From Herbert Morrison to Command and Control: the Decline of Local Democracy and its Effect on Public Services

Abstract

In a dark corridor on the first floor of Hackney Town Hall you can see photographic portraits of the Borough's Mayors in dignified procession round the walls. The new Borough Council's first Mayor was elected by councillors in 1900 and for the next two decades the robed figures are recognizably Victorian in appearance: grey-headed, heavy-jowled, compla cent, stolid. Then, with a shock, you come upon an entirely different character. He's young. He leans eagerly towards the camera, his blind eye turned slightly to one side. He has a self-confident smile about his mouth and a startling quiff of jet-black hair shooting up from his forehead announces energy and action for all to see. This was Herbert Morrison, Labour Mayor of Hackney in 1920: his party, swept to power in a landslide victory the year before that, began a new age in London's local politics. His fellow Labour Mayors in London included Major Clement Attlee in Stepney and George Lansbury in Poplar. Over the next few years Morrison would personify Labour local politics in London, and from 1934 London local government itself. In the press he was 'Mr London'. His was a distinctively 'new' Labour, consciously distanced from the adversarial politics of Lansbury in Poplar and communist-influenced parties in Bethnal Green and elsewhere. Morrison was sensibleness personified -~ pragmatic and diplomatic in his dealings with government, but of huge ambition for his party and his people, the Londoners. As Leader of the London County Council (LCC) from 1934, Morrison was at his desk in County Hall when the bombs began to fall. Churchill brought him into the war cabinet as Home Secretary because of the trust Londoners placed in him at a time when the morale of the capital's bombed population seemed close to mutinous breaking point. As Morrison visited the bomb sites he was greeted by shouts of 'Good Old 'Erb'. It might be useful to remind ourselves, sixty or seventy years on, just what sort of local government Morrison and his fellow council leaders represented and reigned over in the thirties and forties - in that brief