Oxfordshire Council to Trial a Climate Lockdown
Oxfordshire Council to Trial a Climate Lockdown Starting 2024
Essay by Eric Worrall
First published JoNova; Imagine if your power mad politicians liked Covid Lockdowns so much, they wanted to continue them indefinitely. This is going to be trialled in Oxfordshire in Britain.
Oxfordshire County Council Pass Climate Lockdown ‘trial’ to Begin in 2024
Oxfordshire County Council yesterday approved plans to lock residents into one of six zones to ‘save the planet’ from global warming. The latest stage in the ’15 minute city’ agenda is to place electronic gates on key roads in and out of the city, confining residents to their own neighbourhoods.
Under the new scheme if residents want to leave their zone they will need permission from the Council who gets to decide who is worthy of freedom and who isn’t. Under the new scheme residents will be allowed to leave their zone a maximum of 100 days per year, but in order to even gain this every resident will have to register their car details with the council who will then track their movements via smart cameras round the city.
Communism will make the weather better.
Oxfordshire County Council, which is run by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party, secretly decided to divide-up the city of Oxford into six ‘15 minute’ districts in 2021 soon after they were elected to office. None of the councillors declared their intention of imprisoning local residents in their manifestos of course, preferring to make vague claims about how they will ‘improve the environment’ instead.
Every resident will be required to register their car with the County Council who will then monitor how many times they leave their district via number plate recognition cameras. And don’t think you can beat the system if you’re a two car household. Those two cars will be counted as one meaning you will have to divide up the journeys between yourselves. 2 cars 50 journeys each; 3 cars 33 journeys each and so on.
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This story is so crazy, I wanted corroboration. This is the same story published in the Oxford Mail;
Traffic filters will divide city into six “15 minute” neighbourhoods, agrees highways councillor
25th October
ROAD blocks stopping most motorists from driving through Oxford city centre will divide the city into six “15 minute” neighbourhoods, a county council travel chief has said.
And he insisted the controversial plan would go ahead whether people liked it or not.
Duncan Enright, Oxfordshire County Council’s cabinet member for travel and development strategy, explained the authority’s traffic filter proposals in an interview in The Sunday Times.
He said the filters would turn Oxford into “a 15-minute city” with local services within a small walking radius.
…
People can drive freely around their own neighbourhood and can apply for a permit to drive through the filters, and into other neighbourhoods, for up to 100 days per year. This equates to an average of two days per week.
…
Oxfordshire is the home of the University of Oxford, one of Britain’s premier learning institutions.
Communist states like the Soviet Union and China seem to love movement restrictions and internal passports. In my opinion Britain has been edging closer to naked communism for at least half a century, so I guess it was inevitable that an attempt would be made at some point to introduce Chinese style movement restrictions on British people. In my opinion the climate claims are just an excuse, an attempt to deflect criticism of their authoritarianism.
I would love to write that the University of Oxford is up in arms, that Oxford academics are outraged at this attempt to restrict people’s freedom, but so far I have not discovered one utterance of public outrage from university academics.
For almost a thousand years the University of Oxford stood as a beacon of intellectual freedom. A number of leading Oxford intellectuals were hanged or otherwise persecuted over the centuries, because of their resistance to authoritarianism. So it seems incredibly sad that the inheritors of that proud tradition seem so willing to turn their backs on those freedoms their predecessors sometimes laid down their lives to defend.
Update (EW): The “15 Minute City” concept mentioned by Councillor Duncan Enright is intimately tied to sustainability and climate goals. From Introducing the “15-Minute City”: Sustainability, Resilience and Place Identity in Future Post-Pandemic Cities :-
“… The success of this concept, as it has been shown in the city of Paris under the leadership of Mayor Anne Hidalgo, has been hailed as a potent urban planning concept that will lead to an economic boost, while bringing about social cohesion and interaction and help create sustainable ecosystems in cities, more so after the experiences of COVID-19 and associated containment measures. While some of the features of the “15-Minute City” concept had been temporarily adopted in different cities after the impacts of COVID-19, its adoption in long-term planning would result in a higher quality of life as proximity to basic services would help in saving time wasted in traffic, thus promoting sustainable mobility [35]. This will aid in efforts to reduce emissions as envisioned in the Paris agreement and promote higher cultural outputs, amongst others. For instance, by re-thinking the transportation system to create more biking and walkable streets, the challenges of private car ownership will be somehow addressed as they will be reduced as more people embrace biking culture. In addition, as expressed by Reimer [36], the adoption of the “15-Minute City” concept will also open gateways for more novel digital innovations such as bike-sharing technologies that would increase the high livability experiences of urban residents. For instance, as is expressed by Gehl [37], the re-thinking of cities to facilitate walkability and cycling would, in turn, inspire the creation of parks, squares and public places within neighborhoods, and by doing so, it would help to bridge the social inequality in accessing such facilities, which are not always available for everyone in a car-dependent city. …”
Balkanising cities into smaller districts, like the districts in “The Hunger Games”, will in my opinion cause substantial economic damage, and reduce social contact and cooperation between different regions of cities which have been manipulated in this way. The whole point of living in a city, for people who choose to do so, is the broad range of economic and social opportunities and resources offered by city life. But as they’ve said many times, traditional concepts of prosperity and economic growth are not the core goals of deep greens.
Council claims it is a “Victim of Abuse” following new Policy to enforce Climate Lockdowns without consent of the Public
“Imagine if your power-mad politicians liked Covid Lockdowns so much, they wanted to continue them indefinitely. This is going to be trialled in Oxfordshire in Britain,” a Watts Up With That article stated.
The article is about Oxfordshire County Council’s plans to trial climate lockdowns in 2024 using the “15-Minute City” concept which is intimately tied to sustainability and climate goals.
The Watts Up With That article went viral. In response, reported Vision News, Oxford City and County Councils have rushed to local media claiming that they are now the “victims” of abuse after their plans for a Communist-style dystopian city were revealed.
Oxford’s 15-Minute Neighbourhoods
On 24 October, Oxford Mail reported that according to a county council travel chief, roadblocks stopping most motorists from driving through Oxford city centre will divide the city into six “15-Minute Neighbourhoods.” And the councillor insisted the controversial plan would go ahead whether people liked it or not.
Duncan Enright, Oxfordshire County Council’s cabinet member for travel and development strategy, explained the authority’s traffic filter proposals in an interview in The Sunday Times. He said the filters would turn Oxford into “a 15-Minute City” with local services within a small walking radius.
The day before, The Times reported that Oxford City will be divided into six districts, and motorists will get fined if they leave their neighbourhood too often. The Times claimed the Council was “fighting back” against gridlocked traffic with “strict rules on how often motorists can drive outside their neighbourhood.” However, only The Times is claiming it is to do with gridlocked traffic and it’s curious how The Times made out that was the aim of the Council’s move when it is clearly part of a global agenda. Vision News explained more in an article published on 30 November which began:
Oxfordshire County Council yesterday approved plans to lock residents into one of six zones to “save the planet” from global warming. The latest stage in the “15-Minute City” agenda is to place electronic gates on key roads in and out of the city, confining residents to their own neighbourhoods.
Under the new scheme, if residents want to leave their zone, they will need permission from the Council which gets to decide who is worthy of freedom and who isn’t. Under the new scheme, residents will be allowed to leave their zone a maximum of 100 days per year, but in order to even gain this every resident will have to register their car details with the council which will then track their movements via smart cameras around the city.
Oxfordshire County Council Pass Climate Lockdown ‘trial’ to Begin in 2024, Vision News, 30 November 2022
6 December 2022 (14 mins)
Yesterday, Vision News reported that it turns out Oxford residents don’t much care for Marxist-style authoritarianism. Vision News was referring to an Oxford Mail article that day which stated that staff and councillors of Oxfordshire City Council had “been hit with a bombardment of abuse [ ] online about traffic filters.”
The Oxford Mail attempted to blame the online “abuse” on false and incorrect information about the 15-Minute Neighbourhoods being disseminated. However, Vision News has carefully fact-checked Oxford Mail’s latest report and found that the article is entirely misleading and false and clearly Oxford Mail has not done its homework.
What Oxford City Council, Oxford County Council and Oxford Mail seem to be incapable of comprehending is that people do not want, nor do they agree, to be forced into a dystopian future that globalist technocrats have devised to control residents and remove their rights and freedom of movement.
Low Traffic Neighbourhoods
15-Minute Neighbourhoods are not the only dystopian control scheme Oxford is trialling. Between March and June 2021, Oxfordshire County Council held a series of workshops, engagement activities and then a public consultation in June 2021 regarding low traffic neighbourhoods (“LTNs”).
An LTN is an area where motorised traffic is prevented from taking shortcuts through a residential area by means of traffic filters. This creates quieter and safer streets where residents may feel safer and more comfortable when making local journeys by bus, by cycle or on foot.
All roads remain accessible, but drivers may have to find alternative routes.
East Oxford low traffic neighbourhoods, Oxfordshire County Council
Following the initial consultation, in May 2022, the Council opened a survey to the public regarding LTNs. The survey closed on 30 November. “We are trialling three low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) in … east Oxford under an experimental traffic regulation order (ETRO). These LTNs are collectively known as the east Oxford LTNs,” Oxfordshire County Council’s website now states.
Sustainability and Climate
C40 is a global network of mayors “taking urgent action to confront the climate crisis.” Although Oxford is not one of the nearly 100 C40 cities, it is one of the 1,143 cities and local governments that have joined C40’s ‘Cities Race to Zero’ – cities whose leaders are “working urgently toward a decarbonised economy.”
In July 2020, the C40 Knowledge Hub advised how to “build back better” with a 15-Minute City:
- Establish a citywide 15-Minute City vision.
- Realise your 15-Minute City vision through an inclusive engagement process.
- Improve walking and cycling infrastructure, including by reallocating street space to pedestrians and cyclists.
- Create complete neighbourhoods by decentralising core services and developing a social and functional mix.
- Implement planning measures to help complete neighbourhoods to thrive.
- Encourage teleworking and service digitalisation to limit the need for travel.
Does it seem like Oxford’s Councils are following the “build back better” plan?
And the plan fits into the Smart City agenda. In January 2021, a paper was published in Smart Cities to introduce the “15-Minute City”:
While cities endure lockdowns in order to ensure decent levels of health, the challenges linked to the unfolding of the pandemic have led to the need for a radical re-think of the city, leading to the re-emergence of a concept, initially proposed in 2016 by Carlos Moreno: the “15-Minute City”. The concept, offering a novel perspective of “chrono-urbanism,” adds to existing thematic of Smart Cities …
The success of this concept, as it has been shown in the city of Paris under the leadership of Mayor Anne Hidalgo, has been hailed as a potent urban planning concept that will lead to an economic boost, while bringing about social cohesion and interaction and help create sustainable ecosystems in cities, more so after the experiences of Covid-19 and associated containment measures.
While some of the features of the “15-Minute City” concept had been temporarily adopted in different cities after the impacts of Covid-19, its adoption in long-term planning would result in a higher quality of life as proximity to basic services would help in saving time wasted in traffic, thus promoting sustainable mobility.
This will aid in efforts to reduce emissions as envisioned in the Paris agreement and promote higher cultural outputs, amongst others. For instance, by re-thinking the transportation system to create more biking and walkable streets, the challenges of private car ownership will be somehow addressed as they will be reduced as more people embrace biking culture.
In addition, as expressed by Reimer, the adoption of the “15-Minute City” concept will also open gateways for more novel digital innovations such as bike-sharing technologies that would increase the high livability experiences of urban residents. For instance, as is expressed by Gehl, the re-thinking of cities to facilitate walkability and cycling would, in turn, inspire the creation of parks, squares and public places within neighbourhoods, and by doing so, it would help to bridge the social inequality in accessing such facilities, which are not always available for everyone in a car-dependent city.
Introducing the “15-Minute City”: Sustainability, Resilience and Place Identity in Future Post-Pandemic Cities, 2. A Perspective on the 15-Minute City as an Urban Planning Pandemic Response, Smart Cities, 8 January 2021
And of course, the World Economic Forum (“WEF”) likes the idea of 15-Minute Cities. A WEF article in November 2021 stated: “One of the biggest urban ideas to emerge from the pandemic is the idea of the 15-minute city or 15-minute neighbourhood … Various cities around the world have begun to embrace the 15-minute city approach … Such experiments are unprecedented and exciting.”
Exciting for whom?
