The last time Oxford city councillor Mike Woodin featured in this newspaper, he made the front page, writes GEORGE FREW. In the picture, he was sandwiched between two of Thames Valley's finest, who arrested him for obstructing an officer during the morning raid on protesters at the LMS station last month.

In the story, Mr Woodin was quoted as saying: "I rather think that they were obstructing me."

As the leader of Oxford's Green Party, he'd turned up to demonstrate against the felling of trees next to the historic station. The trees were duly chopped down, the protesters evicted and the powers that be had won another battle in the ongoing war. In other European countries such as Norway and Germany, the Greens are a political force to be reckoned with. They are in the business of forming coalition governments.

On Oxford City Council, the Green Party is represented by four out of a total of 50 councillors. Still, this is a distinct improvement on how things used to be - it took Mike Woodin five hard years of campaigning in the Central ward before he won it and he spent the next two in a sort of state of political solitary confinement, as the Green's sole council representative.

"It's changed, but not enough," he admits. "There are still too many pork-barrel local politicos and Oxford has always attracted the attention of young ambitious people passing through to the greater glories of Westminster." At 32, this is, of course, just the sort of charge that could be laid at Mike Woodin's door.

In the lands of the Vikings or in the country where grown men wear leather shorts and small hats with extravagant plumage, he might already have a feather in his cap as a national politician.

But England has always been less of a pleasant land for the Green Party and more of a struggle. Woodin explains why this should be so in two words: proportional representation.

"We've got our main priorities in society wrong," he says firmly.

"The big environment issue is global warming and the stressed-out lifestyles people are forced into." In Oxford, he believes the big environment issue is the traffic - which is hard to disagree with, following a summer of discontent on the Botley Road which is sure to be followed by a winter of same as the usual snaking queues of impatient motorists make their way in and out of the city.

"We need to make a determined shift away from the car. Oxford should be more self-confident. People will want to work and live here and we should trade on that and provide decent public transport. Deny the car access and people will still flock to the place," says Woodin, whose wife Deborah is the Green's South ward candidate for the next city council elections. Ask him if he forsees a time when he might want to operate on a bigger political stage and he replies frankly: "Yes. If we got proportional representation, this would stand us in good stead. The current system stifles debate at every level, because people's views are not fully represented.

"I'd like to think that the Greens have brought a change in attitude about this. We get fine words from some politicians about green issues, but very little action."

He admits that he sometimes gets depressed, but is convinced that the eco-warriors who fought the battle of the Newbury bypass and came together under a similar flag for the Oxford LMS struggle should be judged by posterity. "I think direct action's success should be looked at in the long term and will be judged like this. Newbury focused national attention and helped change the national mood - if you are excluded from the system then you will expend your energies outside that system.

"But the Green Party is growing in popularity. Instead of being met with derision, more Greens are being returned to office. I think my fellow councillors take me seriously now, although I may be flattering myself. I don't think so, though. I've always been a positive sort of person.

"My only regret is that it's so difficult to take part in local politics and still make a living," he says.

Mike Woodin makes his, when he can, at Balliol College, where he's a lecturer in psychology.

He wouldn't be the first Oxford don to end up in Westminster, but he would be the first to sail in under a Green banner and the party's first MP. Now that really would be a front-page story.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.