The instructions at the beginning directed me:

“think about ‘your local area’. When answering, please consider your local area to be the area within 15 to 20 minutes walking or wheeling distance from your home (around half a mile or 800 metres).”

The inherent contradiction in the above is that 15 to 20 minutes’ walk is a mile, not half a mile. Possibly an unpowered wheelchair might be slower, or the effort of propelling it by hand for more than half a mile might be too much for most people, but I’d have to be a very slow walker to take 15 minutes to walk half a mile in tarmaced streets. So, which distance was I supposed to consider local; half a mile or twice that far? There’s not much worth mentioning really within either distance, to be honest, but the survey would be more meaningful if people knew which to use. Different interpretations would render the results unreliable and inconsistent.

That was just the first of five problems I found with the survey and its interpretation. The next was a question about “Air quality and traffic pollution” as if exhaust fumes are the only possible cause of poor air. That ignores the inconvenient fact that the principle problem I notice on cycling back into the city after a day in the country is not diesel fumes but wood smoke. Bristol is a city of people who think themselves conscious of the environment. It has one of the country’s two Green MPs. The problem is there is a difference between thinking oneself environmentally conscious and actually being so. I recently heard a Londoner opine on Any Answers that the environment is more important than the view, apparently oblivious that for anyone outside the degraded landscape of an inner city, the view is their environment. So it is with people who install wood-burning boilers in a city, undoing all the clean-air work of the last 70 years, in the belief that because they are burning a bio-fuel they are therefore good for the environment. They ignore two problems: firstly, burning wood at domestic temperatures produces huge amounts of creosote and dioxins, both of which are highly toxic and carcinogenic and, secondly, wood is only a renewable resource if burnt more slowly than trees grow, which is unlikely if whole cities start to rely on it for heating space and water. As a result, wildlife and the human population is being poisoned slowly by people who think too superficially to resist the lies of advertisers and virtue-signallers. However, the Green Party will understandably want to blame drivers rather than its voters, so I would not expect them to give us the opportunity to distinguish between the two sources of poor air.

Thirdly, when asked what I would be prepared to do for the environment, I was required to say whether I have or would consider reducing the amount I fly for holidays. There was no N/A box, so it was a bit like the old “Have you stopped beating your wife?” chestnut. I have never flown on holiday and do not intend to start now, so I had to answer No, but that implies I don’t care when the truth is I can’t reduce what I never do and I never do because I don’t believe in flying for such a trivial purpose. That’s just my personal opinion, but I am entitled to it and I’m entitled not to be mis-represented for living by it.

A similar problem was present in a question about drinking. Having answered that I never drink I then had to say how much I drink when I do, and the minimum was one unit a day. How can that make sense? I left that question unanswered, but there was no indication that was permitted. If I don’t drink, don’t ask me how much and give me no valid answer.

The final problem was not with a question but a bald statement of supposed fact, that “People are Disabled by barriers in society such as lack of physical access and lack of accessible communication, not by their impairment.” It’s not a new view, but neither is it universally accepted. It presupposes there is no more to disability than how it affects human relationships and there is no more to life than human activity. Neither of those presumptions can stand up to scrutiny. Blind people are not just affected by an inability to see obstacles placed by society. They also cannot see natural obstacles. Nor are they affected only by difficulties in navigation. They also cannot enjoy visual beauty, such as the view I mentioned earlier, and that is a loss of ability to appreciate one aspect of the world. That is not caused by society. It is caused by their sensory difference. Similarly, it is not only audio communication deaf people cannot enjoy; bird song and music cannot be enjoyed by someone who has no hearing at all, and some kinds of music will be seriously less audible and meaningful to a person with limited hearing. A wheelchair cannot negotiate steps, but it is also pretty useless at crossing rugged rocky terrain or fitting on a narrow mountain track. Of course, a wheelchair is not a disability but an aid, and a rather poor one at that, for the reasons mentioned. No, there is more to life than human interaction and there is more to disability than its social effects. Human beings are not the origin of the world. The world is the origin of human beings. Therein lies the philosophical folly of our age.

The shortcomings in the questions might or might not be deliberate, but the stating of a controversial political opinion as if it is unquestionably true is divisive, and unnecessarily so for a Council which is supposed to rule for all citizens irrespective of differences or which party they voted for. We need to separate political activity such as governing in the interest of all from mere politicking and politicking has no place in the delivery of services even when political policies are required to deliver them. Politics needs to adapt to facts. Pretending facts can be made to fit in with politics is another expression of that same philosophical folly already mentioned. We need to be ruled by people who are not fools.