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My slightly different take on Thursday's elections, now that I have had a bit of time to separate my own defeat and local party's odd targeting strategy from cold hard results, is that the second biggest winners were....nobody. Of the councils up for election, 66 have returned councils with no overall control - where no party group is large enough to take control of the council; six more than previously.

So probably up to about a third of us live in an area that has minority or coalition government. This sort of result is usually one of the main arguments against Proportional Representation - that it leads to "weak" government. But, you know, I believe "weak" government is exactly what we want and need. Government is too big, too strong, too interfering as it is, and under the winner takes all voting system we have this leads to absolute power in the hands of a minority of voters.

Next year, Scotland will have "all up" council elections, using the Single Transferable Vote system to return multi-member wards (which local government is already used to anyway). So if Scotland can cope with it, why can't the rest of us?

Take Oxford for a minute again. Apart from one lady who disappeared without a word half way through her term of office, the Tories have now not had a single councillor for ten years. Yet with a "paper" candidate in my ward they still achieved 350 or so votes (17.5% of the vote and in the process kept Labour's candidate safe from my attack!). Across the city they have 12% of the vote, pretty well without trying at all (I reckon they only targeted, and not very enthusiastically at that, four wards out of twenty four). The Greens, through judicious targeting in their core areas, achieve 20% of the vote and get some 17% of the seats and Labour, the Lib Dems and the Independent Working Class Association are over-represented for their vote.

If Oxford wants to be a unitary authority (and on its present performance I agree with the Conservative leader of the county council that that would be a bad thing unless the city can prove it can run what services it has already efficiently) then it is only fair that all political opinion amongst its citizens be represented proportionately. Yes, there is a "democratic deficit" in the two tier situation at present where a political party completely unrepresented in the city (at borough or county council level) has complete control over some very big aspects of local government for Oxford's citizens - such as schools, roads and social services, but let's not replace that with another democratic deficit. If we want to have change, start with creating something closer to a democracy first. For the current system is anything but.

Technorati Tags: electoral reform, oxford, politics

I'm sure there are probably a good few people rubbing their hands with some relish at the thought that private schools might feel the squeeze from this edict from the Charities Commission that they have to prove the value of their contribution to the wider community to retain their charitable status.

But before they get too excited, perhaps they might want to think about the numbers. I read that independent schools have about 600,000 pupils. If we accept the figures put forward by Nick Clegg, I think, when he was talking about the "pupil premium" in which he said, if memory serves, that the average cost was about £9,000 per year per pupil - which allowing for endowments and so on is probably a bit more than the average fees - it is an "industry" with a turnover of nearly £5.5 billion per year.

The statements about the level of charitable benefit they receive suggest that it amounts to about £100 million. This is therefore just under 2% of their combined turnover. Hardly insurmountable if they decide to stick two fingers up to the Charities Commission. But there's another side to it, isn't there. If we accept government figures that they spend about £6,000 per year on average on each state school pupil, then the 600,000 pupils whose parents are often scrimping and saving to put them through a private school are saving the state sector just over £3.5 billion.

It seems to me that whatever you think of private education, the charge that they do not contribute financially to the state sector through their customers' taxation cannot be upheld. Of course, since most of the charitable benefit is presumably in the form of reclamation of VAT on some expenses and I would argue that nobody should pay VAT, the most iniquitous tax on production we have, they would not have such a benefit in my fiscal regime anyway!

There is lots of mention today about Laurie Draper and his "cannabis induced" instant psychotic episode (in the Telegraph), or is it, as the Guardian says "hypomania" in Soldier killed friend's father in drug attack that supposedly led him to kill a friend's father with whom he had been sharing a pipe of cannabis.

There is no denying that his victim is dead, and that Draper killed him. But I would be intrigued to know what the medical evidence was. Because certainly the media coverage either cannot get it right or is reporting some cod science used to get someone off the greater charge based on the prejudices of people against drugs and their symptoms.

First off, which is it - psychotic or hypomania? The latter is specifically not the former. Hypomania is actually defined as a mild form of mania without psychosis - presumably the defense team thought, correctly as it turns out, that the prefix "hypo-" would sound as if it meant "severe" - the exact opposite of what it does mean. Further, contrary to what the Guardian reports, the medical definition specifically states that hypomania is only hypomania if the symptoms, none of which involve violent outbursts of the kind that would create a killer, are not related to substance use!

Second, why would being under the influence of the alleged effects of a drug be a defense against murder? Does someone who kills after getting drunk get let off murder because he or she was drinking?

Unless it was forced on him unwillingly (a paratrooper?) even if one could prove a direct and instant causal link between getting stoned and the "frenzied outburst" why would it constitute any kind of defense except by playing on the fears and prejudices of everyone involved in that legal process?

One attempt to get off a higher charge by blaming it on the skunk when even the reported scientific terms used are medically inaccurate does not constitute "proof" of a link. It only constitutes proof that in a world of suspicion and prejudice engendered by the "war on drugs" people, even lawyers, are only too willing to accept it as yet more evidence of the utter depravity and dangers one puts ones-self into by using such substances.

Will the CPS appeal the downgraded conviction? Will they hell. It suits their agenda. As the Guardian says the "case may stir debate over downgrading to class C (of cannabis)".

I don't quite know how I have managed to go through the last nearly forty years without seeing "Cathy Come Home" until tonight.

Especially with my interest in housing provision.

Have things improved? We've certainly demolished most of the women's hostels shown in the film. But what about absolute numbers in inadequate housing? The film quoted, I think, a million households in 1966. Government figures currently show just under a hundred thousand household accepted and in temporary accommodation.

But take Oxford. They are shown as supporting 742 households in temporary accommodation. But four thousand and more are on the housing register. So let's say there are nearly 600,000 households in inadequate accommodation. Then there's the estimate from Crisis a year or so ago, of the "hidden homeless" - those not on registers, "sofa surfing". They estimated another nearly 400,000 individuals.

As the last lines of the film said - "homelessness was seen as a temporary problem after the war, but the problem appears to be with us for the foreseeable future". Forty years on, it appears still to be a timely prophesy.