Honorary Proletarian

No, I haven’t turned into the Daily Mail!  I’m prompted to write this by the shocking, though at the same time unsurprising, news that Oxford is now by some way the most difficult place in Britain to buy a house, with house prices up to 13.5 times annual income.  The findings haven’t been published online yet but I’ll link to them when they are.

Oxford has long been one of the most expensive places in Oxford to live: back in 2003 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation named it as one of the 40 most difficult places in the country for key workers to find anywhere to live, and a couple of years ago the Oxford Mail revealed that to get a typical mortgage here, you had to be paid at least £78,000 a year.  Now it seems Oxford has overtaken even London in terms of the disparity between average income and average house price – and given the impact of this on the rental market, this affects not just people with steady jobs trying to get a mortgage, but everyone.

So why is Oxford so bad?  Two words: green belt.  At least, that’s what the sort of people who put their so-called rural amenities before  the welfare of the majority of people call it.  Personally, I see nothing particularly green in the disused sewage works and fly-tipping site the City Council wants to build on off Grenoble Road opposite Greater Leys, nor in the pesticide-covered fields next to the ring road North-West of Barton.

So why build an “urban extension” rather than “infill”?  Oxford is horribly overcrowded and has been “filled in” as much as it can stand.  Quality of life is affected by the disappearance of gardens and the multiplication of cars in a confined area.  Pressure is put on transport and local facilities.

There are about 700 unoccupied homes in Oxford that the Council is strenuously trying to bring back into use with its new legal powers, but thousands, not hundreds of new homes are needed.  Put simply, we can’t squeeze any more people inside the ring road, so we’re going to have to expand outside it, willy-nilly.

Permission has been given by the Government to build four thousand desperately needed new homes off Grenoble Road.  The usual suspects are trying to stall this using Britain’s absurd legal processes until, they hope, a Tory government gets in and decided it doesn’t give a shit about the people of Oxford.  This is immoral and must be stopped, just as the similar campaigns against wind turbines that are holding up Britain’s commitment to fighting climate change must be stopped (and yes, it’s the same people who are objecting to the building of Britain’s first Council-sponsored wind turbine here as well.  Nowhere near houses, by the way).

A couple of weeks ago I met a lovely couple, the wife heavily pregnant, who live in one room in a grotty HMO (thats House in Multiple Occupation, for those not familiar with the jargon of overcrowding).  The baby is due about now so may have been born into a place where fresh air is  a rare commodity and as for a green space to play – well, thanks to my comrades on the Council there is at least still a playground nearby, due to be thoroughly refurbised.  Of course, the family have little chance of getting a Council house in the immediate future – Oxford has not sold off its Council houses (hurray!) and still has over 8,000 of them, but there’s also more then 5,000 families and individuals on the waiting list.

I believe, as a socialist, that people have a right to a decent standard of living, and this includes gardens, play areas, fresh air, parks and community facilities where they live.  Environmentalists may prattle about the value of the countryside as an amenity.  But preserving the countryside on one hand and packing human beings like sardines into a can on the other isn’t sustainable.  One of this country’s earliest socialists and environmentalists, William Morris, dreamed of abolisihing the distinction between town and country by enabling the population to distribute itself more evenly across the landscape.  Human beings, after all, are the central and most important part of the environment, however strongly we feel about the rest of it.

So come on, Labour Government.  Maybe you reckon you’re going to lose to the Tories.  Even if you are, you can do something useful by pushing through new development where it’s needed, giving Councils the powers to regulate HMOs properly and bring empty homes back into use, allowing Councils to build new Council houses, without condition (the scheme to allow some in overcrowded cities like Oxford, under which the City Council is currently applying, is a good start but not nearly enough) and stop any part of Council tenants’ rent going to central government.

People keep telling me they miss this blog, which is not what I’d say, but I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.  I thought, therefore, that I’d better sit down and write something, though I have more to do now than I used to.  Unto everything there is a season, and unto staring at a computer screen listening to (of all things) Denis Healey on YouTube and wondering what the hell I’m taking about, there is today.

Yes, you can tell, can’t you.  I’m bored.

I tend to think about elections a lot (yes, I’m not only bored, I can also be boring).  So bored I read recently that archaeologists think democracy may be a very ancient idea  – though I suppose it’s their job to think that things are very ancient.  Apparently even the Mesopotamians may originally have had elections of a kind, five thousand years ago.  I wonder what sort of elections?  Did they produce campaign leaflets (on clay, of course)?

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SHITTI-MARDUK FOR GOVERNOR!*

Good reasons to vote tomorrow:

Shitti-Marduk is an experienced warlord. In the last battle against the accursed Elamites, he was responsible for collecting the hands of enemy corpses.

If elected, he will redecorate the temple of Ishtar with gold plate and inaugurate a new law code containing at least ten different forms of mutilation.

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OK, time to stop being silly now.  I look outside and see that the sun is shining, so it’s time to go out and enjoy the fresh air.  Best wishes to everyone doing Workers’ Beer at Reading, I hope the sunshine dries out some of the mud…and see you soon.  I shall be back at the keyboard in due course.

*Yes, there really was someone called Shitti-Marduk.