Sir - Good to know that Supt Jim Trotman wants "the safest means possible" on May Morning and that "if that means closure, then closure it is". He is too modest. Barbed wire, a general curfew 24 hours either side of May 1, and police helicopters overhead would surely be more secure.

An alternative approach would be for Supt Trotman to take his army of uniforms' on a civil liberties course covering freedom of assembly and movement, the concept of proportionality and the novel idea of not punishing the innocent for the sins of the guilty.

Like the Superintendent, I think people should be strongly discouraged from jumping from the bridge.

Immediate arrest, long hours of community service once their broken limbs had healed and a term's rustication for any students involved might do it.

Magdalen Bridge is the key entry point to Oxford from the East.

Yet, for more than a decade, the city council and police have used one excuse after another to try to prevent people from East Oxford entering the city on May Morning.

This is the same long and dishonourable tradition that once protected' the University from the town and built the Cutteslowe wall in North Oxford to keep out the unwashed.

Those of us who live east of Magdalen Bridge may be proles. But we are proles with a good understanding of our human rights.

And that does not include tramping miles in the wrong direction to find a back door into Oxford. It apparently took a tank on manoeuvres to knock down Cutteslowe Wall for the first time.

Is there a less dramatic way to knock down the wall in the Superintendent's mind?

Peter McIntyre, Oxford