THE CITY AND FEDERALISM: THE UK AND GERMANY - Matthew Heathcote

The CPS called for reforming the House of Lords into a ‘Chamber of the Regions’, expanding local institutions at the expense of the central state and empowering the town hall.6 The Localist Papers are a reminder that both sides of the political debate see the issues arising from hyper-centralisation. [...] In the modern era, the 1835 Municipal Counties Act codified the role of these metropolitan councils in the administrative operation of cities across the UK, drawing on the traditional organisations and institutions that had existed in UK cities since the medieval period. [...] Rather, it was the Conservative controlled borough of Westminster which had called upon then-Minister for the Environment, Michael Heseltine, to abolish the GLC, and it would be the Conservative controlled borough of Bromley which would take the GLC to the High Court over the issue, resulting in the GLC being forced to abolish the fares policy.30 This trend, of traditional boroughs challenging the. [...] Clive Betts used similar language when describing his former metropolitan zone in Sheffield, referring to the additional bureaucratic systems and the general distrust of the South Yorkshire political machine as defining the metropolitan district’s identity among the wider populace.33 Back in London, the districts’ pressure on the Conservative Party to commit to abolishing the GLC in the 1983 manif. [...] Thus, though the abolition of the GLC led to the collapse of strategic planning and the growth of inequality between the London boroughs, there is evidence to suggest that cooperation between the boroughs continued.