SO Jericho and Osney councillor Susanna Pressel says that boats coming from all over the country are a problem.

She appears to be judging people by where they are from.

From this it would appear that the “solution” for her would be to send them back to where they came from.

Yet Ian Thompson (of Oxford City Council) says there is not a policy of constructive exclusion.

The council has ignored the building of flower beds with retaining brick and mortar walls along the towpath where mooring has been banned, while claiming that boaters are making unauthorised structures (mooring pins).

Such discriminatory use of bylaws and powers is deplorable, not just there, but also at the Isis public house.

This is where the city council’s Mark Spragg says that canoes have been placed to deter unauthorised residential mooring and refused to take action, even though it is a bylaw offence to moor vessels in a way as to deliberately obstruct the riverbanks or towpath.

Oxford City Council and the Environment Agency are not allowed to to put up “no livaboards” signs, but instead seem hell-bent on constructive exclusion, along with British Waterways and Thames Valley Police.

Without ‘livaboards’ the towpaths will be a drug dealers and muggers’ paradise and people feel safer with boaters being around.

DAVID WATSON, (Boat-dweller), Oxford