A little about Jock

Hi there! My name's Jock Coats and I'm the owner of this site. I am based in Oxford in the United Kingdom where I have been pretty well settled since 1992.

I work in IT at Oxford Brookes University, supporting desktop systems for non-academic staff. And at nights, at least while our students are in residence, I am also a warden in one of our halls of residence, Morrell Hall - it gives me free accommodation in a city wsell known for its exorbitant housing costs!

I am a member of the Liberal Democrats, and from 1999-2002 I was a City Councillor for a ward called Old Marston & Risinghurst which has sadly now been reorganized into four other neighbouring wards. While on the council I was involved in Economic Development and most interestingly Housing issues and was chair of the Housing Strategy Advisory Panel and the Economic and Social Well-being Scrutiny Committee. I was also very interested in planning, and sat on the city's previous centralized Planning Committee.

In addition to the day job, many of the causes and issues I got interested in while on the City Council, have become continuing interests. I am chair and co-founder of Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts , a group aiming to produce more affordable housing under the control of local communities who want to meet their own local needs. I am also a director of the Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum which was established to promote and help develop social enterprire in the Oxfordshire area. And in December 2006 I was elected by the non-teaching staff at Oxford Brookes University to be their appointee to the university Board of Governors for four years, and had previously spent seven years as a representative on the university's Academic Board. I became secretary of the Lib Dems' group that campaigns for Land Value Tax and other Economic Reform, ALTER, two years ago, and am a member of the Liberal Democrats' Education Association. I have recently been involved in setting up "The 1909 Group " which aims to publicize and campaign for some of the radical economic and fiscal reforms that were in the Liberal Reform Agenda of the early 20th century leading up to Lloyd-George's "People's Budget" in 1909.

As if all that weren't enough I also do a bit of web developing in what spare time is left, previously using the Python programming language and the Zope/Plone CMS and more recently using Drupal and PHP, which is running this blog.

I'm 40, single, Catholic, gay and liberal to the point of libertarian. But then you'll probably already know most of that if you've read much of my blog.

Return to the front page .