Students: not Green?
CONTROVERSIAL COMMENTS FROM Green Party candidate Laura Merrill saw swathes of anti-student feeling emerge at local council election hustings on Monday night. Speaking of her plans to move students and asylum seekers out of East Oxford's Cowley and Iffley, she demanded "why can't they go somewhere else?"
A Labour candidate accused Green party councillors of saying that students "ruin the environment", grouping them with asylum seekers and "frailer members of the population". Merrill responded: "we only think students should be spread out more around Oxford, to Marston and Abingdon". Tory candidate Sean Sullivan cried, "Oh, so you're admitting it now?"
Faced with a small but increasingly hostile audience at Merton College, Merrill responded provocatively to questions about law and order in Oxford. One student cited the theft of his bike as an example of crime problems in Oxford, to which Merrill replied, "By another student, perhaps...?"
The Green candidates were also challenged by Union CCC Anthony Man about their proposals to pedestrianise Broad Street. Merrill bemoaned Broad Street's present function as "a car park", and proposes to plant trees down the middle, "like in Bruges." Man protested to this, claiming that the trees would ruin the panorama, saying, "you can't rename it Narrow Street. Trees are tall things - they grow."
Merrill joined with the Conservative candidates in condemning student apathy for city politics. To Monday night's "good turnout" of six candidates and ten constituents, she insisted that students who don't care "get what they deserve."
9th May 2002