, not houses; about the same again, 3,700 and some, live at the family home; leaving a total of 4,700 and change who do not live either at home nor in university accommodation, and 1,300 or so of these live outside Oxford. So just over 3,400 occupy what might otherwise be "family homes" within Oxford of those who "do not pay council tax" (i.e. full-time students): just over 2% of the city's term time population and just under 3% of its non-student population.

Now, it is true, as Green councillor Craig Simmons pointed out that this 3,400 is a higher number than either the university would like, and more importantly than what the university had agreed to get the number down to by this year. However we do have another 400 student rooms in halls of residence coming onstream within the next 18 months, with another 370 or so expected shortly after provided within the city by a private provider. On top of that Brookes themselves are redeveloping both Harcourt and, if planning permission is forthcoming, Wheatley to a higher capacity still. 3,400 is, however, lower than the number in private accommodation when the agreement with the City Council was made in the Local Plan process seven years ago, and, contrary to one claim in the meeting, we have increased halls provision by over 800 bedrooms since that agreement.

So, first conclusion: even if there has been a small increase in the overall number of students, the number "living out" within the city has still fallen in absolute terms, and will continue to do so as new halls come onstream, whatever the perception amongst the local communities.

Second, the "New Student Centre Building" in context. Whilst it was ostensibly the planning application for a new building on the site of a previous very tatty 1950s building at the Gipsy Lane campus that sparked this more general outcry at "Brookes's expansion" and the need to "restrain" the university, it was markedly absent from much of the discussion at the meeting. One might, from the inside perspective, suggest that this is because the arguments are in fact inconvenient for the "anti-Brookes" campaign.

Yes, it is a big building. But it does not mark an expansion in the overall floor space at Gipsy Lane - which was one of the grounds for Green councillors at least trying to prevent it getting planning consent. The widely consulted upon "Master Plan", approved by the City Council over a year ago now, makes it quite clear that this building is the key to reducing overall the floor space and the number of buildings on the Gipsy Lane site. At the moment, because of the age and history of some of the buildings, they are actually pretty badly utilized - in terms of how much of the time any particular room or building is in use for education. The provision of this new building, designed with much more flexible spaces, and more suitable for contemporary teaching and learning activities means that at the end of the Master Plan process, there will in fact be a net reduction of over 30% of built floor space on the Gipsy Lane campus compared with what is there now (i.e. after the loss of the 50s engineering building).

So, second conclusion: setting aside issues of design and neighbourliness, which, yes, are important, especially if you live immediately adjacent to it, on the issue which concerns the agitated community groups most - the perception of an ever expanding university - the present application represents not an expansion, but in fact phase one of an overall reduction in built space. This does not, I believe, give them an argument for refusal of the planning application on the grounds of not having met targets about the number of students "living out".

Now, third, and to my mind the most important issue here, and one in which I think we are in complete agreement, concerns where in Oxford those "living out" students actually live, and what effect they may have on those particular neighbourhoods and how best to mitigate those effects. Yes, it can be clearly seen that those who live out prefer to live out as close as they can to first, the main campuses and second, the parts of Oxford in which they want to spend the rest of their time - socializing, spending money in the local economy (estimates range up to £100 million on top of what the university itself contributes to the local economy) and so on.

What one can reasonably say is that, notwithstanding that the overall number living out is falling, they are getting, apparently inexorably, more concentrated in certain neighbourhoods - in particular within an overall area bounded by about Howard Street in the south-west, St Clement's in the west, Headley Way and the "New Marston" area in the north and parts of Headington in the east. And along with that concentration of where they live, goes all the changes that local communities are concerned about in regard to the "Inner" Cowley Rd in terms of the mix of businesses, concentration of nightlife that causes disturbances and so on.

Now, on this issue, I think it is worth emphasizing one crucial fact: family homes become HMOs and student lets only when an owner occupier decides to sell to someone who is going to rent the property out. It may be true that students are prepared to pay a premium for proximity to their places of study and socializing, but you cannot actually blame the university for the fact that householders in these areas have apparently been all too willing to surrender family homes, presumably at top whack prices, to landlords who have spotted and want to exploit this trend in the market. Such is the nature of the land and property market, whether the demand is from students, or a particular ethnic community, or proximity to a particular employer.

I also think this is key to achieving some of the concerned neighbours' wishes too. Instead of calling for the heavy hand of government to step in and create some arbitrary rules for avoiding what the community is calling, rather unkindly in my opinion, "student ghettoes", there is a perfectly good, voluntary mechanism for putting a stop to any further "studentification" and eventually clawing back some of the property for family owner-occupier use. And in particular, it is a mechanism that will test the real resolve of those communities to do something about it themselves, and demonstrate whether the campaigners are, in fact, representative of the more general opinion in their areas.

My proposal: these campaigners should approach every owner-occupier in their areas and ask them voluntarily to sign up to a restrictive covenant on their home such that they will not sell up to someone intending to rent the property out as a multi-occupancy or student let. If everyone does so, then it is a sure demonstration that the campaigners are representative, and that their own neighbours are willing to help, effectively financially (by foregoing any possible premium they may get from a prospective landlord over another owner-occupier), stop any further encroachment. If they are not willing to accept such a restriction, one can only conclude that, when it comes down to it, that local community favours that price premium over maintaining their community. In such a situation, why on earth should an unrepresentative minority then be able to call upon the heavy hand of government coercion to do the same thing by force or planning regulation? If new halls do release family-homes back into the owner-occupancy market, they to should be encouraged to adopt the covenant and so help those neighbourhoods claw back some of the lost ground.

But this also goes hand in hand with assisting the university itself to help them, by providing purpose built accommodation in areas where students will find it more attractive to choose halls than to choose private lets. There is much debate about this issue - will students ever be tempted into halls rather than the perceived "benefits" of living out? Here we do have a problem of image in Oxford. Because of the history of Brookes all its current halls of residence were built in order first and foremost to accommodate the first year students. We cannot actually demonstrate that halls can be more attractive than private housing for continuing year students because we do not, effectively, have any halls that offer the equivalent type of accommodation.

"First year halls" are geared around people who arrive for the first time, not knowing the city probably, and almost certainly not knowing enough others to decide on their own groups with whom to share accommodation. Rooms are licensed to individuals bundled together in "cluster flats" that preserve enough privacy for individuals who do not know each other, and more rules to make such ad hoc groups function in as civilized a way as possible.

Further halls developed with the aim of enticing continuing year students out of family housing therefore need to be geared to that market: they need to be in the right location so that they are at least as convenient as the private lets with which they are competing; they need to offer a better standard of accommodation; they need to be more directed at groups who have formed a circle of friends and who want to club together and share a flat or house as a quasi-household; and they need to be in sufficient quantity to enable them to compete on price with private lets, allowing for any difference in quality.

And, for those who remain skeptical I can tell you now that I have yet to visit a private let student house that offers as good a standard of accommodation as properly maintained halls of residence. Family homes were not built that way - someone will get a pokey little room, others the en-suite bathroom, some will share a tiny little communal space because a landlord has decided to fit as many bedrooms in as possible, and so on.

Our newest halls of residence are being built at densities in excess of 300 bedspaces per hectare, and yet each bed-sitting room is around 15 sq m (the minimum acceptable for letting purposes in a private house is just 6 sq m) with its own en-suite facilities, and all the little things like sufficient power sockets, TV, phone and internet points in every room, well maintained, if "institutional", furniture, enough communal space such that everyone in the flat can have a place at the same dining table, cupboards and fridge space to keep their own things in and so on. Many halls providers in the private sector now provide facilities such as gyms and even swimming pools to make them more attractive. And in those university towns and cities where they do have a higher number of hall spaces available, whether university provided or by the recently burgeoning commercial providers, they do not seem to have a problem filling them - else it would not be such a lucrative business to be in.

By contrast, I have seen some truly shocking private lets, they are at a density usually way below half of what we can fit in halls - basically landlords can get away with treating their student tenants like something out of the Young Ones - especially perhaps those in truly "family sized" homes which are unlikely to fall under any of the registration and inspection schemes any time soon.

But the real upshot is that if we can build sufficient halls, close into the main campuses and socializing areas of town, for every hectare's worth of halls, we can reduce the land used by student private lets by two or three times that amount. So it's no use everyone moaning about "studentification" of family housing neighbourhoods whilst at the same time selling to those very landlords they don't want to see, and most importantly, whilst trying to prevent, as far as possible, planning for the halls of residence that could and should replace the need for the use of those family homes.

I've gone on far too long here. But I want to address a couple of specific points that were raised at the meeting:

First, several times someone (with whom I have had a most unpleasant brush previously over a Brookes development in which she quite wrongly assumed I was merely a Brookes shill when on the Planning Committee) said that Brookes wanted to get rid of some of its halls - specifically mentioning Crescent Hall and Paul Kent Hall. The only reference to this the university has made is in its submission to the Core Strategy examination in public. And it is quite clear - impossible to misinterpret other than willfully. These halls are, de facto, further away from the campuses and socializing facilities than most students would, everything else being equal, prefer to live. They are therefore not contributing to any possible effect of getting students out of family homes more conveniently located. All the university has said is that if it can be allocated sufficient land in more attractive locations such that it could build as many bedspaces as in these two other halls, as well as its overall aim to have net more halls spaces, then it would be better to build in those better locations and release those sites into the market for mainstream housing land.

There is not now, never has been, and will not be any intention to reduce the overall number of hall spaces available to Brookes students by disposing of those two halls. It is simply a recognition of the facts of the property market and the desire of students to live closer to where they want to be,

Second, on disciplinary issues and taking some responsibility for inculcating a more communitarian spirit in our students, especially those who live out. Someone said that the university does not do anything to help turn what I think they called eighteen year old tear-aways, newly independent, away from home, wanting only to please themselves, into potentially good neighbours. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whilst I am sure there is more the university could do to make it easier, for example, for concerned neighbours to see that something is done about egregious cases of un-neighbourliness, the whole pastoral and disciplinary effort in halls in their first year is directed at trying to get our students to have consideration for others' needs.

We are assisted also in this by the police - my three local beat officers were in fact onsite when I returned from the meeting last night getting ready to go on rounds with the wardens to start that very process with this year's new intake to halls. This is the second year now of an initiative begun by our local neighbourhood officers and now spreading as good practice to university communities throughout the Thames Valley Police area.

The city council also assists - for example by helping us tailor our recycling system in halls so that it matches as much as possible what students living out will be expected to do. Again, this has only really been fully online for two years now, so should only really now be feeding through to those now living out. Hopefully neighbours will see some improvement.

And lastly - bravo if you have read this far - cars. Cars are big lumps of metal. They take up a lot of space, whether they are owned by students or other residents. With students in halls we can police the city's conditions that students do not bring or use a car in Oxford.

Now I know that neighbourhoods perceive this to be a big problem - that a student house could have four or more cars for example. That they notice when students are back because parking becomes impossible. But it is a simple fact: it is only a minority of students who can actually afford to keep a car. You only need one car per house in much of east Oxford to overload the available on-street parking. If so many of these student houses, as is implied, actually had a car per resident, the problem would be far, far greater than it is.

Many people want the university to make it a condition of study that students do not have a car in Oxford, whether or not they are in halls. I cannot concur with that. They are adults; if they have a car, they are paying for the roads. If it is a controlled parking zone they will have to pay for permits. Nowadays students almost inevitably have to work to support themselves, and for plenty that means work sufficiently far away from their place of residence to need a car - possibly even more so than people living in inner east Oxford and working in town or at the hospitals. If you are going to try and base the right to a permit on whether someone pays council tax, then you had better be prepared to ban anyone in receipt of council tax benefit from having a car as well.

The same woman as was misinformed about Crescent and Paul Kent Hall questioned why students can be given car permits at Wheatley and Harcourt. Well there are sound practical reasons - the only people at Harcourt for example who are eligible to apply for a parking permit are those education students who have to travel to school based teaching placements.

Phew - as I said, bravo if you have managed to get this far. I have to say that the whole tenor of that meeting was far too antagonistic toward Brookes, and many of the reasons for that seem to originate in misunderstandings, or, as in the case of owner-occupiers selling up to landlords, of the communities' own making. Brookes is committed to helping address these issues, whatever the origins of them. But the communities need to work with Brookes to achieve it. Taking the line, as in the advertisements for the meeting, that they wish to "restrain" Brookes, does not seem to me to be conducive to a "constructive debate".

And, since "dark threats" were being issued about the prospects for politicians who are not seen to back these neighbourhoods, I will also say that I for one will be taking a dim view of those politicians who take positions that work to the detriment of students as part of a wider agenda against the university amongst some of their more vocal constituents. Some last week voted, in my opinion, against the best interests of nearly a third of their electorate. It is, indeed, usually a silent third, but I for one will do what I can to get our students to have their say in this city. Whatever problems communities may have with particular examples of student neighbours, there is far too great a tendency in this city to lump them all together as the sole cause for all your distress. Any who go around trying to claim to be "student friendly" when it suits them, but most of the time siding against them on all manner of local issues, deserve to be exposed as cynical and somewhat unsophisticatedly so hypocrites.

Spotted this is today's Oxford Mail. An environmentalist has been allowed by the courts to claim for unfair dismissal owing to his environmental beliefs:

An Oxford environmentalist, sacked from one of the country’s largest property companies, is to claim he was unfairly dismissed because of his views on climate change. Tim Nicholson, 41, told a pre-hearing review his views on the environment put him at odds with other senior employers at Grainger plc — and contributed towards his dismissal. Mr Nicholson was told he could make a claim under the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations 2003. [From Environmentalist to fight sacking at tribunal (From Oxford Mail)]

So, is it greenery matter of faith? Or science?

With the recent wintry weather, the stories have come thick and fast again about how you could be sued if you try and clear a pavement outside your property and someone slips. In Oxfordshire we had the bizarre case of a farmer who, needing to clear the snow to let milk tankers in and so on decided to go the "extra half mile" and snow plough the roads in his local village that were completely neglected by the county forced to focus on "big routes" who was then castigated for not being "qualified" to clear snow.

And yet, we also know that in many other countries it is seen as a civic duty, even on occasions a legal duty, to do what you can to clear snow from the public area around your private property. Between the Health and Safety nazis and insurance companies here we are destroying community self-sufficiency and good neighbourliness in fear of legal repercussions.

And a friend pointed out that in the US (not sure which state or whether it is a federal thing) they have a law they call the "Good Samaritan Law" which effectively pre-emptively removes liability from those who "do the right thing" and help out where they can. In fact it's the same sort of law that makes it a crime in France not to stop and give first aid to someone in need and so on - something else here that is now so circumscribed by health and safety and liability issues that you wouldn't dare touch someone dying in the street without professional indemnity insurance in case you did something wrong an insurance company could get you for.

These Good Samaritan Laws don't excuse people from stupidity - I think if you used hot water to clear snow from the pavement outside your house and it froze into black ice, your stupidity could still be rewarded with liability - but it would remove this paralyzing fear of not helping out "just in case".

Perhaps someone could answer this point of law though - assuming you weren't actually clearing the snow when someone slipped and damaged themselves, presumably their insurance company could not actually definitively say that it was you who cleared the snow. Their first target would presumably be the owner - ie the local authority. It would then be up to the local authority to petition to add you as a co-defendant or similar, no? Does anyone imagine that a council who tried to pass the blame for their own failure to do what they were supposed to be obliged to do - clear their own pavements - would survive terribly long passing that buck to genuine people doing their bit in their neighbourhood?

Absolute bollocks! School bureaucracy (and local state protected monopoly) goes bonkers in cold weather...

Cold war over coat policy 6:30am Saturday 7th February 2009 Comments (13) Have your say » By Hayley Cover » Children had a freezing walk home after a school confiscated their coats because they were not official uniform. Last night, John and Shirley Cooper said they were outraged King Alfred’s Sports and Community College, in Wantage, had not let their son Sean, 14, have the coat back to go home. The school confiscated the coats of four other children on Tuesday. Sean had to walk half a mile to his home in Dean Butler Close without his plain black hooded windcheater. [From Cold war over coat policy (From The Oxford Times)]

Just across the park from my flat is a house, known as Dairy Lodge. It is part of the legacy of the Morrell family who built it as part of their parkland estate which the City Council requisitioned many years ago. Part of the estate was fenced off, became Robert Maxwell's house and is now part of Oxford Brookes University. But the city hung onto other parts of the park, including two of its lodges, Dairy Lodge being one of them.

To my mind it is extremely dubious as to whether they have an ethical right to flog these houses off - being a part of private property they simply purloined from the last owners and clarly a part of the park as a coherent whole, but such is their financial predicament and incompetent financial management that they decided they had no choice but to flog off Dairy Lodge.

And so it's been on the market - you will understand that even Oxford is a difficult market at the moment (someone just reduced their £1.2m property in Old Headington to £995k for example) - for six weeks or so. It was only put onto the agent's website three weeks or so ago, with a closing date for "informal tenders" of 26th January.

Now, personally, I would have sold it leasehold - after all it is an integral part of Headington Hill Park and therefore of public interest as part of that estate. But no, it was sold freehold. It includes in its £425,000 guide price a large barn, almost as big as the house itself, which, the particulars suggest, might be developed with appropriate planning consent.

Guess who grants planning consent? Yep, you got it, the city council as planning authority. Planning consent is like writing a blank cheque to the applicant for the amount of money by which the site will appreciate if it has permission to become a five bed, three reception property instead of the three bed two reception (and downstairs bathroom) property as sold.

So you would think that a local planning authority would have a guess at what sort of planning consent any new owner might apply for and do it for themselves, and knock up the sale price by a hundred grand or so. But no, Oxford City Council, with consummate incompetence and possibly even maladministration, has flogged the house as seen whilst encouraging the new occupier to make a small fortune on it instantly by suggesting they apply to convert the barn.

Great - this is a council so strapped for cash that they are selling a unique building in an historic setting that one has to wonder whether they even have the right to sell. And they can't even get that right! I wonder how the District Auditor is going to view that?

Last year there was an almighty row, aided and abetted of course by politicians taking opportunist (but unrealistic and possibly illegal) positions ahead of elections, about huge rent rises in the five year Covered Market rent review process. A modicum of peace was restored when the city council pledged to spend the paltry sum of £50,000 on some painting and decorating. Today we learn that the cash strapped spending slashing council has withdrawn the funding and, quite rightly, some of the traders in the market are pretty pissed off.

Image copryright SteveBell @ Flickr (I hope I'm allowed to use this!) Not only that, but today we also learned that retail property is at the head of the rush downwards with average values now below those when the rent review period began in 2003. So not only has the council managed to snag peak of the market rents but has now slashed the only sop to the traders it offered.

It's time to realize that the City Council is incapable of being a good landlord to such a sensitive building and it local trader tenants. For many people in Oxford the Covered Market is the jewel in the crown of local retailing. Many suburban centers have lost their fresh food outlets- butchers, green-grocers and so on - and on top of that the market can offer a range of products that only the center of gravity of a city could realistically support.

Whether the Westgate redevelopment goes ahead and when is also critical, as that will move the center of gravity of the city westwards, alongside the redevelopment of the whole south western quarter of the city, and the Covered Market and the surrounding streets need their landlords to plan investment now to try to maintain footfall at that end of the city center when the time comes. It will be a fair trek on foot between Waitrose and the new car parking attached to the Westgate center and the High Street, and the further reduction in scheduled bus services stopping in the High will make things even worse.

Instead of reining in its expenditure on its estate, which is largely to the east of St Aldate's and Cornmarket - the area that will be most affected by these changes over the next few years - the City Council needs to find a way of taking the lead in investing in this part of town. We all know they cannot afford to do so themselves in the current climate as they are slashing away at any expenditure they can so they need to change the way their interests in these properties are handled so that they can attract outside investment.

A Property Investment Partnership would fit the bill. The City Council, and any other landlords who want to participate to keep their estate's value up when all the changes happen, contribute the properties as owner partners, the tenants put in their rent as occupier partners and we go out and find an investor partner or several to put in whatever capital is required.

Ownership is not ceded to anyone else in the long run, the new facilities improve footfall and therefore takings, which is reflected in a higher yield from the whole development, since traders' occupation payments are based on their turnover rather than mere "rent" changing that from a fixed cost to a variable cost at this time of great pressure on retail. Everyone wins. You could even throw in other facilities such as a customer loyalty card, selling small shares to the customers so they also become partners in the thing they value so highly.

Let's face it, the city has finally realized it cannot possibly finance its leisure centers properly and has now given them away in a U-turn since castigating me for suggesting it in 2002 (which would have saved them millions over those years, enough to finance all the projects they are slashing to make ends meet today). So it has no excuse now for not looking at more imaginative ways of dealing with the rest of its non-core operations. And failure to invest now risks their long term future income faced with all the challenges I've already mentioned - which would surely be, foreseeable as it is, maladministration if it comes to pass.

Oxford City Council is set, it would appear, to cut its funding for the City Centre Management Company, OX1 and "repatriate" many of its functions to the bureaucracy of the City Council. In another U-turn from its former support of the idea of a city centre management company the Labour administration thinks that it will be more "transparent" if things are run from the Town Hall again.

New manager 'set to run Oxford' OX1 is to continue as an independent representative body for businesses Oxford city centre is to have a new manager to oversee improvements designed to benefit residents, shoppers, visitors and businesses. Currently £105,000 goes to a company called OX1, a group representing firms which organised events this year to promote the city centre. [From BBC NEWS | England | Oxfordshire | New manager 'set to run Oxford']

When they first pushed the idea back in 1999 I was fundamentally against establishing OX1 as a sort of a "closed shop" of retailers and other economic interests and wanted a much more open structure which would enable users of the city centre, workers, shoppers, citizens, culture groups and so on to take a real stake. I proposed then what I called a "City Centre Management Co-operative".

But in any case, OX1 has never been given the clout or profile it would need to do a decent job. Indeed it has at times become the excuse for a city council not investing in the centre - such as this year when the Christmas lights underwhelmed it was pointed out that it was not the council's job - that it funded OX1 to do that sort of thing (funding which, it would appear, is less than half what the council itself spent on lights ten years ago). Indeed privatizing the provision of Christmas lights was one of the leading drivers behind the CCMC in the first place - we were told that by giving it independence from the council's financial strictures it would be able to produce better investment is such promotional activities.

Oxford city centre is a confusing enough place as it is - not only is the city council responsible for all sorts of statutory administravia, but it is also a significant landlord in its own right. There are competing pressures for its meagre resources there too - it will make a lot of money out of the redevelopment of the Westgate shopping centre if that continues but will likely in turn lose out on its properties in parts of the centre that will lose footfall - such as the High Street, Covered Market and Broad Street areas.

Perhaps more than most other city centres there are powerful local interests outside the city council - the university and colleges own much of the commercial property, as well as, in a sense, "controlling" much of the consumer side of the city's commercial scene. The county council is not such a significant landlord but does control the access in the form of responsibility for roads, traffic and public transport. So there are real conflicts of interest here that could do with sorting out, rather than, perhaps, exacerbating by re-centralizing more of the administrative functions into the city council. And on top of all that, the city council has been utterly incompetent in its execution of the services it provides in the city centre as well - street cleaning, rubbish collection and so on.

So what is needed is to look again at my original idea of a city centre partnership or co-operative in which all users and providers in the city centre can participate and take a real stake. And all the more so in this frightening time when the economic situation may see our high streets decimated with both chain stores and local traders under real threat of closure.

Landlords could be persuaded (led by the city council itself whose investment ability is hopeless anyway) to put their properties (including, perhaps especially, the Covered Market) into such a partnership, allowing finance to be raised for improvements and changing the rent structure which currently threatens to cripple many businesses, especially the local traders. Traders are also not going to survive without customers, so city centre users could be encouraged to join in solidarity with the business they will no doubt regret losing if they go, with perhaps some kind of city centre dividend paid for out of improved revenues from the resultant customer loyalty.

Oxford city centre is a centre for people from throughout the county and region, who have just as little a say in how things are managed there by the city council as do the businesses OX1 was initially setup to represent. Mutualizing the city centre in such a partnership would enable all of these people, as well as Oxford residents to have a real stake and a real say in how their city centre serves them.