An article in the Oxford Mail – ‘Spyplane’ above city sparks concern over privacy – reports that Oxford City Council has been hiring an aeroplane to criss-cross the city to gather information about unlawful annexes. The news has sparked concern, not least because the council has given no destruction date for the resulting data and has already thought of at least one collateral purpose for it.

Oxford is one of those councils which recently tried to force taxi drivers to install CCTV equipment to allow constant video monitoring of passengers. Like so many people at the bottom end of the public service pond, they thought nothing either of the cost (all private enterprises are capitalist pigs to a certain kind of public servant) nor about the privacy concerns. I wrote about it – Oxford tramples on privacy with CCTV in taxis – before Oxford City Council was forced to back off.

More recently, it has become clear that Oxford City Council’s planning department is staffed by people who are incompetent even by the low standards of this authority. The construction of some particularly ghastly blocks of flats across the view at the end of a much loved meadow was recommended after an officer’s reading skills were not up to detecting a blatant lie about visibility made by the applicant, the University of Oxford; he also seems to have been bewildered by all those syllables in “environmental impact assessment” so we now have to have one retrospectively.

The dim little pen-pushers who believed that there would be only “glimpses” of these flats are now hiring planes to snoop on Oxford

It is people of this calibre who have now been hiring planes to snoop on council tax payers. This, to me, is the real problem with the erosion of privacy – one can see, perhaps, that MI5 might have a need for such data but when the dumb animals at the lower reaches of public authority can snoop to their hearts’ content, we have gone too far.