London Government Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 11 December 1962.

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Photo of Mr Charles Curran Mr Charles Curran , Uxbridge 12:00, 11 December 1962

If we take the London County Council area and elections, we find that over the whole area about one-third of the electorate participates. I am saying that by contrast in a Parliamentary election, over the whole country about four-fifths of the electorate participates. I am inviting the House to agree—it seems to me to be pretty well self-evident—that if we ever reached a state of affairs when two-thirds of the voters did not take any interest whatever in Parliamentary elections, we would say that Parliament was moribund and that Parliamentary democracy was pretty well finished.

When we consider the proposals in the Bill, we have to look primarily at the question of whether those proposals appear likely to generate interest in local government. That is the primary test. For myself, I decline to measure the Bill by reference to the vested interests that are involved in it. Important as they are, however, I do not dismiss them.

The primary test must be whether it is likely that the boroughs which we create will generate an interest in muni- cipal democracy greater than the interest which is now shown in the London County Council mechanism and, to be fair, in the county council mechanisms around it, because the London County Council is no worse than the Middlesex County Council. It is just as difficult to get people to take part in county council elections and in borough elections, too. [Interruption.] The figures for the metropolitan boroughs are no better, as the hon. Lady the Member for Peckham (Mrs. Corbet) knows.

We have to reckon in the London region that municipal democracy has become very largely a sham. It is becoming more and more of a sham. I suggest that the Bill deserves support primarily because it gives us at least a chance of revitalising democracy in local government.

I invite the House to consider the ways in which, as I think, the proposals in the Bill will reactivate local government. The basic proposal in the Bill as far as most of us are concerned is that instead of the administrative jungle of authorities scattered all over the London region—the county councils, the local authorities and the ad hoc bodies of one kind or another which have been set up over the last 70 or 80 years—the Bill substitutes two lots of local authorities.

The Bill proposes to give to the enlarged boroughs powers as education authorities. I invite the House to agree that by putting education into the hands of the enlarged borough councils, which the Bill will create—