Sir – Poor Oxford, saddled with a city council so careless of its duty to protect the city’s priceless heritage, that it seeks to destroy its skyline with monstrous wind turbines.

Worthy successors though to the city council in the seventies which flew the Red Flag over the Town Hall to show solidarity with Red Robbo in his successful campaign to bankrupt the city’s then biggest employer.

Acting against the city’s best interests is, sadly, what Oxford City Council consistently does best. No practical benefit would result from erecting wind turbines on the city’s surrounding hills to offset the grievous environmental damage they would cause. Wind may be free but wind turbines certainly aren’t, and few can exist without the enormous subsidies the Government forces us to pay through our electricity bills, certainly not in inland sites like this.

The erratic amounts of CO2-free electricity they produce are offset by all the emissions created in making them, and in the proper power stations that have to run alongside them to provide electricity when the right kind of wind fails to blow — which is, as it happens, most of the time.

A fitting punishment for the councillors planning this environmental vandalism would be that all their homes received electricity only from wind turbines. They could then spend most evenings sitting in the dark, boiling kettles only when it was windy, and missing most of the instalments of the Left Bank Show, as well as paying more than twice as much for electricity as their neighbours.

The city council must not be allowed to blight our hills with wind turbines just for green tokenism. Turbines should only be where the city council so often are — all at sea.

Michael Tyce, Waterstock