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For all those people who claim that alternate weekly residual waste collection has given rise in Oxford to a plague of rats and who believe they can demonstrate that by pointing to the 5% increase in the number of callouts to the council's pest control department in the second half of the year (despite a 20% drop in the first half of the year) comes less comforting news from elsewhere in the country:

BBC NEWS | England | Shropshire | Rat complaints double in a year:

Mr Rodgers says other areas have experienced the same problem

Shrewsbury and Atcham Borough Council received 118 calls in 2006 and they have had 255 so far in 2007.

Rat-catcher Geoff Rodgers said the animals love decking, water features and bird seed but he believes climate change is also a factor.

"We've seen a marked increase this year in the amount of calls this autumn but this area is no different to other areas in the country," he said.

He added: "They've all experienced the same problem. It's just something that we have got to work with and bear in mind.

"With climate change these creatures adapt to it like they adapt to other things."

I have to admit that I viscerally loathe defectors. So don't expect any nice words of regret at losing Sajjad Karim to the Tories, for whatever reason he thinks justifies his actions.

But back within the party he has just run away from, I wonder whether it has any importance. One of the things that Nick Clegg got plenty of plaudits for recently was the idea of an "earned amnesty" for existing illegal immigrants, a measure that I have not seen Cameron, even last week in Prague, beat. But given that this is one area where we have clear blue water between us and the Tories on if Sajjad thinks we've made a mistake, does this translate into a bit of a blow for Nick's policy?

Me, of course, I'm an open borders advocate. You cannot expect to have free movement of goods and services without free movement of people. The challenge is not how to stop people coming here for whatever reason, but to help build a world in which people do not feel the need to migrate simply to better themselves in a minimum wage job.

Such a task is not one for the petty isolationists in the Tory party, and will need a truly co-operative internationalist party to understand. Which is, in the UK, only the Lib Dems, at least of the major parties.

Here's some century old words of wisdom and humour for Sajj:

I often think it's comical -- Fal, lal, la!
How Nature always does contrive -- Fal, lal, la!
That every boy and every gal
That's born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative!
Fal, lal, la! —
(Iolanthe, Gilbert and Sullivan, 1882)

"Liberal Conservative" or "Conservative Liberal" are ideological oxymorons. Sayonara, Sajj, I hope you really do know what you are joining.

UPDATE:  It just goes to show what people will read and what they won't that this post makes it into the "Golden Dozen" and some of my more thoughtful posts don't!  Maybe I should try to be salacious more of the time! 

Funny thing, looking through my blog stats, we are all just a bunch of big gossips aren't we. Forget all my screeds of writing on my pet subjects like drugs laws, land value tax, whacko economics and community planning and development. The top posts, every time, are ones that have a whiff of scandal about them, or at least someone's name in the title. Yesterday I got the most hits for a while and the most popular of those was my post about Greg Barker. I notice it also made it to top outgoing post on the Lib Dem aggregator.

Sad lot you are! But it gave me an opportunity to test out a new (to me at least) free blog posting client, Qumana.

Tags: blogging

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Nearly a month ago, when Chief Constable Peter Fahy of Cheshire went on his rant about upping the alcohol age limit I wrote the following piece but ended up not posting it. Now that thanks to Tim Martin of Wetherspoons (somewhat ironically as I would hold his company to be part of the problem - cashing in on the drinking shed culture and pricing out many estate pubs) an alternative argument similar to mine below has been posited, and picked up by Liberal England and Niles, I thought maybe it was worth reviving. It was a theme I mentioned actually in my candidate vetting interview as one potential way in which local authorities might be able to influence this "binge drinking" issue:

There's all this chatter about alcohol fuelled crime and anti-social behaviour going on. Most sensible folk seem to agree that raising the drinking age is no answer (I would in fact abolish any minimum age completely of course). But I wanted to take a different tack that has niggled away at me for a while. Kind of on the "Bowling Alone" theme of declining social capital. I believe a lot of this trouble is because of the demise of the local pub.

more from san joan's evening
Originally uploaded by J_G_R

Everyone now seems to get together (usually on the same night of course) and gather at drinking sheds in town and city centers. Long ago, when people weren't so mobile late at night and so on, they would go to their local pub. Many of our housing estates even had one built as part of the original planning for the estate, at least as important as a church or a medical centre or a Co-op.

But in there you would not just have the Club 18-30 hell bent on a little youthful havoc. You'd have people of all ages and all social groups on an estate. And it was probably the only one within walking distance so if you were barred it was a real pain to go anywhere else. If you got a little obnoxious or worse on the booze your family and neighbours would get to hear about it pretty quick through someone else who was at the pub when you kicked off. You would have to apologize, and perhaps even beg, or at least eat a bit of humble pie, to get back in. Be a little shamed by the incident.

Now, nobody who knows you sees you out in these anonymous booze barns in the centre of town. One is much like another so if you embarrass yourself at one you can go to half a dozen others for the same bus journey. Reprimands are all down to the police, assisted perhaps by bouncers. And all have to stay within strict boundaries - your cousin is not going to take you out the side door and box your ears (not that I'd advocate such violence as a cure!) until you stop acting like an idiot and can go back in and apologize. You might even feel proud to be on "Police, Camera, Action" rather than ashamed to be acting the idiot in front of your family and neighbours.

I doubt we can roll back the years that have made some city streets (like George Street here in Oxford) end to end gin palaces. Who knows though, maybe climate change, fuel costs, environmental concerns, might one day make us go back to the real local pub and have to face up to our families when we act the alcohol fuelled arsehole.