Finding my Feet

Since being elected to Oxford City Council for the Green Party the learning curve has steepened. At a new councillors' training event last week I came away with 3.9 kg of paper with brochures from several similar-sounding organisations (e.g. the 'Oxford Strategic Partnership', the 'Oxfordshire Partnership') each with their own list of thematic priorities to add to the existing priorities declared in Oxford's own Core Strategy and Development Plan.

All good stuff, and partnership is doubtless a good thing, but the danger is that it removes accountability and gives power to an inner circle of people (few of whom are directly elected) who decide the 'big vision'. It's no wonder that there's a growing feeling on the ground that planning (that is, the long-term planning policies not the small, local planning consents) is out of control, top-down and unaccountable. I don't think these things are mere talk-shops : they are actually setting the 'rules' by which more local planning decisions are bound. i think.

I do not make a virtue of ignorance, but one thing I bring to this political world is a very recent memory of being an 'ordinary member of the public' who has very little idea about any of this. It's easy for political hacks to imagine that everybody thinks as they do, but I'd be surprised if more than 5% of Oxford's population had much idea which political parties were actually running the city.