Headington Matters -- it really does

This short post is unashamedly, unabashedly, unrepentantly about my ward, the great community of Headington in north east Oxford. Actually, historically, Oxford is more of an add-on to Headington rather than vice versa, but we're not going to harp on about that.

The attentive among you will notice that there is a new list just started on the right hand side of this blog. It's for Headington issues and, in particular, for petitions and other useful information. Much of it will come (I say ashamedly, abashedly, but not really repentantly) from my ward colleague's website, where more information can be found.

The first petition up there is Save our Subway. The Headington underpass is under attack: as part of the 'improvements' to London Road, the intention is to block in the underpass to widen the road. It is supposed to help buses -- but this idea (as I said in the local press) would simply make pedestrians suffer. So, if you are local to Headington or if you have ever used the underpass with its colourful murals locals painted five years ago, go on, sign the petition, you know it makes sense.

One final thought on Headington: it stands to the city down the hill as Arezzo does to Florence. The Aretines, you will remember, were the fathers of Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, Giorgio Vasari and other 'greats' of the Italian Renaissance -- in short, it was the genius-factory for the city which ruled it. Without Arezzo, Florence would have been much lesser -- and so would Oxford without Headington.

Great blogs I've never written

I have to admit it: I’m an idle blogger. I wake up in the night with the text of a well-crafted posting half there in my mind. I have good intentions actually to sit and type it in the morning. But then there are e-mails to answer, there’s that report which has to be read before 9am or – heaven forfend – there’s actually some work to be done. And so, the posting is posted to the back of mind and becomes just one more which could have been a contender.

I can still remember some of them. There’s the one entitled ‘Is it RIP for the BBC?’ where I was going, for once, to agree with my ward colleague on a financial matter: he, you will remember, affects to imagine being an economic ‘liberal’ is compatible with being a true social liberal -- or is it that I affect to imagine the opposite? I can't quite recall. My humble submission on the larger issues of what it is to be a liberal was going to be the subject of further postings, in which I was to discourse on the nature of liberalism in the twenty-first century. And then there was the one that I actually began writing at 6:30 this morning asking ‘Where are the liberal Catholics?’ – a question to which many will think they have the answer but which was going to allow me to muse aloud on the conservative revanche to the feminist challenge to the liberal tradition of emphasising the private sphere, beyond the public gaze (got that?).

But they all remain in the capacious recycling bin that’s somewhere in my mind – and that gets emptied much less often than once a fortnight. But, somehow, I don’t imagine the blogosphere is lesser without them.

Cribbing no more

Following on from my posting of yesterday, there seems to have been a crisis-summit at Tory HQ. No longer in their news section do they have the plagiarised article I mentioned. Which leaves them with nothing to say about the defections or the Witney Wonder's bold visit into enemy territory, that is, Oxford. What have they got to hide?

Two final thoughts. First, it's encouraging to know that my blog can appeal beyond the happy band of brothers and sisters who are true Liberal Democrats and is apparently monitored by the Tories. Second, I wonder whether the royalties cheque is winging its way even now from the Conservative party to the journalist they cribbed.

Cribbing is the sincerest form of flattery

Whatever else you say about the Tories, you've got to give them this: they have a redoubtable ability to put a smile on our faces. I'm not thinking now about Cameron announcing he's the heir of Blair, just at the time when most of the nation are counting down the days until the PM finally shuffles off his super-mortal coil. What's amusing me is the Tories' apparent embarrassment about having drawn to their ample bosom two city councillors formerly stranded on the Independent bench.

What with the Witney Wonder himself taking the unusual step of setting foot into Oxford to find out what the two were like, you would have thought that they might have wanted to blow their trumpet. But they're obviously lost for words. And when, finally, something was posted on their website, it somehow didn't feel quite right. It was not only that the Tory party was here revealing that one of the councillors had left the Liberal Democrats because his then-colleagues had judged that he was not up to being on Oxford City Council's Executive Board. It was that all the words seemed somehow familiar -- and, indeed, they are identical to the words of the Oxford Mail originally reporting the defections.

Now, we knew the Conservatives were desperate but this takes it into a different league. What I wonder is whether Giles Sheldrick, the journalist who is been unwittingly writing the Tories' press release, is getting his royalties. Or will he demand that they remove his well-hewn prose from their website? It's hard to imagine that the Mail's Chief Reporter feels flattered by their act of piracy.

I was robbed

It's rare enough that I write a blog that gains much attention. Then, even when I do, its popularity remains unacknowledged. Through a 'technical hitch', I don't make it to the Golden Dozen on LibDem Voice.

I don't know whether it makes it better or worse that the Dozen was, on this occasion, not compiled by ward colleague. Instead, it was drawn up instead by an Oxford councillor from a completely different ward. I'm not the suspicious type.

Tories in Oxford: remember, you read it here first

So the story of the mass defections from Oxford's Independent Group to the Tories has broken. As attentive readers of this blog could have read about this back at the start of last month, this can hardly count as new news. Except for that fact that the predictions were for at least three Tory councillors -- but they've only mustered two.

Clearly, the silver-tongued smooching of the latest Camerooney failed to persuade those other councillors who were the objects of his attention. Amazingly, those other councillors decided that the idea of moving from a small group to an even smaller one lacked something in the enticement stakes.

It does leave the acrid scent of desperation hanging in the air. It's just a question of who is more desperate: Oxfordshire's Conservatives, who in the Witney Wonder's own backyard can't get anyone with a blue rosette near to winning an election in the county's capital. Or the formerly Independent-minded councillors, counting the days to the next election campaign and deciding that being in any party whatsoever is better than none.

It's a curious political journey for the individuals involved, one of whom has discussed joining at least two other parties before, while the other is a regular attendee at 'Save the NHS' marches. I suppose that will now be out and in will come support for charging for residents parking permits, anti-European rhetoric and backing for the Iraq war. We should wish them luck for their last few months on Oxford City Council.

Civil partnerships: why we are lucky

Have I mentioned I was in Italy a couple of months ago? I might have alluded now and again to the fact that work forced me to visit a country I thoroughly enjoy. There is so much that I relish there – but, recently, there has been one issue that has made me thank the Lord that I am British.

Civil partnerships: the Labour party has a patchy record on such issues, understandably so for an organisation which does not see civil liberties as at its core. But, while they are still reprobates on matters like ID cards, we should at least give credit for the fact that, at last, civil partnerships have been legalised here.

Not so in Italy, where a bill called ‘Dico’ is the patata calda. Remember: many commentators have said that this bill legalising civil partnerships, rather than an American airbase near Verona or the number of troops in Afghanistan, is the real reason why some venerable senators brought down the first Prodi government. The second government has not yet dropped the bill but the pressure is on them. British experience would lead us to expect demonstrations in favour of such a bill – I bumped into one in Rome when I was there – but what we don’t expect are mass demonstrations against such a commonsensical, liberal measure. But that is what exactly happened this weekend, on ‘Family Day’ – not, you understand, a cross-generational celebration of Doris Day, but a mass protest, with an American title, in support of ‘family values’.

The Catholic church stayed away, but then they didn’t need to be there: the Vatican diktat had already gone out that any MP who called themselves a Catholic had to vote against the bill. Silvio Berlusconi, now the leader of the opposition, did turn up. He claimed it was because of a scurrilous cartoon (which goes something like: woman to man ‘oh no, there are going to be so many clerics on the march’, man to woman ‘what, would you prefer to leave them at home with the kids?’). The cartoonist said the Catholic church should give him 200 years plenary indulgence for encouraging Berlusconi to attend. Silvio was joined by a million others.

The intervention of religion so forcefully in public life, the inability to divide the ethical from political: in some ways, it seems, the Italians are more American than their Anglo-Saxon European partners. We can’t be complacent, we shouldn’t be proud – but how I wish my favourite nation would lighten up a little.