Over the past week the Social Club of the East Oxford Community Centre on Cowley Road has been brought to the point of closure by absent paperwork and secret meetings by councillors. The Social Club has a thirty year history as an integral heart of the community facing the average problems for a club in the area, exacerbated by media bullying and intimidation. The Social Club has offered an inexpensive alternative to High Street communities, with users sharing a common underground and independent mentality. Its home to some 700 members including many groups events such as Brookes’ People and Planet and the African-Caribbean Society, Oxford University Students Nights, and national arts and music festivals. The rest of the centre will be affected by the loss of revenue through the club, and its utility as a public face.
The City Council meets today, Tuesday 27th , at 5pm, without murmurs from the public gallery to decide whether to close the club this week. This has been based, generally on a anti-club agenda by certain members of the parliament and specifically they would say by violence, noise, poor security and debt. In reference to the last two, bouncers have been working the doors for several month and the debts owed by the Club could be paid off sooner than two months. The Social Club Association Committee has been forced into a corner and scraped together a proposal to the City Council to suspend their own bar license for around six weeks, pending a review. In the meantime, supporters of the Centre have been asked to write positive testimonials of the club and email them to council members.

Val Johnson  vjohnson@oxford.gov.uk
Councillor Craig Simmons  cllrcsimmons@oxford.gov.uk
Councillor Nuala Young  cllrnyoung@oxford.gov.uk
Councillor Sid Phelps  cllrsphelps@oxford.gov.uk
Councillor Alan Armitage  cllraarmitage@oxford.gov.uk
Councillor David Rundle  david.rundle@history.ox.ac.uk
Michael Lawrence  mlawrence@oxford.gov.uk
Penny Gardner  pgardener@oxford.gov.uk
Fergus Lapage  flapage@oxford.gov.uk
Craig Buckby  cbuckby@oxford.gov.uk
Jawaid Malik  jmalik@oxford.gov.uk
Jeremy J. Thomas  jjthomas@oxford.gov.uk

(And if someone could cross-post this to Indymedia Oxford and anywhere else in grassroots media, like Dreamingspires, Facebook, blogs, livejournals, myspaces, I'd be most