Talk:Greater London Council

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article covers subjects of relevance to WikiProject Urban studies and planning, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Urban studies and planning on Wikipedia.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the assessment scale.
???	This article has not yet received an importance rating on the assessment scale.

Contents 1 Politics 2 City of London 3 Inner London Probation Service 4 Electoral system for GLC

[edit] Politics

The article focuses very heavily on the personality politics of the GLC and rather ignores some of the underlying problems that arouse. A significant number of services were slowly moved away from it over the course of its lifetime (sometimes to independent bodies covering the same areas, at other times the services were reorganised on a different geographic basis) and indeed at one point even Ken Livingstone was asking why it still existed! (This was before he became leader of it.) Furthermore some of the Livingstone ventures had been ruled illegal by the courts and aroused hostility in some of the boroughs, especially when the actions were having negligible effect but increasing taxes - the policy of raising the rates to subsidise the London Underground was challenged by one of the boroughs that is nowhere near a tube station. By the early 1980s there was a strong administrative case for abolishing the GLC, regardless of the party politics. Does anyone know more of the detail to add some of this to the article? -- Timrollpickering (13 Feb 2004)

Try looking at Streamlining the cities and the external link from it. G-Man 19:44, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The reason the original article 'focuses on the personality politics of the GLC' is that it was probably copied from my website and then fiddled about with so that it did not look like a copyvio (compare the early versions and you'll see it more clearly). There's more discussion of the policies of the GLC under the biographies of its leaders which I have written. Actually the GLC gained powers at first (eg London Transport in 1969) before losing them later under Thatcher. Ken Livingstone's support for abolition after the report of the Marshall inquiry is interesting but perhaps belongs more in the Livingstone biog.

There should be more about abolition because it's actually wrong to say that the Livingstone leadership led to abolition: the GLC would have been abolished no matter who was leading it, because the outer London boroughs had finally worked out they didn't need it at all. It would, though, have been bad form for a Conservative government to abolish a Conservative-led GLC. Dbiv 00:35, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure I entirely agree with that assesment. I think the fact that Livingstone's policies proved popular rattled the Thatcherites. Livingstone was at least a large factor in the abolition. G-Man 17:50, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] City of London

I'm just doing some link-chasing and realised this article doesn't mention that the GLC didn't include the City of London ... my memory is correct in this isn't it? -VampWillow 13:19, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)

No, the GLC did include the City, though there are other institutions of all-London government which don't. Dbiv 00:35, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC

[edit] Inner London Probation Service

Was one of those organisations that remained independent of GLC and City of London. In fact ILPS started in 1936 and shared boundaries with ILEA (Inner london Educataion Authority) The City of London Probation service remained independent of ILPS until the 1990's when it was at last merged. The good burgers of the City had been reluctant to lose their independence but eventually the Home Office will took precedence. I have started an article about ILPS which was itself succeeded by London Probation Area serving all London from April 1 2001 which was the day The National Probation Service came into being. (I have yet to learn how to link items so will be happy for another to do it for me, please!) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Tolkny (talk • contribs) .

[edit] Electoral system for GLC

The first GLC election was on 9 April 1964, with each of the new boroughs electing a number of representatives ...In 1972 the electoral system was reformed to introduce single-member constituencies

What was the original voting system? The 'single non-transferable vote', or the 'limited vote', or some other system? There's a big difference so the article should specify.

213.202.141.1 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 13:29, 3 May 2008 (UTC)