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The Telegraph today highlights a poll claiming that up to 68% of the population want an English parliament. At least I think that's what the various, slightly confusing, figures say. It might mean that 68% of Scots want an English parliament for all I can work out.

No worries. Suffice it to say that I find myself, once again, in the minority. But not, I hasten to add, because of any particular devotion to Westminster, far from it. I loathe the place and all that it stands for personally. But because I do believe that supporting an English parliament is a substitute for real devolutionary democratic change. Yes, it may well be unfair that Scotland has one and that we are ruled by people who have their own parliament and whose decisions at Westminster do not affect what happens in some areas of life to their own constituents.

But think of this. I live in Oxford. I like to think, though I don't have one to call my own, that it is my home. I believe that Oxford has in its little valley setting, everything we need to be able to run our lives the way we want to.

Why would I want someone elected by the people of Leicester West deciding what to do with our hospitals? Is that any better than, say, someone elected by the people of Airdrie and Shotts, telling our Thames Valley police force what to do? Is it going to be any better that someone put there by the people of Bolton ties our councils up in knots than someone for Dunfermline holds the purse-strings?

Leviathan may have been a necessary evil in building up a strong post-war state in an era of relative scarcity and in negotiating economies of scale in order to get a social safety net functioning in the first place. But neither it, nor its little sibling, an English parliament is necessary now to get our cities, regions and services competing and growing in ways that the people who depend on them want.

I simply refuse to believe that the people who happen to have conned or cajoled the poor citizens of Sedgefield, or even of Witney into sending them to the High Trough of Parliament are any better, with ideas or managerial competence, than those the folk of Headington, Wolvercote, or even Hinksey Park have decided should run their home town. And the former, for all their globe trotting, power broking and international adventuring are making the world a more dangerous place to boot.

If we have to have an English parliament, let it be in a form David Hume would have suggested, which, with modern communications and travel is self-evidently more practical in the 21st century than ever it was in the 18th.

The Oxford Mail today reports (City chief 'may back the burn') that:

Oxford City Council's new leader John Goddard has controversially not ruled out backing incineration to get rid of the city's waste in the future.

Now this argument is getting tired, with the so called "constructive opposition" folk from the city's Labour and Green groups being consistent only in their disingenuousness and spin.

I went to a conference in spring 2005 organised by the Oxford Inspires group - obviously they were already so knowledgeable that these political stalwarts of the environmental movement didn't need to go but hey. A young lady from the county council outlined a desire on their part to become a "zero waste county". Which is, of course, pretty much everyone's Elysian ideal I suppose.

On the other hand, there are practicalities to face. What if...

...oil goes to £300 a barrel inside the next decade as many of those same environmental activists claim will happen - at least the ones who fervently believe we are past peak oil?

...we find a technology that allows certain bulk waste to be used to create a local source of energy more cheaply than oil, or its less attractive alternatives such as shale, in a way that is clean and manageable and still gets the most from recycling what can be recycled economically?

Are you all going to thumb your noses at it?

I can understand the political gamesmanship that might make you want to rule a particular option out, an option that we all know has proven controversial almost anywhere it's been tried. Does it mean you rule out incineration specifically and uniquely? What about other mechanisms for getting energy from waste using heat, such as pyrolysis - which, to most people, one suspects, will actually mean the same as "incineration" even if it is subtly different?

Technorati Tags: oxford, politics

Only Jock should be able to access this url .

UPDATE:  It looks like I might have managed to do this - so well done me for delving into the PHP and riting a load of new code.  SOmething I am not expert at.

So I can now get back to proper blogging and hope thath someone links to a post of mine before too long and I can find out if it has worked! 

If you want to  see what I've done - you can have a look at http://drupal.org/node/175805

Ruth Kelly stirs up an interesting issue about translating official documents. For years now it has been the trend to assume that people are empowered by being able to participate and are enabled to participate by being informed of what's going on in a language they understand.

But I do, really, understand the logic that says people would be better integrated if they had to learn English. The trouble is learning English is not the same as being able to understand an official document. As the third of pensioners who are not collecting their pensions entitlement will probably mostly tell you, thirty odd page forms leave even native speakers of 70 plus years mystified.

Mind you, for centuries, government in this country as in many others, spoke and wrote in a different language from the plebs (though it might seem that way still) so we were united in not being able to understand official documents. So maybe Ms Kelly is right. All official documents should be promulgated in Latin, or better still, Norman French (though I'm sure Opus Dei would prefer the former), then we've all got an equal chance of not being able to understand them.