On Monday, the day that the economic crisis crashed into Oxford and 850 workers were summarily sacked from BMW, the Labour minority-run city council group pushed through its budget, imposing the maximum possible increase in council tax.

They reneged on their promise to refurbish Oxford’s Covered Market using some of the newly and substantially increased rents, and are doing nothing new to help the most vulnerable people in the city.

The Labour budget was not debated in the full council – not because the opposition parties had no alternatives, but because the Lord Mayor used her position as chair to force a vote before a debate could take place.

As she must have expected, the vote was tied, 22 for and 22 against, so she could then use her casting vote to impose Labour’s budget on the city.

Gagged and guillotined, this was not the open and inclusive process needed to bring the city together. Oxford’s Labour group, faced with an unprecedented crisis, has shown no capacity for new thinking.

Instead, once again, it has given its knee-jerk reactions: keeping taxes as high as possible; stifling possibilities for dissenting opinion; and criticising everyone else – including, this time, their own Labour government.

A tired and shell-shocked Labour government, borrowing billions, and mortgaging the future, is failing to refloat the banking system which is still pulling the economy backwards.

Locally, Oxford City Council should be bending its energies to do whatever it can to relieve burdens on local people and busineses by keeping taxes down, helping the least well-off, and reducing its own costs.

On Monday night, working openly together, the council could have put together a better budget.

JOHN GODDARD, Oxford City councillor, Blandford Avenue, Oxford