Local Government Vs. National Government

People in Britain have most direct dealings with local government than with national government. Local counsils traditionally manage nearly all public servises. Taken together, they employ three times as many people as the national government does. In addition, there's no system in Britain whereby a national government official has responsibility for a particular geographical area. In practice, therefore, local councils have traditionally been fairly free from constant central interference in their day to day work.

Local councils are allowed to collect one kind of tax, based on property (all other kinds are collected by central government). It used to be called 'rates' and was paid only by those who owned property. In the early 1990s it was replaced by the 'community charge' (known as the 'poll tax'). This charge was the same for everybody who livedin the area covered by a council. It was very unpopular and was quickly replaced by the 'council tax', which is based on the estimated value of a property and the number of people living in it. Local councils are unable to raise enough money in this way for them to provide the services which national government has told them to provide. In addition, recent governments have imposed upper limits on the amount of council tax that councils can charge and now collect the taxes on business properties themselves (and then share the money out between local councils). As a result, over half of a local council's income is given to it by national government.

The modern trend has been towards greater control by central government. This is not just a matter of conntrolling the way local government raises money. There are now more laws governing the way councils can conduct their affairs. On top of this, schools and hospitals can now 'opt out' of local-government control. Perhaps this trend is inevitable now that national party politics dominates local politics. Successful independent candidates (who do not belong to a political party) at local elections are becoming rarer and rarer. Most of people now vote at local elections according to their national party preferences, if they bother to vote at all, so that these elections become a kind of opinion poll on the performance of the national government.

THE TENSION BETWEEN NATIONAL GOVERNMENT AND LOCAL DEMOCRACY

There has always been a tension between local and national government, between civic freedoms expressed locally and intervention by national government. This tension, which has been growing since 1945, raises important questions about local freedoms and the power of national government. The political party in power tends to insist on the importance of national government intervention, while the opposition party strongly defends the right to local democracy. In 1976, for example, a Labour government told all local authorities to arrange secondary education on non-selective lines, forcing them to combine the traditionally seperate schools for children deemed to be of higher and lower ability at the early age of 11. A few local authorities successfully defied the government.

The long-cherished independence of local government, however, has been slowly eroded over the years by a variety of processes. In the 19th century the majority of candidates were independent citizens, concerned solely with the well-being of their town or country. From the late 19th century onwards, however, national political parties began to sponsor candidates in local elections. In this way political loyalties at a national level began to displace local considerations and determine how people voted. Today there are virtually no independent candidates left, except in one or two remote rural areas.