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I see another article in today's Oxford Mail demanding action over some of the council owned garage sites around Oxford. In Action Demand Over Garages local resident Tony Greenfield suggests that "No-one in the council, it seems, has the business acumen, or real interest, to turn this around. It is a disgraceful waste of our money."

Mr Greenfield and others might be interested to know that since I was ward councillor for his area some four years ago now I've continued to try to get something done about these garages. With my Community Land Trust hat on I have even submitted outline proposals to take over several of these sites and provide mutually owned affordable housing.

I even did sketch plans for these ones off Raymund Rd, and have been asked on at least three different occasions by local councillors (Lib Dems, since Mr Greenfield made such a point of criticisng us/them) whether I've heard any more about it. I reckon with clever use of space and materials you could get at least eight three bedroomed or ten two bedroomed "mews" style homes on that site all with integral garages as you can see in the image below.

The wheels of local government turn very slow indeed in this case. The review of the use of garage sites across the city was begun when I was still on the council - I was not re-elected in 2002! Some have been handed over to "preferred" housing association partners, but others, more difficult to use ones, that the housing associations didn't want to be bothered with, are still festering there blighting their neighbourhoods.

Oxfordshire CLT met on Monday to finalise our registration. Within weeks we will be legally able to accept land, and we have a development partner waiting to help us plan and build. It will only take the city council to say so and we can start putting the effort in.

I had a go at the Guardian Friday politics quiz today. It said I got nine out of ten, and that the one I got wrong was a question about how many Prime Ministers had had a State Funeral since the turn of the nineteenth century. I reckoned four (Wellington, Palmerston, Gladstone and Churchill), they claim three. Who is correct? Or have I missed something?

If ever there was a good day to lose an MEP, today must be difficult to beat.

The former Lib Dem member for somewhere up north will be inside page stuff tomorrow compared with bent-as-a-nine-bob-note Labour donation scandals, yet again.  It utterly beggars belief that anyone would imagine that donations made via someone else were right and proper.  Mind you there always were stories about a certain landlord in Oxford forcing his tenans each to give Labour small amounts on his behalf so he would not go above he notification level each year.  So maybe it's endemic.

And so, having linked, I may as well cite The Daily Pundit who writes about the number of NuTory candidates who were once NuLabour members. But it's not so much their political backgrounds that I want to take issue with - to me the interchangeability of such political favours merely highlights that both parties are really merely sibling subsidiaries of the post-Thatcher Managerial Clique.

No, what I'm more interested in is how a serious political party, claiming to be democrats of some sort, and on the one hand with its leader wanting to hold "public primaries" for some of its candidates, selects its candidates through some sort of appointed committee and without an all-member vote in the consitutency or jurisdiction concerned.

It's not just the successor to Doris that was selected this way, but apparently the Judas Karim for the North West Euro-Parliament list. No wonder the latter thought his chances better with the Tories if he really only needed to butter up a few committee members rather than reach out to the activists and members.