David Hayes: London's Mayoral Election in Historical Context
David Hayes, deputy editor of openDemocracy, writes each month for Inside Story.
...[W]hat is the “London” its mayor now governs.
Even a brief answer has to circumvent the kind of trap with which Britain’s hybrid-accretive system of government can ensnare the rational observer. For example, there’s the fact that the “Mayor of London” is quite separate from the “Lord Mayor of the City of London,” the mainly ceremonial figure who heads the governance of the City of London Corporation; the purview of this mayor, whose titular role was established in 1354, is London’s historic core around St Paul’s Cathedral, the Barbican, the Bank of England and the “square mile” financial district (and, among several such peculiarities, the vast public spaces of Hampstead Heath and Epping Forest in north London).
The longstanding capacity of the “City” – as opposed to the “city” – to resist democratic governance is an issue the “occupy” protest, encamped outside St Paul’s since mid-October, stumbled on. Neither Ken nor Boris, each a champion of the benefits the financial sector is held to bring to London entire, has shown any interest in setting foot on this toxic territory.
The mayoralty held consecutively by these two men is a modern one, created by Tony Blair’s government after 1997 as part of the “devolution settlement” that also brought limited self-government to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. (Several English regions were going to be included but the only one asked said “no,” and that was that.) The 1999 reform established a new Greater London Authority, comprising the mayor and the London Assembly, to be based in City Hall. The latter designation again invites confusion with the “City,” whose own entirely unrelated headquarters are in the historic Guildhall, near St Paul’s; perhaps for this reason, City Hall is being renamed “London House” for the duration of Olympics year. (The governance of Britain – or do I mean England – often recalls the humourist George Mikes’s quip that in this country, the purpose of introducing people is to conceal their identity from each other.)
Indeed, the New Labour reform was but the latest of a series of efforts by Westminster to address the “insoluble puzzle of how best to govern London,” which – as Jerry White explains in his fine book London in the 20th Century – was already centuries-old when the Victorians grappled with it.
At the heart of the problem was the legacy of the Corporation’s refusal, during the great spread of London during the sixteenth century, to allow the City’s boundaries to move outwards in step. Another era of immense growth and rapid social change in the nineteenth century consumed dozens of small communities, making them part of a larger whole and thus linked by interest, but – unlike other English cities where administrative unity on the basis of extending historic boundaries was possible – London’s sheer size and the lack of a civic centre left them utterly unconnected.
The puzzle was compounded by the inescapable fact that London was also the sovereign heart of British power – state, monarchical, parliamentary, commercial and imperial. This London lived to rule: it could not allow any upstart “civic” London to govern itself without infringing on its absolutist prerogatives. “The sullen, morose sea of overcrowded humanity that is London has never been encouraged to develop a sense of active community,” Neal Ascherson once wrote, reviewing an early biography of Ken Livingstone. The ensuing tension – between the Whitehall–Westminster complex and the “new” city, between absolute sovereignty and modern democracy – unfolded in the context of the incremental widening of the franchise from 1832 and decades of rapid change in which the worlds of work, settlement, transport, social class and political agency in the city were being transformed.
In practical terms the problem became how to define London’s inner administrative map (and periodically redraw its outer boundaries) and, an even more complicated and political task, how to determine the balance of powers (including over services such as education, health, and housing) between the national government in Whitehall, district boards or local councils, and any London-wide authority.
Like that great nineteenth-century diplomatic conundrum, the Schleswig-Holstein question – to which only three people knew the answer, of whom one died, one went mad and one forgot – the “insoluble puzzle” of London’s governance has stretched the finest minds of Britain’s administrative class. The period from the 1880s, which saw the Labour Party gradually become a pivotal factor in the capital’s political life, saw several major reorganisations: among them in 1889 (the establishment of the directly elected London County Council), 1900 (the creation of prestigious metropolitan borough councils), and 1965 (the replacement of those bodies by the Greater London Council and a new set of borough councils).
In this perspective, the Thatcher–Livingstone feud that ended with the GLC’s abolition in 1986, and the Blair-era introduction of the Greater London Authority in 2000, were but episodes in a long line of reforms that promised no definitive closure. Yet the mayor-assembly model does offer four advantages: democratic legitimacy, accountability, personified leadership and city-wide executive power (over transport, planning, the environment, economic development, culture and London’s police – after that body had been answerable to the national government since 1829). These translate into the mayor’s ability to make a real difference to the lives of Londoners, and the office as a prize worth owning.