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On Thursday "The Insider" (a laughable conceit of sniping from behind anonymity mostly at people trying their best to do some good in local politics) in the Oxford Mail complained that a Green councillor had not updated his blog for a few months, describing a blog as a "self important forum to tell people what you have been up to".

Until I got into this I was extremely skeptical myself about it. And I did think blogging was a bit of onanistic self-promotion that probably nobody would ever read. Of course the Insiders gives the lie to that suggestion - since he, or she, obviously does follow them sometimes. We've seen how instant news from ordinary people on the scene - long before the news crews could get there - gave us insights into the July bombings, the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the war in Iraq direct from a chap in Baghdad. How the BBC and other news networks are paying people for their camera phone eye-witness reports and images and so on.

All one can reasonably conclude is that it is in fact the media running scared. Blogging offers an opportunity for people to air their opinions for others to find and read. It threatens the monopoly of the "Fleet Street" scribblers in holding our attention for a few precious minutes every day. And of course they do it for money - whether the journalist or commentator getting paid, to the media giant continuing to attract advertising - if we all got our opinions from each other (and they're no less valid - often it seems more honest and truthful than opinion journalists in my experience) instead of from the self-important scribbler in a newspaper or television office, they have little else of worth to us.

Finally running scared of the power of the web are we, "Insider"?

The new man at the helm of Universities UK, the "trade body" for university vice-chancellors, is saying that universities ought to be teaching remedial English lessons to students who arrive at university not being able to communicate very well in written English:

Universities 'must offer basic grammar classes' - Telegraph:
By Graeme Paton, Education Editor
Last Updated: 1:48am BST 14/09/2007

Rick Trainor, the president of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, said that universities should do more to ensure graduates are properly prepared for the world of work.

Employers have already criticised the standards of basic skills among teenagers, saying too many are leaving school with a poor grasp of the three Rs.

Wlk b4 u rn plz!!!
Originally uploaded by Ryan Pierini

Now, he would apparently label me "nostalgic" for hankering after the days when pupils were able to string a sentence together by the time they left school. Apparently they more than make up for this basic inability in "new capabilities" in "IT, in group and independent working, in spoken presentations and in creativity well beyond those of their predecessors." After all, he says, every generation whines that the next is not "up to scratch".

I'm sorry, in the words of former Glasgow University Rector Richard Wilson, I don't believe it! This is in a country where we now spend nearly £80,000,000,000 a year on education. Prof Trainor can call me old fashioned all he likes, but I don't believe that it is acceptable to be spending that sort of money for people hoping to go on to higher education to be leaving school with only SMS level English. We are failing them not least if they enter work or higher education without the ability to communicate complex ideas in a way that everyone ought to be able to understand.

It's not that new a problem either. I remember as a new Hall Warden ten or so years ago being asked to "proof read" someone's essay which turned out to have the feel of a Joycean stream of consciousness with little structure, and even worse grammar. But I suppose the modern way of looking at this is that if we universities can take someone barely able to write on the basis that they can "Powerpoint" (which I am assured is now a verb in its own right) well and turn them into a world class graduate, our "value added" is significantly greater than if that person had arrived with a full set of basic academic skills after fourteen years of schooling.

And yes, I suppose if we're going to graduate them at all we're going to have to engage in this remedial work. But it should be with much protest not resignation. First and foremost we should be screaming out that this level of entry to higher education is just not good enough and that schools, not universities, ought to be addressing it.

I don't really have a lot of time for the Greens in Oxford - their politics that is - as individuals I get on well I think with all of those I know. They go their own way and do their own thing and are rarely to be relied on, as our joint administration in the run up to 2002 on the City Council proved.

But they have a one party crypto-communist state in East Oxford, so there's no meaningful opposition to them on the East Area Committee, at the moment at least. But it is unusually refreshing to see them turn down the offer of an intrusive state run CCTV system on the Cowley Road. I'm not sure about their alternative of bobbies on bikes and (more!) road safety measures on a road that has become a bit of a joke anyway for the way vehicles now have to weave dangerously in and out of the path of buses and pedestrians, but good on them for resisting the encroachment of further state surveillance in the area.

I've never felt unsafe down there, except perhaps on leery Wednesday when the university sports teams are on the drunken prowl, and it is well surveilled naturally by all the people using it at all hours of the day and night - and by bouncers at the pubs and clubs every few yards. So there is no need in my mind for yet more electronic eyes.

Most right-thinking people, and I hope all Lib Dems, have castigated this government for the provisions of the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act that restrict protests within 1km of parliament, which was the thing under which Maya Anne Evans was prosecuted for reading the names of Iraqi war dead out at the Cenotaph.

Some of us signed one of those vacuous Downing Street Petitions on the issue a while back and we received notice of an even more vacuous government response to that today, published at the Number 10 site. So I thought it was worth highlighting from it that the government have (quietly so far as I can see) snuck out a consultation paper called "Managing Protest Around Parliament" on 25th October, which you can read and submit comments on until 17th January if you're interested.