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I feel I've been tagged in a strange sort of a meme for my thoughts on Oxford's recent local election results by Antonia [From Oxford elections round-up]:

We await with bated breath the thoughts of Stephen Tall, no longer Lib Dem councillor for Headington, his colleague David Rundle, and the third-placed Lib Dem candidate for Headington Hill and prolific blogger, Jock Coats.

Well thanks, she just had to rub it in by mentioning that third place. I am embarrassed and humiliated to have come third. There are of course official post mortems to come yet on the campaign, but whatever their verdict, one simple fact is that I am a "bad candidate". Whatever fresh ideas I may have brought to the council (and I doubt my Labour victor will be doing much of that, sad to say), I cannot escape the fact that I hate knocking on strangers to talk politics with them. So for me, the literature and word of mouth amongst people who have met me outside that context is more crucial than for most. Such glad-handing ought to have happened long before the campaign proper started with voter ID canvassing in late March. And been followed up with a leaflet introducing me properly and extolling my virtues before the cross city campaign started with its more party led focus on whole city issues.

Then there was "that leaflet." On the last weekend of the campaign I had the dubious honour of having a Labour leaflet, apparently partly delivered by Mrs Dromey (I rather hope, Antonia, that you were unaware of that leaflet's existence when we exchanged pleasantries on the Friday evening), using quotes from this blog about drugs policy obviously intended to give the impression that if I won I would probably be found standing outside the primary school handing out various narcotics to the year sevens, or perhaps to their parents! Several opponents have commented that they thought it was one of the worst personal attack leaflets they had seen. I suppose I ought to feel flattered that Labour were sufficiently alarmed by my candidacy to feel the need to drag the contest into the gutter.

You can read it for yourself here. By my reckoning, it at least breaches copyright law (my moral right not to have my copyrighted work treated in a derogatory fashion or in a way designed to be prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author or director), if not possibly electoral law. Enquiries are ongoing. I am not a sore loser, but I was upset by it. I know it cost me both votes and reputation, even amongst my deliverers.

Anyway, enough of the campaign itself. Will I ever try again? I don't know. For many years, since in fact I was last on the council in 2002, I have wondered whether the present system of local government is fit for purpose. As an ideological descendent of the individualist-anarchists and a mutualist, I find the state, in all its guises, terribly coercive. I believe sovereignty should lie with the individual and he or she should only cede power upwards to representatives over things that they cannot arrange for themselves or in small groups or local communities. Local government is so tied down by Whitehall and Westminster that the current arrangements simply cannot be responsive enough to local peoples' needs.

The main reason I wanted to be on the council was to continue to promote, from the inside as it were, my mutualist agenda of hiving local authority functions off onto social, community led partnerships. The more things compete for the crumbs of council budgets within the tight control of Whitehall oversight the less satisfactory the outcome. Leisure services for example cannot hope to compete in quality at least with private providers while it is within the constraints of council budgeting. Similarly, whilst more difficult, I think the solutions to our housing problems are community led, rather than council, landowner and planning led.

Every time I've lost so far I've come out of the contest wanting to do other things that will make a difference one day outside the council structure. Almost as if to prove we can cope without the psychopaths who are so good at saying the right thing at the right time to get themselves elected. This time it is to continue to promote the social enterprise "alternative" for producing social and public goods and to work on promoting local community e-democracy.

• It will be interesting to watch Labour finally explain where they think there is a "£5m cash crisis" at the city council - reading the latest annual accounts I cannot see it myself. But there's another argument for local government reform - despite us being the tax payer/employers their finances are even more opaque than any company's I've ever seen.

• It will be fun to see Maureen Christian defend the Northway Playing fields from something or other she seems to think threatens them (certainly the only "threat" i heard was my own idea to see if we could fit a cricket square on there by budging up the two football pitches and see if we could get a local cricket team going).

• I think it will be a retrograde step if Labour succeed in removing planning decisions from area committees. They were not perfect there, but I have always maintained that was as a result of the bad legal advice that both sides in any disputed application had the right only to speak for five minutes each - where they have open discussion at area committees they manage to get better decisions and more fruitful interplay between applicant and objectors and a better outcome for both.

• It will also be interesting to see whether the Tories, who, despite not winning a single seat managed to come in second in many wards, and at least the ones in which they tried to put up a full campaign, will be able to keep up that level of work, for example, next year, when their declining reputation in control of the county is up for defending.

• And it will be interesting to see whether this marks the high water point for the IWCA, who lost two of their councillors.

• But I also don't really expect the city council, under any party, to set Oxford on fire with bright new ideas that will markedly change the quality of life for its citizens.

Finally, if anyone has any ideas about what little thank you gifts I can get for two teenaged Muslim boys who managed throughout to deliver most of the half of the ward for which we did not have regular deliverers - not a happy situation to be in at the start of a campaign and one of the first things I hope to put right for next time - I'd be very grateful to hear them! Their father has resisted all my requests for his advice so far!

If a councillor almost anywhere in England at least made the sort of statements Iris Robinson's been coming out with about homosexuality, I would have thought that a complaint to the Standards Board would at least be entertained and investigated. Even her "retraction" is disgusting and compounds her guilt:

When the Good Friday agreement was developed into a constitution for Northern Ireland, it had, I seem to remember, quite exemplary equalities provisions. Northern Ireland was, for example, as a result, the first place in the UK to equalize the age of consent for gay and straight sex.

I realise she has parliamentary privilege when in the House of Commons, but her last outburst was on the public radio in Northern Ireland and should have landed her in trouble in my opinion. If a similar remark had been made in the commons about almost any other minority (I suspect not if it were "immigrants"), I'm sure it would have engendered a formal censure of some kind.

I am sure she does indeed represent some religious bigots in her constituency, but I am equally sure that not everyone who has voted for her can be tarred with that same brush. I do believe in democracy, so I am not calling for some interfering twerp from some QUANGO investigating her remarks - that's her consitutents' job when she next runs for office. But people should know that she's an evil bigoted bitch whose personal conviction renders her unable to represent her constituents properly.

UPDATE: As "Scribo Ergo Sum " reminds us, our psychopathic unelected "leader" Gordon Brown prefers to do business with her and her party than his own revolting members.  Iris would no doubt love the idea of locking up homosexuals for 42 days without charge or reason.

You'd have thought that a city in which the Green Party regularly polls up to 20% of the vote, holds a quarter of the county council seats and a sixth of the city council seats (and the latter in a minority administration to boot where their vote in council can effectively make or break a policy) and where they have been in a joint administration even, would be one of the most sustainable cities in the country.

You'd be wrong:

OXFORD people are among the greediest in the country in consuming the Earth's resources, according to a new league table.

A report by the Worldwide Fund for Nature ranked the 60 cities in England, Scotland and Wales by their residents' average ecological footprints - and discovered each Oxford person consumes more than three times the resources the planet can sustain.

It used data from local authorities to calculate the area each city's residents needed for food, energy and resources and to absorb waste and pollution.

Oxford ranked joint 55th out of the 60 cities, with its residents having among the five largest footprints for housing, consumer items and private services.

I'm sure they would tell us it's all because we don't carry out enough of their policies. My hunch is that in fact voting Green is for most people a substitute for taking personal action. That voting Green is "doing my bit for the environment".

I suspect Oxford's bad showing is nothing to do with local politics, but partly that in the big picture we are a city with a global reach. That we probably have a greater proportion of residents who are visiting from overseas and travel back regularly - at university vacations and so on - certainly judging by the success of the multitude of Heathrow & Gatwick bus services. That we are a magnet for London commuters so have a higher proportion than other cities of people who commute 120 miles a day. And that the city ballooned in the rapid growth of the motor industry resulting in hundreds of acres of relatively inefficient inter-war housing making up the bulk of our built environment.

These are structural issues that are too big for what is seen often as a crusty, crypto-communist, community politics organisation to address purely locally. It needs real devolution of power that can only be granted by the Westminster players so we can have real control of our own development as a city, changes to the way we tax people for environmentally damaging habits and so on.

One thing the Greens could do locally, as some have in the past with the Oxfordshire Land Value Tax study, is to support my calls for Oxford to be allowed to trial LVT as a replacement for the Council Tax, city wide - see if we can't persuade a majority of the city council and city representative county councillors to support such a move. That's part of the bigger picture that we can try to address, and it's their party policy. Efficient use of land is key to reducing our footprint, to getting people able to commute less, to use more local suppliers where possible, to remodel the city with an efficient built environment and so on.