Overall conclusion
In its statements about road traffic casualties, air pollution and traffic volumes, the county council shows a pattern of misrepresentation and of false statements which is unacceptable and concerning. Together with other lapses of integrity in process, it appears the council has deliberately misled the public. The Liberal Democrats a heavy responsibility for having engendered the bitter division within our community on this issue, and for having contributed to the collapse of faith in democratic government which is such a worrying feature of our times.


Note

1. See for example:  Oxford Traffic filters: Major details hidden from public | Oxford Mail https://share.google/JzZgf6LHo2QAmazB5

Congestion charge decided ‘behind closed doors’ – BBC News https://share.google/MhBsSUnM4YZnLppwH

Oxford traffic filters: pressure mounting on council | Oxford Mail https://share.google/6yWKlRtjeL1jQJvYs

I have, God help me, been dealing with Network Rail and the city and county councils about the revamp of Oxford station and - of course!- the 4 day/4 year closure of Botley Road, for the past 8 years.  It was in August 2017 that we in Abbey Road  protested against the original plan, which proposed a monstrous three-story shopping center on top of the station (if it had gone ahead, it would have opened just in time for the collapse of retail in Oxford).  The whole ghastly saga has been depressing, exhausting, and taken away much of the pleasure of living in Oxford.

It has also been an education. In no particular order:

Community protest is  largely a middle class sport.  People who might consider themselves traditional ‘working class’ are much less likely to get involved. They’re likely to be older, less internet focussed (and almost all discussion and information about community politics is internet-based) and, some of them, less comfortable with directly challenging authority. It’s easy to forget about them. But occasionally, their absence is brought into sharp focus.

Local democracy can be every bit as distant, arrogant and uncommunicative as Westminster or Brussels. The city and county councils have for years done a very good job of totally ignoring what has been happening to us.  More than that, denying their own part in this disaster. Network Rail has recognised the harm it has done, and apologised, and offered some small compensation: the county council most definitely  has not. Their arrogance is a continuous insult to us.

Given their need to persuade people to vote for them, it’s surprising how some  politicians are first class shits. Liz Leffman, Leader of the county council, opined in public (for no particular reason) that the small businesses who said closure of Botley Road was driving them  to the wall, were either lying, or just didn’t understand their business as well as she did. She clearly hadn’t bothered to read the harrowing report sent her, detailing the desperate plight of these people – and their families. She must be so puzzled that Network Rail has stumped up nearly a million in compensation. Andrew Gant, the cabinet member  responsible for highways projects – and this has become almost entirely a highways project, for now – refused at first even to reply to a letter setting out in detail his own responsibility for much of this mess, then two months later sent a brief reply saying that nothing that has gone wrong is anything to do with him. Andrew Gant, cabinet member not responsible for highways. Or anything.

But thank goodness,  some politicians  do their job well.  Layla Moran has been exemplary as our MP, championing our cause in the House, persistently harrying ministers, and visiting individual businesses in trouble. She even  sent her mum to get her hair done at our local hairdresser. She is what is called a “good constituency MP”. (But what other sort can there possibly be? You are either a champion for your constituents, or a bad MP.) Our councillors, Susanna Pressel and Lois Muddiman, have also fought the good fight for us and we so much appreciate their support.

When it comes to arrogance,  callous indifference and  lack of  accountability, there is no difference  between public or private corporations. Network Rail, and National Highways, which are part of government, were no better at engaging with the community than private sector Thames  Water or British Gas or Kier. Perhaps it’s as simple as this: big  organisations tend to  rob those working in them of their common  humanity. They come to see ‘civilians’ as at best a nuisance, at worst the enemy. (As a recovering bureaucrat, I can remember that feeling.) Young radicals who believe renationalisation will make services cheaper, better, more open, more responsive will be bitterly disappointed. Power loves power, hates to share it.

Running a small businesses is the hardest job there is, and nobody, no one, is on your side. If you fail, you fail, and that's your problem. No political party nowadays cares about small businesses. Labour is deeply in love with (indeed, in bed with, and having illegitimate children by) Big Money, while the Tories, under Thatcher the champions of small businesses, today  only care about hating immigrants and the BBC. Yet there are five and a half million small businesses in this country. If they don't thrive, we don't. I've got to know some of the two or three dozen small businesses around Botley Road, and I hadn’t  appreciated  how hard they have to work how, how uncertain life is for them, and how integral they are to our community. I remember thinking, at  a meeting between a couple of dozen of these people and  civil servants from the Department of Transport in London that it was like Europeans arriving for the first time in  Africa or Australia  and peering uncertainty at these strange people. Certainly speaking  different languages!

Being disabled is tough. In theory, you have all sorts of rights. In practice, it often feels that bats are better protected. Many disabled people have had their lives seriously restricted by the Botley Road closure, and no one cares, because they’re invisible.

It is possible to penetrate the indifference of power,  by giving ordinary people a voice. That's what I did in my book NetworkHell. Done in desperation  because I couldn't think of anything else to do, but it was a good idea. The power of individual testimony shows in the inquiries into  the Post Office scandal, Grenfell  Towers and COVID. When you hear the voice of an ordinary person and see their picture gazing back at you,  it's  more difficult to turn away.

However, it’s hard to transmute momentary sympathy for victims into effective remedial action. Look at the Post Office, still dithering on compensation, decades after they conspired to ruin people, their own staff, who they knew to be innocent. Lord Hendy came in January to apologise for what Network Rail has done to us over the previous two years – then announced the road would be closed for two more years, and since his visit, Network Rail and their pals in the county council have increased their unforgivable intrusion into the lives and even homes of those near the station.

When things go really badly wrong, the people responsible at the top never suffer any consequences. Andrew Haines, CEO of Network Rail, is retiring with a knighthood. Peter Hendy retired last year as  chair of Network Rail, with a seat for life in our glorious House of Cronies plus a ministerial job, all without the need for anything as vulgar as a vote or even a competition.  Project manager Philip Morton just carries on being project manager. For as long as it takes. I’m not a fan of management-by-sacking – I worked for Michael Howard. And often, failure, like success, isn’t down to a single person. But surely, when your career path is identical whether you succeed brilliantly or fail dismally, something’s amiss?

I’m pleased to have published ‘NetworkHell’. But when you do something like this, for the community, and lots of people thank you, curiously, you don't feel puffed up or proud – you feel  humbled. I feel just lucky to be in a position to do this, to help.

But when lots of people applaud and say they support you, it's still bloody hard to get them to actually do anything. Le Vay’s law; when a community is exercised about an issue, 60% of the people are indifferent and want just to  carry on with our lives, 30% say they support you, but it won't actually do anything, 5% have lots of ideas about what you should do but won't actually get up  off their sofas, and if you're lucky, 5% will actually help. It's been like that in every such campaign or voluntary  group I've ever been involved in.

Yet sometimes you just come across natural champions. Ruth Deech for example, Baroness Deech, champion of the disabled and a  born fighter if ever I saw one. She takes no prisoners. I feel almost sorry for Lord Hendy facing her in the Lords. Whatever you do in  life, don’t get on the wrong side of Baroness Deech.

A common enemy brings a community together like nothing else. Our own neighbourhood, though not unfriendly, has always been a bit anonymous. We knew people on either side,  but that was about it. But having 500 buses a day lumber down our quiet cul de sac has brought people out, literally, in a street meeting. It is the only good thing about this ghastly saga and I hope it lasts.

Sometimes, in a long campaign like this, you get a lurking suspicion that you’re becoming one of those people who shout at everybody in the street. Well, maybe you are, but if someone doesn’t shout, no one will hear.

On the other hand, engaging in a community campaign can be profoundly rewarding in a particular way: it takes your mind off the ghastly big issues that you can't possibly  affect:  Trump, Putin, Gaza,  Ukraine, several varieties of  utter environmental catastrophe, the awful new world of zero growth and bankrupt public finances and spavined public services. Do good, it’ll do you good!

But a  point will eventually come where you've simply had enough, and then you must disengage, cultivate your garden, and hope somebody else will  pick up here you left off.

31 Abbey Road OX2 0AD
[email protected]
14 January 2025
 
Dear Mr Gant

“NETWORKHELL”: REPORT ON THE IMPACT OF CLOSURE OF BOTLEY ROAD ON OUR COMMUNITY

As you know, the botched Network Rail project at Oxford station has resulted in the seemingly endless closure of Botley Road, Oxford.  As this is the only road connecting West Oxford to the rest of the city, the closure has had serious consequences for the community. Originally, Network Rail said the closure would be only 4 days: it has now been closed for over 600 days and there is still no date for its reopening.

For two years, no one's listened to us, and no one has helped us. When Network Rail announced that it would not reopen the road last October, the umpteenth time they’ve missed their own deadline, we decided to collect statements by local people who’re suffering from the closure and publish them, in an effort to shame authority into action.

The report has now been published, and I enclose a copy. The 32 personal statements of impact, mostly by the elderly and disabled, and by small family businesses, should indeed shame those involved.
You have consistently maintained that the project is nothing to do with the county council, that what is gone wrong is not the county council’s fault in any way, and that there is nothing the county council can do about it.

I believe the facts contradict all of those statements. I set out nine ways in which it appears that the county council has contributed to this disaster:
1)      Failure to act as effective customer:  The main cause of the delay according to Network Rail is the difficulty of widening and deepening the road under the railway bridge. This is not however being done for ‘railway purposes’, but for ‘highway purposes’, concerning the use of buses and improvements in pedestrian and cycling access, and connects with the county council's transport strategy. Who then is really the customer for these changes?  Clearly not Network Rail, charged with railway infrastructure: it must be the county council as highways authority. Yet the county council have always maintained that the project has ‘nothing to do with them’ and been content simply to point the finger at Network Rail. Granted the contract is held by Network Rail, the county council should nevertheless have insisted on acting as the real customer of this element. The lack of an effective customer has been a major element in the project’s failure.
 
2)      Confusion about the requirement: Specifically, the county council allowed the case for the project to proceed on an incorrect basis. Network Rail’s business case is that the clearance under the bridge was so low that the local authority (sic) had to procure specially made buses to fit under it, and that increasing the height would bring savings in procurement and in ‘fleet homogeneity’. This is contradicted by the county council's own statement of the requirement (which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act last year). This stated that the lower buses are of standard construction, that the majority of buses in the county are of low height and that there were no plans for existing bus operators to buy higher buses. However, most bizarrely, the paper went on to say that over the lifetime of the bridge the height of the average person might increase - thus taller buses might be needed for evolutionary reasons!
 
In the report, the managing director of the Oxford Bus Company states that the lower height buses are of standard construction and do not require special procurement, that in any case, lower buses are required on other low bridges on its network, and that  its fleet of new electric buses are also of this lower height, and he therefore saw no urgent need to increase headroom on this bridge.
 
It appears therefore that the lack of an effective customer for the highways aspects of the project may have resulted in a fundamental misunderstanding about the requirements as regards headroom. If this had not occurred, the project might have been easier in engineering terms, thus avoiding the repeated delays in re-opening the road.
 
3)      Lack of accurate information about utilities: A major cause of delay, according to Network Rail, has been that the County Council did not maintain accurate records of what utilities were under the road, by whom owned, and where located. While utilities have a legal right to work on the road to install their pipes and cables, they surely cannot do this work without notifying the highways authority of what they're doing. It is therefore unclear why accurate and comprehensive records were not maintained. If they had been, the project might have preceded more smoothly.
 
4)      A passive view of its role: the county council seems to have taken the view that since Network Rail have legal rights to work on the road for railway purposes, the county council was unable to challenge anything they did, even though part of the work is clearly for highways, not railways, purposes. For example, for two years the council has been saying that it is going to draw up a Section 278 agreement with Network Rail, which I understand is a standard legal requirement before work is done to make permanent changes to the highway. Yet as late as last August, no such agreement had been made, begging the question: what Network Rail have been doing for two years, if not making permanent changes to the highway? The county council also allowed Thames Water to block off one lane of Osney Bridge all last summer, even though Thames Water has said that work could not proceed in the summer because the Environment Agency would not allow it. The blocked lane added to delay yet was for months used only to park the private cars of Thames Water employees. Our protests met with no response.
 
5)      Permitting unsafe road layouts: whatever else goes on, the county council always retains its statutory responsibility for the safety of the highway. Yet it allowed Network Rail to operate the overcrowded passenger tunnel which is now the only direct route into Oxford in an unsafe condition, with poor lighting and an uneven and broken floor. It also allowed the situation to develop where people waiting for westbound buses and passers-by were forced to walk in the road for lack of room. It has allowed piecemeal changes in road layout, bus stops, traffic and pedestrian lights within a very small space which, cumulatively, are viewed by local people as dangerous. It has failed to enforce restrictions effectively, for example, on cars stopping to drop off and pick up passengers at the corners of Mill Street and Abbey Road.
 
 
6)      Failure to take adequate mitigating action: The county council have failed to make adequate arrangements to mitigate the effects of the closure. Local people often comment on the difficulty of getting the county council to take action. For example, seats and shelters at the temporary west-bound bus stops, possible widening of the pavement there, adequate additional bus services from Botley to the city centre and to hospitals for people unable to walk through, and safe access for disabled people to the station and to the city.
 
7)      Failure to consult: The county council declared that it was ready to consult residents of Abbey and Cripley roads on changes in parking, road layout and traffic management in those roads, not only during the project but permanently following construction, but has generally told us, rather than consulted.
 
8)      Refusal to consider help for small businesses: despite bearing some of the  responsibility for the prolonged road closure, the county council has refused even to discuss the issue of financial help  with small business owners, some of whom have been forced out of  business or forced out of Oxford by the closure. The closure has caused significant economic damage to West Oxford, estimated as £20m commercial revenue to date and the loss of at least 100 jobs.
 
9)      Failure to mitigate effects on the city as a whole: The prolonged closure of Botley Road meant that introduction of the new traffic filter scheme for Oxford has been postponed for the best part of two years. As the managing director of the Oxford Bus Company makes clear in his statement, the effect of introducing LTN's without traffic filters has been to force more traffic onto main routes into and out of the city, but without being able to reduce use of private cars. The predictable consequence the bus journey times have risen substantially, due to increased congestion. This is also made it impossible to deploy electric buses as planned. The effect is likely to increase pollution around the main routes, although as the county council have suspended publication of air quality data, it’s impossible to know. It’s also likely to have had an economic effect, as people are less willing to travel into Oxford for shopping, entertainment etc.  The county council should therefore have considered suspending some LTN's until traffic filters can be implemented - but did not do so.

In sum, the evidence shows that while the main responsibility for failure of the project clearly lies with Network Rail, the county council itself bears considerable responsibility in a number of different ways, and ought therefore to accept that responsibility publicly, apologise to the local community, and engage more positively in mitigating measures.

I'm copying this letter and the report to other councillors, and to the media.

Yours
 
 
Julian Le Vay

That the return of Trump to  the White House has dire implications for European security is widely recognised and much discussed. Ukraine deprived of American support will be forced into subservience to Russia, possibly leaving a free rump around Lviv but obliged to remain outside NATO  and the EU and to be disarmed and therefore, obliged to respect Moscow’s further demands, whatever they may be. Putin will move on to the next stage of his endless war against the West, cold, semi fredo or hot. Possibly the next focus will be Moldova, or demands  for a land corridor into Kalingrad (Danzig, anyone?), or campaigns about Russians in the Baltic states, or more underhand shenanigans in the Baltic Sea, or maybe the arrival of russian troops in Slovakia and  Hungary - by invitation, of course. What is absolutely certain is that Putin will be much emboldened by the arrival of Trump and NATO much weakened.

No doubt Ukraine's European allies will continue to support it even after American wothdr\wal.  But who are those allies? Not Turkey certainly. Hungary and Slovakia are pro Putin. In France, Germany, and Italy there are large and growing minorities up both left wing pacifists and right wing appeasers of Putin, the difference between the two categories not always clear. Only Britain, Poland, the Baltic states and Scandinavian countries are absolutely firm against Russian aggression. That makes the olds look very favourable to Putin, since unlike these European states he does not care about his casualties and does not care about the economic consequences for his own people and is also prepared to take enormous risks.

What I've not seen so far is any discussion about the impact of all this on deterrence theory. From nearly a  century a precarious  nuclear peace has been based on MAD, the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction. According to MAD, no nuclear country dares initiating nuclear war against another,  because even if they strike first, the other country may have  enough nuclear power left to wnsure the destruction of the aggressor  state. (This applies not just for the US versus Russia or China or North Korea, but also India versus Pakistan. It doesn't hold for Israel versus Iran until Iran becomes a nuclear force of its own but then Israel seems to be winning hands down using conventional force). Admittedly a number of world leaders including Putin and blank and Trump at the beginning of his first term,  have suggested they might in some circumstances consider first use. Nevertheless the nuclear peace has held.

The return of Trump to the White House casts  MAD in doubt. Trump's vice president is a vociferous  advocate of American isolationism. Trump himself has already threatened not to honour his NATO  commitment for countries who he thinks aren't spending enough on their own defence.

Imagine a Trump world in which the US has  withdrawn either formally or implicitly from his NATO  commitments, perhaps withdrawn troops from Europe, and Europe itself is much divided between pro and anti Russian states. Imagine pressure from Russia on the anti Russian states to give way,   including the UK –  and Putin hates the UK more than any other country. It might be about continued support for Ukraine or intervention in  Moldova or any other flashpoints of the kind of I’ve described. Suppose there in such circumstance Putin either openly or more likely implicitly threatens first use. We would then know that there was considerable doubt whether America would reply with a nuclear attack on Russia if Russia had launched a nuclear attack on us, particularly if it was just one smallish bomb say on Faslane. And we would know that Putin would know this. And Putin would know that we knew this. In such circumstances the UK government would have to consider the possibility that the only deterrent available was the single UK submarine on patrol. One sub must be extremely vulnerable to concentrated Russian attempts to destroy it. Supposing it were destroyed. There would then be no deterrent at all. UK governments would have to concede to whatever the Russian demands were or face the possibility of a nuclear assault in which it had no nuclear allies at all right  (I'm discounting the French of course] .

My point is not that these nuclear exchanges would actually happen – likely not - but that all parties would realise that they could happen. Whereas  now at the moment such a scenario  is not conceivable, becauses of MAD, which is underwritten by the  US. In other words, the second coming of Trump threatens the end of MAD. And in the circumstances  of Europe at the moment, that gives enormous power to the fascist leader in the Kremlin – wiithout his having to fire a shot.

 I don't think we've begun to think about that. We should.

Somewhere on social media I voiced doubts that the criminal justice system can, in fact, cut reoffending. And - rare event! - a reader emailed me to ask for the evidence. I wrote this in reply.

The case for doubting the ability of correctional services to make significant, permanent reductions in the rate of reoffending is as follows.

1.  Sustained, well resourced programmes to do this have had little, or temporary, effects, here and in New Zealand. See my analyses ;
https://www.julianlevay.com/articles/20-years-of-reducing-re-offending-well-did-it-work
and
https://www.julianlevay.com/articles/nothing-works-again
and on NZ
https://oag.parliament.nz/2016/reoffending
 
2.   Reconviction rates for prisons and probation  have fallen substantially since 2010 ie during exactly the period when both prison and probation servcies were being devastated and reduced to unprecendented chaos by cuts, and in probation,  botched privatisation. Here

3.      Reconviction rates fell similarly over the same period for disposals that have nothing to do with the work of the correctional services eg the fine, discharge. See above also.
 
4.      Reoffending rates are merely a subset of the overall offending rate – the ‘crime rate’. The  crime rate rises and falls hugely, for reasons we cannot know, but which certainly having nothing to do with the criminal justice system. See
 
https://www.julianlevay.com/articles/doubling-prison-numbers-did-not-halve-crime
 
I am not - of course - saying that ‘nothing works’ in reducing reoffending. We know that some interventions do work for some peole for at least a couple of years (longer, we don’t know). But they have to be particularly suitable for those interventions. For the whole mass of offenders, it is doubtful that interventions can make a difference that lasts. Though at the individual level, we should always try to help those offenders who do want to change, or who are suffering because of the same things that push them into crime - homelessness, drugs - but (in my view) for moral reasons (the State has assumed control of them, therefore takes  responsiility for their problems which it arguably doesnt have for a 'free' person). But not as part of social engineering.

And is that  so surprising? A person is shaped by heredity, family upbringing, social circumstances, experience, over perhaps 20 years, their formative years, in ways predisposing them to offending. How likely is it, when society itself is unchanged- or rather, since 2010, has become much tougher, bleaker, and public services have greatly deteriorated  – that a brief course run by prison or probation officers will offset those influences, that in the real world are as strong as ever, or stronger?

Two things interest me out of all this.

One is the way both right leaning policiticans/media and left leaning criminologists/commentators resist - almost without thinking - the evidence that contradicts their beliefs. And not just on crime. On everything. We choose our beliefs, ones we feel ‘comfortable’ with, then sort through the evidence and pick out what supports them. ‘Confirmation bias’, they call it.

The second is what aims and values should the criminal justice system follow, if in fact it is not capable for reducing the crime rate? That is an interesting moral question. Because if the system isnt a machine to produce changes in society, in mass behaviour, surely its only rationale must be moral? Which leads us I suspect to a place equally far from the Guardian and the Mail....

1.  Trump will be the next President of the US
2.   Le Pen will be the next President of France
3.   Russia will overrun Ukraine
4.   Russia will then start a new war, open or covert, sudden or gradual
5.   The US will quit NATO, which will fall apart
6.  The UK will find itself under Russian attack without NATO behind it
7.   The UK will make a humiliating peace and its economy will be shattered
8.   The EU will disintegrate