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It comes as little surprise to me personally that businesses in Oxford City Centre have voted not to pay an extra one per cent on their rates to create a "Business Improvement District":

And who can blame them when the basic standard of cleanliness in the city centre is currently appalling. Here's a photo I took on Saturday of an overflowing and hanging off bin attached to one of their £30,000 benches. Every other bin I saw in the city was full and many were overflowing, but that was the worst. This was early afternoon on a Saturday, the main shopping day, in a city that attracts millions of visitors a year and the place is heaving on a Saturday.

But when I was on the council, and was involved in economic development when the OX1 City Centre Management Company was established, I wanted it to be more wide-ranging than just the "corporateization" of the city centre. I wanted to create a multi-membership co-operative type organization that would involve the users of the city centre as well as the businesses and other stakeholders such as landowners.

Something does need to be done about the city centre, especially the area that will be economically depressed when the new Westgate Centre opens up attracting more and more people to the western end of the city. Although the city council are also landowners of the Westgate Centre, or most of it at least, they also own a significant number of business premises, including the Covered Market and shops in both the High and the Broad, in this eastern end of the city centre. They need to get together with the other landowners in that end of town and ensure that it remains an economically attractive place to do business.

But in the meantime I shall be writing to Mr O'Dell about my idea presently.

Hmmm. I've just been watching the new Spooks series. I won't give too much away but I was interested to see that they portrayed the security services using CCTV in London with facial recognition software to identify people they wanted to get to hospital for life-saving tests and vaccination.

I guess this is supposed to make us feel that such software and equipment has benign uses. But of course for this method to work, it needs a databank of facial images as large as the ID cards biometric database.

Does the Home Office use BBC drama to get its points across? Or is this genuinely independent fiction? Either way, it seems to promote more creep, creep, creep in our lives...

There's been lots of discussion about whether Lib Dems should support state funded schooling via institutions that have a religious guiding philosophy, let's put it that way, since Nick Clegg, self-proclaimed atheist, seemed to offer such schooling support recently (see the links at the bottom for the discussion elsewhere).

Some caveats here. I was brought up in quite a religious family. All my grandparents were "Gospel Hall Brethren"; a small Scottish anti-clerical sect. My family were frequently ex-patriates in Africa. The first school I really remember was in Nairobi. I don't remember it being "faith based" but looking at its website now I see it was scarily so - they even quote "spare the rod and spoil the child" and so on! Though I don't remember having chapel or any other kind of worship.

When we returned to the UK I got a scholarship to a Woodard prep school and thence to a Woodard public school. Nathaniel Woodard was a nineteenth century Church of England clergyman who established a network of relatively low cost boarding schools aimed at educating the sons (and daughters to his credit) of other clergy and professional middle classes. They both had a strong religious tradition. I was in the choir at both. Listen to Carols from Kings and I've done every treble and tenor solo on the entire disc (and I was better at it!).

About the time of my O levels I eschewed religion and became an atheist. Though missing chapel was not an option, it was just one of those social occasions that public schools like to go in for. And I never stopped enjoying the music and ceremony. Ten years and a long story later, I became a Catholic, and nearly joined the religious community at a well known top Catholic public school and monastery. Whilst what some of you may call "indoctrination" was more obvious there - my Anglican school had one priest, this one had nearly a hundred at its disposal - in fact it tended to take a discursive tone. I remain a Catholic, though their recent admissions policy has hardened my attitude towards them a little - still, I suppose that's what forgiveness is all about!

Anyway, back to the point. Nearly all the schooling available in this country before the 20th century was established by religious charities and with a religious ethos. We cannot just write it all off completely. But when we say "religious ethos" we're not talking Madrassas here. And I actually think that you can't really be a "good atheist" unless you've first heard what it is you're objecting to!

However there's one point about the current arrangements I feel I need to defend. People have been saying that one answer is to ensure that even faith schools must have an open admissions policy within their catchment. The catch, if you pardon the pun, is that these institutions do not really have a catchment area in the same sense as other state schools. The churches put in their relatively small amount of funding in order to provide a facility for all their members in a given area.

For example, in Oxford we used to have a joint Anglican-Catholic school. Upon reorganization a few years ago that was closed and the Catholics decided that since there wasn't an alternative in the whole of Oxfordshire they would go it alone. But their calculation of what they could put in is based on serving the needs of all the Catholics in Oxfordshire, or this part of the Archdiocese at least. I don't think you can have it both ways - you cannot insist on them taking all comers locally and serve the needs of all their adherents in a bigger area.

What will be quite interesting is next year the Anglicans, who decided that they could not justify another school on their own in Oxford, will become the lead partners in a new "academy" in the city - replacing a supposedly "failing" secular state school. They have vowed that no faith based selection will be permitted, which begs the question why they want to be the lead partner. But whatever their reasons, they will, like other schools they sponsor, have the ability to appoint people to the governing body. In fact, unlike their existing non-academy schools, they will have more autonomy, and yet it will not be a "faith based school" in the sense others are talking about.

Still. Of course for me the answer is easy. If the state did not actually deliver education using our money, it wouldn't be a problem, would it? No doubt there would again be some religious charities offering low cost or free education (though nothing like there once was owing to the relative impoverishment of the churches since the 19th century) but also people would have a greater choice of education for their children and not be reliant on whatever happened to be there provided by the state. What we need to do is not to provide education itself, but to ensure that people have the financial wherewithal to make those choices.

Anyway, I think the point is that I don't think it's done me any harm. In fact it may have made it easier for me to understand what I was doing when avowing myself an atheist to have a grounding in what I was deciding not to believe in. Chapel services were of course an overt sign of that religiosity, but were in fact social occasions when more fun was had seeing how much you could get away with in terms of whispering, mangling hymns and generally messing about. And if education was a genuine choice and we were not coerced into paying for others' faiths to have a special privilege at public expense, why worry too much?

I don't really have a lot of time for the Greens in Oxford - their politics that is - as individuals I get on well I think with all of those I know. They go their own way and do their own thing and are rarely to be relied on, as our joint administration in the run up to 2002 on the City Council proved.

But they have a one party crypto-communist state in East Oxford, so there's no meaningful opposition to them on the East Area Committee, at the moment at least. But it is unusually refreshing to see them turn down the offer of an intrusive state run CCTV system on the Cowley Road. I'm not sure about their alternative of bobbies on bikes and (more!) road safety measures on a road that has become a bit of a joke anyway for the way vehicles now have to weave dangerously in and out of the path of buses and pedestrians, but good on them for resisting the encroachment of further state surveillance in the area.

I've never felt unsafe down there, except perhaps on leery Wednesday when the university sports teams are on the drunken prowl, and it is well surveilled naturally by all the people using it at all hours of the day and night - and by bouncers at the pubs and clubs every few yards. So there is no need in my mind for yet more electronic eyes.