THE letter from Cllr Jean Fooks (February 24) is very much to the point but it omits to mention that the city council, while refusing to continue financing a second Dial-a-Ride minibus for the disabled, has allocated no less than £350,000 for improving the educational attainment of disadvantaged children.

When I first learned of these plans in early February as Hon. Sec. of Oxfordshire Pensioners’ Action Group, I was astonished and incensed. Astonished because education is a matter for the county council, not the city, and incensed because the latter was planning to spend vastly more on children than on disabled and isolated pensioners.

The latter are to get a miserable £20,000 to alleviate the abolition of the city’s own warden system. Perhaps the £20,000 will stop them from dying unnoticed but what sort of life will they have if they cannot get out to a social club?

I put a written question to the city’s board on February 8 and got an evasive answer, so on February 20 I made a short speech to the full city council attacking the Labour Group’s decision. Of course it made no difference. Nor did the Lib-Dem amendment, which would have kept the finance of the second city Dial-a-Ride minibus.

I said the Labour domination is undemocratic because the number of councillors of each party does not proportionally represent the political views of the city voters. About a quarter of them are Conservatives yet for more than 10 years there has not been a single Tory councillor in the city. Oxford needs a council with members from all four main parties.

I urge all pensioners to complain to city councillors and demand support for Dial-a-Ride.

M HUGH-JONES, Headley Way, Oxford