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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.

It has been estimated that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between them underwrite debt of some $5,000,000,000,000 and that US losses from the current credit crunch could amount to $1,600,000,000,000.

The entire external debt obligations of the world's 40 odd Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) is some $300,000,000,000 - that's about 6% of Fannie and Freddie's problems. So any bailout of the US mortgage system is going to amount almost certainly to more money than would write off all that, mainly African, debt (were that the best way to proceed, which I believe it is, with conditions).

By contrast the EU has today decided to support the idea of giving the surplus it has made on the Common Agricultural Policy as a result of rising food crop prices (so it has been subsidising less) to "African farmers". That's about €1,000,000,000 - or one three-thousandth of Fannie and Freddie's problems and two hundredths of Africa's problems.

But where did they get that money from, how did it arise? Robbing those very African farmers by denying them access to our markets and subsidising dumping on theirs. Tariffs are pure evil, aren't they?

So, whenever anyone says to you that it's difficult to find the finance for debt relief in the poorest countries, you'll now know that is total bollocks.  Just think of the scale of the US mortgage debt and what such sums could do for the 600 million or so poorest on the planet.

This reported in today's Oxford Mail:

Life Ban For Leys Thug (from thisisoxfordshire)



A violent thug has been banned from setting foot in Blackbird Leys for the rest of his life.

Magistrates slapped an anti-social behaviour order (Asbo) on David Reid, 37, after hearing about 26 convictions for offences including theft, burglary and assault in the past 22 years.

Reid is banned from ever entering Blackbird Leys the first life-time ban for an area of Oxfordshire and will eventually be barred from entering Greater Leys, where he currently lives.

Now, I am sure that this chap has caused a huge amount of misery to other people in his time. And he clearly deserves some kind of punishment and management. But an ASBO? Banishing him from his home area, where his family still lives, for the rest of his life? It's positively mediaeval. What's next for the New Labour Big Brother? Public floggings? Using the perfectly good vegetables thrown out by Tesco for throwing at the prisoner in the local stocks? I appreciate he did not contest the order - though that's probably a reflection of the assistance available to people faced with this non-criminal sanction - but one does wonder whether he'll even understand it.

Even more importantly, does anyone in their right mind believe that the trouble this chap has created will stop because he leaves Greater Leys? No, it will no doubt go with him. That might help Greater Leys, but it's not going to help other areas to have him moved around. So, does he get another ASBO when he causes "sub-criminal" trouble in Northway? Then again in Barton, or wherever he finds himself next? He clearly can't help himself, but whether a series of threats like this is helping him, and therefore those who might have to come into contact with him in future, is extremely doubtful.

So what are the answers? Well, for a start, it was reported also that the magistrate heard that over that 22 year period Reid had picked up convictions carrying 20 years' worth of jail sentences. Has he served them all, in full? It's in cases like this that one is sorely tempted by the Californian idea of "three strikes and you're out" - in other words on the third offense you get life. I don't personally agree with that though, because it has ended up in some very petty criminals incarcerated for life little more than being "naughty boys".

But we have a system of license here. If you do not serve your entire sentence behind bars, which we presume this chap hasn't since he's had time in between sentences to run up 26 convictions, and you're allowed out on "license" it means you can go straight back inside to serve the rest of your original sentence as well as any new sentence for not keeping your nose out of trouble.

So why is a civil order being used here where serving his sentences out might be more appropriate? It is clear he has not been rehabilitated or reformed by his sentences yet, though I do as a good (sic!) Catholic firmly believe in the ability of every individual to be rehabilitated, to show genuine contrition. And this sort of thing clearly diminishes the threat of a civil order intended to curb anti-social but not quite criminal behaviour, or where a criminal conviction would be hard to obtain.

I've long wanted to rail against ASBOs, particularly in Oxford where they are clearly being used as a political tool. Labour's local election leaflets even proudly proclaim that "they" have doled out more ASBOs than any other town in the Thames Valley, as if it's some kind of league table to be proud of. And to hand down the same potential five year sentence to a 37 year old with a twenty year history of criminal offences against which convictions were secured and a bored teenager not getting enough attention at home, at school, not on the correct diet or whatever is just mad.

And I am particularly sad that my good friend, Mick McAndrews, standing for Labour (this time around) in Barton, has allowed his name to go on a leaflet promoting ASBOs, when he himself has realised they are not what is needed in many of the cases he has dealt with. There are some parts of town is which the most decent citizen might be hard pressed not to become terminally depressed and in some cases anti-social as a result. Depressing areas with housing that will never be "decent" except in the fairy tale world of John Prescott's housing team. If Labour were truly ambitious for Oxford they'd be finding ways of dealing with such endemic depression to give their residents some hope for the future. They're not depressing because of the people that are there, I hasten to add, but because homes fit for heroes are no longer even fit. And that responsibility lies firmly at the feet of housing authorities.

I forget the name of the comedienne woman on TV but with Labour in Oxford she was right: "don't abolish ASBOs, they're the only qualification some of these kids will get!" More appropriately, perhaps, "don't abolish ASBOs, it's the only league table a Labour run Oxford can top"!

I never really got into The West Wing until well into the penultimate series, so I have lots to keep me entertained if I feel withdrawal now that it's all over.

But there's one thing I can't help wondering...if Jed Bartlett's great grandfather's great grandfather - you know, the one that attended the Second Continental Congress at Philadelphia at which the Declaration if Independence was made - would ever have envisaged such a bloated institution striding the world with all the trappings of the deity they wanted to keep it separate from as the modern US Government.