Government system in London

London is identified with the center of British government as represented by the concentration of power in Westminster.

Ironically, London itself has had a rather uneasy relationship with the central government since William the Conqueror guaranteed the City a degree of autonomy by not making the citizens change the way they ran the City when he took power; he did not want to upset his position by going against the citizens of the strongest city in England.

Efforts to deal with the problems of a greatly expanded community in the 19th century began with the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855, which provided the different neighborhoods with common services such as sewerage, fire services, parks, and slum clearance.

The next stage was the establishment of the London County Council (LCC) in 1889 (whose jurisdiction did not include the City).

The LCC eventually expanded to include public ownership of such services as gas, water, electricity, and transport.

The LCC was replaced in 1965 by the Greater London Council (GLC) when the present system of 32 borough councils plus the City of London was set up. In this two-tiered system, local boroughs set property tax rates and were responsible for housing, local planning, local parks, and other local issues.

The top tier, the GLC, handled overall planning, traffic control, roads, sewage, garbage disposal, and protected heritage sites.

Tension between the national government and London’s government increased dramatically after Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979. She often clashed with the GLC, which was dominated by the Labour Party.

Led by Ken Livingstone (nicknamed “Red Ken” by London newspapers), the GLC spent money on the arts, on improvement projects in ethnic neighborhoods, and on subsidized fares for public transport.

Livingstone was one of the loudest critics of Thatcher’s economic policies. Thatcher retaliated against what she perceived as the GLC’s wasteful spending by abolishing it in 1986, leaving each of the 33 separate units to operate by themselves. Any larger-scale coordination of the Greater London area was in the hands of the central government itself.

Since the defeat of the Conservatives in 1997, the new Labour government headed by Tony Blair has moved to restore London’s municipal autonomy. I

n a referendum in May 1998 Londoners overwhelmingly favored the government’s proposals for a Greater London Authority, with a mayor elected to a four-year term and a 25-member elected assembly, to run the city.

In May 2000, Ken Livingstone, the former head of the Greater London Council, was elected mayor of London in a landslide.