The New Few by Ferdinand Mount
Author:Ferdinand Mount [Martin-Mount, Ferdinand]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847378019
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Closing the local
We ought also to take a look at what has happened to local government itself. This is not a pretty sight. For what we see is, for the most part, a withered and castrated remnant of what used to be a vigorous and independent part of British life.
Go back a mere forty years, and you will see local councils in relatively rude health, and still retaining much of the power they and their predecessors – the burgesses and magistrates – had enjoyed for centuries. Prince among those powers was the power to tax. Borough and county councillors had an unrestrained right to levy their rates on businesses and domestic households at whatever level they fancied. They possessed, too, the power to borrow money for public works on the open market by issuing bonds, as well as borrowing from the government through the Public Works Loan Board. As they were reliable repayers and seldom feckless, savers readily bought these bonds, and there were few instances of default.
True, all the activities of local councils had come to be limited and specified by Act of Parliament (though some of those activities predated the statute that regulated them). Councils might, very occasionally, be found by the courts to have strayed beyond their legal powers and would be declared to have acted ultra vires. But in regard to the activities that were permitted to them, local councils enjoyed a remarkable degree of freedom. In education, for example, they could decide whether their schools system was to be comprehensive or divided into grammar and secondary modern, or at secondary level, by age into upper and lower schools; they hired and, less often, fired the teachers; they had a good deal of freedom as to what subjects were to be taught and by what methods. Civil servants in the Department of Education, then only a modest sliver of a building on the approaches to Waterloo Station, were brought up to regard the school curriculum as ‘a secret garden’, into which they tiptoed at their peril.
In some public services, such as the police, the government had built up over the decades the right to advise and even dictate on certain matters, such as police pay and training and the appointment of the Commissioner of Police in London. But as late as 1982, I was on the receiving end of a litany of complaint from the then Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, about the repeated frustrations he had experienced in trying to make the police follow his bidding.
I am not arguing that, as a result, our schools and police forces then were always more efficient and responsive to the demands of citizens and parents. All I am saying is that those services then were undeniably local services, and if you wanted to complain about their shortcomings, you went to the local council, not to Whitehall or to some consultative quango. And that local council commanded a good deal of power to shape its services as it wanted, to improve them where necessary and to raise more money for those improvements.
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