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SCMP Reporter

THEY stand in the middle of the road at traffic lights, a wiper blade window cleaner in one hand and a dirty bucket of water in the other.

    These are the modern urban highwaymen of Britain, youths who because they either wish not to or cannot find gainful employment elsewhere leap on your car at the lights and ''clean'' the windscreen.

        Woe betide those who shoo them away or refuse to pay up generously as the lights turn green and they move on. A mouthful of abuse or worse often follows.

     So imagine the delight in Oxford where the council has now voted to outlaw these young entrepreneurs as part of a comprehensive series of measures aimed at bringing back a little civic pride to the city streets.

       The council also wants to outlaw spitting in the streets (penalty GBP200, HK$2,300) and ban the distribution of leaflets without a licence.

        Drinking alcohol in public will also be banned in designated streets with boozers directed to a ''wet house'' where they can obtain and drink alcohol under supervision. Quite how a ''wet house'' will differ from some of the rougher pubs in the city is not clear.

          At the same time shop keepers in Oxford will be trained in handling rowdy and drunken customers.

        Oxford has created a city centre manager to spearhead the initiative, one that is likely to be watched closely by other local authorities around the country.

   He will no doubt inspect the streets every morning, make sure the litter bins are all empty and check that the street cleaners' teeth are pearly white.

   It sounds superficially wonderful, but ridiculously ill-conceived.

      Isn't Oxford in danger of doing just what Lee Kuan Yew did some time ago in Singapore, clean the place up so much that it loses all spirit and becomes boring and anodyne. Compare Singapore to Hong Kong and there is no doubt which has the most vitality.

    And isn't licensing leaflet distribution just one step away from banning the dissemination of the ideas they contain. Isn't pushing drunks into ''wet houses'' just sweeping them under the carpet.

        Oxford may be ''that sweet city with her dreaming spires'' but cities, especially great places of learning, need the disparate lifestyles they engender. Let's not turn the place into Disneyland.

    THREE years ago the British media was desperate as always for a good summer silly season theme. When a baby was savaged by a particularly brutal dog and a man had his nose bitten off, it let fly with the sort of venom only those with no news to fill their pages can muster.

        Home Secretary Kenneth Baker panicked and rushed through the Dangerous Dogs Act. The target was the pit bull, an ugly brute of a dog bred in the United States for fighting. Owners were required to license them with a Certificate of Exemption - otherwise they would be put down.

        It sounded fine at the time, but now it has turned into an expensive farce. The problem is in defining the pit bull, there are cross breeds and dogs which can be quite harmless but which just happen to look like them.

   The result is that today hundreds of dogs are languishing in kennels at an average cost of GBP9 per day paid by the taxpayer. Over the past year the Metropolitan Police in London have spent 1.2 million pounds (HK$13.8 million) on kennels for pit bulls alone.

        It seems there is a court hearing over the future of nearly every one of the beasts.

        There is no doubt that pit bulls are vicious beasts. Drug dealers would use them to guard crack dens from police raids; extreme rightist parties used them to add an extra element of fear to their marches. They have vanished from those scenes to the delight of the police.

    In that sense the Dangerous Dogs Act has been a success. But panicky, ill-thought out legislation always has its loop-holes.

   It does nothing for other dangerous dogs such as the hybrid wolves some crazies are starting to breed in the US and which no doubt will be appearing on a street near you or me soon.

    Meanwhile ministers say they have no intention of amending the act, to do so would expose them to the folly of the initial panic. It looks like we will keep paying out for the legal and kennel fees for some time to come.



Taking a leap into the dark