I will admit to finding the new, improved, extra-full Antonia life a little bit difficult to manage at the moment. Some of that is down to having a little too much fun - going to see elephants and hippos at West Midlands Safari Park, eating curry with friends in the Balti Triangle, going on a steam train and drinking Pimms in the rain in an very English way - but some of it is down to balancing a full-time job that I love with discovering how to be a good councillor and local representative. Certainly not there yet, but definitely trying.

Doing this, you need a really understanding employer. I have one of those, and they’ve bent over backwards to help me out, but I fear that I’m becoming the newbie bore with my constant repetition of “can we do it outside work hours please?” Happy to fit around childcare responsibilities, of course, but how are we supposed to get a wider mix of councillors if everything is set up for the convenience of people who are not working or retired?

I’m also really beginning to resent badly-chaired and off-topic meetings, even those which I would previously have gone along with. Chairing isn’t hard, though some people never get the knack; having a quick think about what your audience needs to know rather than how to dazzle them with knowledge and acronyms isn’t hard; sticking to an agenda isn’t hard; answering the question asked rather than another one of your own invention isn’t hard. Last week, I attended a meeting for new councillors about planning in which we discussed the philosophical basis of the planning regulation system (that the idea that a person’s property could be subject to rules other than those of the owner was a real blow, albeit covert, to capitalism - you see, I started the meeting off listening) yet didn’t discuss the detail of how to call-in decisions, why you might want to, and which grounds were appropriate for refusing permission.

The other useful thing would be sorting out the practicalities - email addresses that work, requested IT equipment being available, inductions that induct rather than landing new councillors with more paper than they could ever carry home on the bus, not sending me twenty packets of sunflower seeds that I can never use due to not having a garden or in fact any outside space at all, you know the sort of thing. Oh, and I’d really appreciate no more glossy magazines from the LGA, LGIU or IdEA that talk about the importance of having a thorough induction for new councillors, thanks.

To end on a happy note, though, the stuff that’s important, the stuff that’s about people living in Rose Hill, that I’m finding really interesting. Not always fun, not always with a happy ending or the right result, but what I signed on for.

Not usually one to be found reading Conservative pamphlets, am I? Was interested in the factors that David Burrows, who beat Twiggy, puts forward from his analysis (pdf) of big swings to the Tories at the last election. He interviewed the 13 Tories with the biggest swings against Labour and identified these common threads:

1. Early selection & previous candidate experience
2. Long term campaign approach
3. Extreme localism
4. Living in constituency
5. Centre of community issues
6. Person over party
7. Professional campaign support
8. High level of candidate name recognition
9. Better funded campaigns (from selection)
10. Positive campaigning
11. Voters respond to compelling “proof” of hard work
12. Targeting areas not traditionally Conservative heartlands
13. Anti-politics “politics” – acting out of the box
14. Weaker opponents

Of course, this is all in the service of bashing the Cameroonies’ A-list and arguing for “local candidates” (who clearly can never be women, or gay, or from an ethnic minority).

From the BBC:

The next Labour party deputy leader must be a woman, Constitutional Affairs Minister Harriet Harman has said.
Ms Harman told GMTV she wanted a team of three - a leader and two deputies, one of whom should be female.

Well, yeah! Seems obvious to me that it’s unsustainable to have a situation where both leader and deputy leader of the Labour party are men. I’d go further than Harriet, and say that if the leader is a man, then the deputy (I’d only have one) *must* be a woman. And in the fantastical situation where we have a female leader, then the men can have a male deputy to represent their interests - though I don’t think that is a problem likely to arise anytime soon, unfortunately.

No posts about local politics, she said. This isn’t a councillor-blog, she said.

But I have to post this. Which party would you think would it be that would cancel the fully-budgeted-for about-to-be-implemented plans to introduce doorstep plastic recycling in Oxford in October?

You have a choice. Is it:
a) Labour?
b) the Greens?
c) the Tories?
d) the IWCA?, or
e) the Liberal Democrats?

(BTW bad luck if you chose c) - we have no Tories on Oxford City Council.)

If you want to know the answer - click here.

So says the Daily Mail and most other papers today, reporting on a new study from Bournemouth University. Except apparently (and this didn’t get reported) they’re not as bad as their parents (from the National Children’s Bureau media digest, not online):

Findings published in a new book, Breaking the cycle of educational alienation, claim that girls are now more badly behaved than boys when it comes to taking drugs, drinking alcohol and having underage sex. However, both are actually better behaved than their parents were 20 years ago.

Professor Colin Pritchard of Bournemouth University, said “The good news and, perhaps, unexpected is that the 2005 youngsters we studied have less problematic behaviour than those in the 1985 cohort and even with the problematic behaviour, drugs, drink and sex, this is still a minority activity”.

Prof Pritchard and Richard Williams, social inclusion coordinator for the university, repeated a survey along the south coast that was conducted in 1985 involving Year 10 and 11 secondary students. The results were used to contrast today’s behaviour with that of their parents 20 years ago.

Prof Pritchard said “One thing we found among teenagers of all backgrounds was that those who said they liked school were the least likely to binge drink, take drugs or otherwise engage in bad behaviour. That is a challenge to schools and parents to make sure pupils are interested”.

Just updated the links bar, and changed some of the introductory text. I’ve also taken down the Bloggers4Labour bar as it was getting far too long for my page. So some Labour bloggers may have lost their link from here. Drop me a line if you want me to link to you.

Just wanted to say congratulations to my erstwhile opponent in Oxford West and Abingdon, Amanda Mclean, on being accepted onto the A-list of Tory candidates.

/normal rabidly-partisan service resumes shortly

Gendergeek pointed me in the direction of this Guardian article about a new Women’s Aid investigation into post-separation violence by fathers against children.

In the past decade, family courts have ordered 11 children to have contact with fathers who subsequently murdered them. A Women’s Aid report, Failure to Protect, found 18 cases of children ordered to have contact with fathers who had been convicted of schedule one offences - meaning violent crimes against children. It found that 64 children had been ordered to have contact with a parent whose behaviour had previously caused children to be placed on the child protection register. Of those, 21 had been ordered to have unsupervised contact with the abusive parent.
Fathers4Justice, in its colourful three-year campaign, helped create the impression of an unjust legal bias against fathers in the family courts. And, because family court hearings cannot be reported, the myth was allowed to flourish.

Gendergeek makes a salient point when she says:

I am just perturbed that it has taken so long for the claims of a woman-focused family court to be dispelled. It would seem that media-darling F4J’s rancorous implosion amid embarrassing allegations of a kidnap plot has meant that articles such as Decca Aitkenhead’s are now possible.

Exactly. Free from harassment from fathers’ rights activists and free from the presumption that any group so photo-friendly could possibly be dodgy, journalists can now write the truth about contact between fathers and children after relationships break down.

Jo found it, so I can’t take the credit. West Wing Season 7 - out on DVD on 11th September. Hurrah!

Buy it here. I’ve managed to refrain from watching any episodes on More4, so no spoilers in the comments please!

So, I’m back. We got off the plane on Sunday and arrived home Monday lunchtime after a night at my parents’. I’ll just say that the holiday in Kefalonia was wonderful: the sea is really the colour that you see in the adverts, and Greek food is amazing. I havea wonderful tan, and the freckles are peeking out now that the election pallour is past. If you get the chance to go to the Ionian, take it: there may not be many nightclubs or huge ancient relics, but it certainly is a relaxing destination. Unless, that is, you’re a traffic warden by trade - speed limits, motorcycle helmets, road markings, parking spaces - all optional. Jo has some wonderful pictures and the blow-by-blow account. This is my favourite:

I’m also feeling my way to being a very new councillor. Have faithfully attended all the inductions I could make, and am starting to make progress with the pile of dead trees that have landed in my front room.

This photo is of me, our agent Oscar, and the agents for the other three candidates at the count, with the council chief executive at the front reading out the results (the quality isn’t great, but you get the idea):