GLC … the inside story by Wes Whitehouse
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
Farce, chaos or shambles. Writer Wes Whitehouse* offers a choice of words to describe the mess Labour and the Tories got themselves into when choosing their candidates for Mayor of London. 18 months before campaigning officially began, Labour found themselves saddled with a candidate they didn’t want, and the Conservatives with one who would end up in jail.
At the end of the campaign Ken Livingstone was Mayor, but had been expelled from the Labour Party. Jeffrey Archer meanwhile had been hurriedly dumped by the Tories. But if the Greater London Authority (GLA) campaign had set candidate against party, it was nothing compared to the politics of confrontation that had marked that earlier London authority, the Greater London Council (GLC).
The most famous battle took place in the 1980s of course. No sooner had Ken Livingstone become leader of London’s strategic authority in 1981 than he set the GLC on a collision course with Government. He announced his intention of using the council’s County Hall headquarters as a campaigning base to attack the Thatcher government. His activities included hanging anti-government banners on County Hall’s riverfront, in bold view of the Houses of Parliament on the other bank of the Thames. So infuriated was Thatcher at being confronted by this as she took her tea on the Commons’ terrace that she was to abolish the GLC altogether – on April Fools Day 1986.
It was the last act in a long and mixed history. Remarkably, London had no comprehensive local government until the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855. Before that, the capital had been inadequately served by a hotch-potch of parish vestries, boards, commissions and justices of the peace.
But in 1855 the constant threat of cholera and the ‘Big Stink’ of a sewage-choked Thames (so bad that Parliament had to be suspended) forced action. The Board’s prime task was to provide clean water and commission a mains drainage system. Soon other duties were added: street improvements; Thames crossings; parks and fire fighting; the abolition of tolls; all came under the umbrella of the board.
In 1888 the Board was tidied up into a new London County Council (LCC). In the early years it was dominated by the Municipal Reformers (Tories), who ruled from 1907 until 1934. That was the year Labour got in, under the dynamic leadership of Herbert Morrison. Under Morrison the LCC produced its famed three-year plans for health, education, town planning, parks and housing. They were as successful as they were ambitious – building nearly 100,000 new homes by 1939, and making London a model for the world with its excellent hospitals, ambulance service, child care, clean water and 6000 acres of open space.
Reorganisation came again in the sixties. London had changed, depopulating as many moved into the suburbs and the home counties – many families had been bombed out never to return. The 1960 Royal Commission proposed an extension of London’s boundaries to cover 616 square miles (previously it had been 117), doubling the electorate to 5.5m. Middlesex was to be swallowed and with it large chunks of Essex, Kent, Surrey and Hertfordshire. The hospitals went to the young NHS and schools went to a new Inner London Education Authority (ILEA).
The new body, born on 1 April 1964 irritated some Londoners with its lumbering and expensive procedures. The new members (never councillors) had their own entrance, terrace, a grand dining room and bar. To many they seemed to be aping the MPs across Westminster Bridge.
Formality and grandeur faded a little with the election of ‘Red Ken’ in 1981. Formal dress codes were consigned to history. The new leader was universally addressed, even by junior staff, as ‘Ken’. Some old hands found it a culture shock. Whitehouse asked one lady press officer, who had served numerous previous administrations, what she made of the new bunch. ‘Well love,’ she opined. ‘Let’s face it. Bunch of w*****s aren’t they?’
Margaret Thatcher obviously agreed, and gleefully pulled the plugs on the GLC, 35 years to the day from its inauguration. London was now without a strategic voice for the first time in a century.
The Conservatives delighted in rubbishing its achievements, but supporters will point to a raft of innovations, some since discarded but some ahead of their time; some loved, some hated. The Council brought in free travel for the over-60s; it pioneered the use of wheel clamps; it was responsible for the New Towns; it rehoused needy Londoners in flats and bungalows everywhere from the Wash to Weston-Super-Mare; it turned Covent Garden from a central London wasteland to a major shopping and tourism centre; it pioneered the recycling of household rubbish; and it revitalised the Tube; it brought arts to the people; and it built the Thames Barrier.
Now there’s a new London council, and again it’s headed by a Ken Livingstone at odds with the Prime Minister. But with our ageing infrastructure creaking at the seams, will the GLA get the money and powers to rebuild London?
GLC – the inside story by Wes Whitehouse, published by James Lester Publishers, ISBN 095381713X, £14.99 hardback
