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Last weekend my mother was down visiting me in Oxford. On Sunday, for lunch, we wandered into town and went to the Castle/Prison site. Apart from anything else I haven't been up the castle mound to see what the view is like. These days, I thought there was a promise to make publicly funded museums free to access. I was surprised therefore to find that the little museum at St George's Tower was apparently charging to get in, and that you had to pay to get up the castle mound itself.

This whole development, resulting in a posh hotel that few in the city can afford to stay in, some apartments that few in the city can afford to buy, a bunch of brand name eateries and some open space, cost the tax payer some £6 million in the form of a SEEDA grant and the lottery player some £3.8 million - getting on therefore for nearly £10 million of "public" money.

I'd like to see the books on this development. I was on the planning committee when it got permission. Nno thanks to me - I thought the Jeremy Dixon building jutting out in front of the castle mound was hideous on plan, and it has turned out mediocre at best in my opinion - but the then doyen of planning committee had fallen in love with Dixon's work and couldn't be persuaded otherwise. We were told the SEEDA money for the commercial development itself, some £4.5 million, was part of a scheme intended to help make developments viable in "failed land markets". Indeed those of us against it were bullied with threats that the grant money would be withdrawn if we delayed even a few weks to try to get a better design. The threat was quite real though because the whole "failed markets" scheme had already proven so contentious that it was abruptly ended.

To suggest that a site adjacent to what will become a £200 million plus redevelopment of Oxford's main shopping centre, right next to County Hall, really slap bang in the centre of one of the hottest property spots in the country, was a "failed land market" was, frankly, laughable, even at the time. Indeed, on the SEEDA web page for the project it describes it as a "Prime City Centre Location"! "Prime" has specific connotations in describing commercial land.

Yes, it had taken several years to find someone to take it on. Since the prison had closed in 1996 (the last prisoner if I recall correctly was, at the time quite infamous, Jamie Blandford) and the whole site was handed to the County Council they had tried several schemes until Trevor Osborne's Osborne Group and SEEDA got involved and the rest is now history. But four years to get a plan for such a site was not out of the ordinary. Capital Shopping Centres next door has been trying to put together an acceptable plan for well over six years now - at their own financial risk of course.

And we can't even climb the castle mound for free. Oxford Preservation Trust is a great organisation and does have to make ends meet. But really, could not a scheme have been organised to make these spaces, in public hands for a thousand years, free to access? Perhaps by charging sufficient rent to the other tenants who would surely benefit from drawing crowds into the prison and castle site. "Brunch" at the "Living Room" restaurant alone was expensive enough to have included a contribution to my access to the castle.

How much did the County Council receive for the 200 year lease granted Mr Osborne? Presumably nothing - it was, after all a "failed land market", or so they persuaded SEEDA, and all the county appears to have wanted out of it was to remove all risk from the council tax payer, which in itself was laudable, but not necessarily the best they could have got for it. Would the development, now that it's complete, tenancies let and apartments sold, have been profitable without that grant? I know a few land agents locally. Not one of them believes that public subsidy was necessary (at least for the commercial part of the development).

So, was it necessary? And if not, who is going to apologise for wasting all that public money? Or is Osborne Group going to pay it back?

And I still, therefore, have not been up my castle mound - okay, that bit's only a quid, but I'm buggered if as a citizen of this fine city I am going to pay to access what has been public land for a millennium.

In response to a recent letter in the Oxford Mail...

I believe Alan Page (1st Feb) is completely wrong on drugs, though I am probably in a minority. Prohibition, especially of something addictive, is mad. It makes criminals of people who literally “cannot help it” once they are hooked.

For most of history humans have used natural based drugs for health, recreation, and even religious rites. In the nineteenth century when both opium and cocaine were legal, the group most likely to indulge were upper class women. They really only became illegal when the lower classes wanted to join the fun, and often on racist grounds at that.

While they were legal and available in controlled, measured, self-administered doses, addicts functioned perfectly well with few adverse health or social effects, unlike those whose poison was or is alcohol.

People get into more risky methods of use, such as injecting, to get the greatest “hit” precisely because they do not know where their next one may come from or when. The worst will use multiple substances to compensate for an irregular supply of their preferred drug.

On the same principle as “good money drives out bad” who would go to the shady man in the darkened windowed BMW to get a supply of unknown quality or strength if your local pharmacist or nightclub were selling regulated doses alongside the beer or cough mixture?

And you can bet respectable companies have plans for that eventuality already in place.

You know who you are. Those liberals (in particular) who always claim that "libertarian free markets" will result in a corporate plutocracy, or that the current turmoil in world financial markets (yes, it's still going on you know!) is a result of "libertarian free markets". Here, especially for you (but of interest to others I hope too), is a brilliant explanation of how this mutualist understands that free markets benefit people, not corporations.

CORPORATIONS VERSUS THE MARKET; OR, WHIP CONFLATION NOW

by RODERICK LONG - LEAD ESSAY - November 10th, 2008

Defenders of the free market are often accused of being apologists for big business and shills for the corporate elite. Is this a fair charge? No and yes. Emphatically no—because corporate power and the free market are actually antithetical; genuine competition is big business’s worst nightmare. But also, in all too many cases, yes —because although liberty and plutocracy cannot coexist, simultaneous advocacy of both is all too possible.

Read the rest...

A little piece in a well researched blog on house prices around the world I keep an eye on:

Fighting over their castles:

"OF ALL the forces that have changed Britain over the past decade or so, the long bull market in housing is perhaps the strongest—and the most anonymous. High house prices have done their work quietly, reshaping concentrations of wealth and stoking clashes over supply. Other rich countries have had house-price booms too, but Britain's has been faster and more furious (see chart). And high levels of home ownership (Britons are more likely to own bricks than even Americans but less likely to own equities) have magnified their effect."

"Generational Equity" features highly too. Read it all here.