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I know - it's a week late. But I picked up a snippet the other day that tells you why Labour lost in Glasgow East...

Apparently voter contact had been absolutely zero for years. David Marshall had done virtually nothing for years (apart from perhaps collecting money from us for his carefully chosen constituency staff). He supposedly didn't even venture into the constituency much and held few if any surgeries. When they started the by-election campaign they were starting voter identification from scratch with no reliable previous data at all.

Utter bonkers. They absolutely deserve to have lost with the level of contempt towards the constituents that smug inactivity over the years demonstrates.

On the other hand, it puts the SNP victory in some context - were they any better than, say, the IWCA in Oxford whose only reason for existing as a force on the council was Labour's contemptuous attitude in their "safest" wards.

UPDATE: And I see from Dan Paskins that there is a motion in to conference saying much the same .

I cannot claim to speak for the Oxfordshire Community Partnerships’ Key Worker Housing Ambition Group, but I am personally disappointed by Bob Langton’s resignation (“Expert quits housing group”, page 2, 9th September). I think he has chosen the wrong group to dump.

There are indeed several groups working on affordable housing issues. There also does seem to be overlap, especially in the groups of local authorities’ housing and planning officers, sometimes augmented by other social housing providers. But this is the only one where employers wanting to help essential workers are the main drivers. We also appear to be the only group encouraging broader thinking on wider affordability issues and innovative mechanisms to provide more affordable housing for a wider group of households in need.

I haven’t seen Bob at a meeting of the group this year, and we could have done with him to help drive forward the outcomes from the excellent developer event he organised for us in December. But just as one example of many if he had come along on 8th Sept he would have heard of an event that will launch a new mechanism for developing affordable housing. One which empowers local communities to control their own development to meet their needs, and, it has to be said, not just the wants of those who would trade in nature’s gift to us all – the land itself - primarily for private profit.

Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts would probably not exist without a workshop in June 2003 the KWHAG held at which some of us decided to take up their challenge and be innovative instead of waiting for the powers that be to do more of the same old hand-me-down grant funded social housing, which simply isn’t happening in anything like sufficient quantity.

And OCP, through the KWHAG, has been the only body to have supported us all this time. We hope that Oxfordshire’s county and district councillors will give us added impetus next month following our launch.

Still, as your regular coverage of landowners around Oxford clamouring to persuade the authorities to let them make huge profits shows, people can be impatient when their living turns on it. Nevertheless, none of this can flourish without landowners, authorities and those in need of housing co-operating. The KWHAG is unique in bringing all those together.

I live next door to Headington Hill Park in Oxford, which I think is the nicest park in the city, laid out as it was a century and a half ago now by the Morrell family as part of the parkland setting for Headington Hill Hall, which is now occupied by my employers at Oxford Brookes University. The park was split from the hall grounds some decades ago before the Hall was rented to Robert Maxwell to house his family (the "best council house in Britain" he apparently used to say) and has been managed by the city council ever since.

For a couple of weeks now there has been tree felling going on in all the city's parks as part of a biennial survey of trees that might be getting sick or dangerous. Anyway, I went round the park carefully checking all those with red crosses on, which I assumed were the ones that were going to be taken out and was quite sanguine about it - about a dozen out of several hundred trees in the park and all had either been obviously damaged in last year's heavy storms that felled on in our grounds next door or were clearly lifeless.

However on our daily lunchtime walk I was appalled to see this:

The second most interesting chestnut tree in the park has been hacked around - I don't know yet whether it is actually pollarded (can you do that to something as slow growing as a chestnut?) or in the penultimate stage of being removed completely. But I'm bloody fuming. I am sure there was no red cross on it. A few weeks ago they did cut off one of the most precarious looking branches (but no worse than some other beautiful chestnuts nearby) and whilst I was annoyed by that I thought the pain was all over for this majestic example.

Here's the best photo I have of it from last year.

And in case you are interested, here's one of the one I think is the most interesting tree, possibly that I've ever seen, but certainly in the park.

I have to say, whilst I initially dismissed the notion that trees were being cut down specifically to provide benching for the "promenade" production of Midsummer-night's Dream that's going on in the park this summer, clearly the few trees with Xs on previously would not have been enough to provide the amount of seating space they needed. I am now suspicious that might be the case. If so, it's gross. Who on earth would imagine it would be a good idea to cut down trees to assist a performance of probably the greatest drama set in a magic wood?

More and more recently I hear or read people saying that Tony Blair's ten years in power has generated in them a deep distrust and even loathing of politics and politicians. Through sleaze, spin, wars, a vast growth in the reach and size of the state - most of which appears to many to have gone straight into the pockets of corporate bosses and shareholders, he has produced a far more powerful advertisement for the possible benefits of a minimal state than many who have tried to explain it academically through their writings.

Even now, in his political retirement, with his vulgar rush to pick up lucrative jobs where he could use his rent-seeking influence to further the very fat-cat industries he pledged to attack in 1997, he still generates much loathing. Forget the Lisbon Treaty or EU Constitution, I'm ready to campaign for an "out" vote in an "in or out" referendum should Tony Blair get anywhere close to becoming the first permanent EU president.

And from behind the portcullis I don't believe that the current crop of party leaders are rising to the real challenge of Blair's legacy. In fact, ostrich like, I feel they view it as merely a series of mistakes that can be put right by more government, just of a different political hue, when in reality the message of Blair's premiership is clear:

Government is moribund, inherently corrupt, a necessary evil for a particular point of human development. A point that has been passed and government can do no more except fight for its own existence as if it has a right to exist regardless of and separate from the desires and needs of the people it seeks to govern. This infantilizing of the people (indeed we even call it the "nanny state" in tacit recognition of that infantilization) needs to be brought to an end.

I was at some training last week on dealing with "Difficult, Disturbing and Dangerous Behaviour". In an aside about the nature of psychopathy the trainer, himself a clinical psychiatrist, suggested that perhaps politicians are in fact psychopaths. It got me looking up the definition of a psychopath. Judge for yourself how many of these criteria Tony Blair meets:

Personally, I make it at least half of them.

Merseyside police work with Revenue and Customs and other agencies to stop £166m of drugs entering the country