Sunday 21 February 2016

Red Check

Several emails suggest that I have articulated a longstanding and profound feeling in certain quarters about the City of London.

You cannot even be a local government candidate there unless some or other upper-class drinking club has already admitted you to membership.

Yet it is not that kind of place. Where is? But the City certainly is not.

Not many wards with 7,375 inhabitants could get a Green candidate onto the ballot paper, and extremely few, never mind that were were 78.5 per cent white, could get a Respect one.

That would require 10 signatures on the nomination papers.

The same as every candidate for Mayor of London will have received from the City.

And why not? At the global heart of neoliberal economics, there have been few, if any, privatisations of municipal amenities and services.

Such has been the choice of an authority predominantly elected by the companies to and for which everywhere else's amenities and services have been flogged off. They know the score.

Bringing proper local democracy to the City will be, among other good things, the first step in bringing back proper local government to the rest of us.

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