Margaret Thatcher went to great lengths to abolish the Greater London Council, finally succeeding in doing so in 1986. If ever there was an unnecessarily bureaucratic, cumbersome, superfluous and sometimes corrupt organisation, that was it.
Soon after Labour came to power they offered the people of London the chance to have an "elected Mayor". The people of London voted narrowly in favour, many of them thinking they would get an autonomous mayor (perhaps like the Mayor of New York) who would cut the red tape and prevarication and who would take personal responsibility to solve many of London’s issues.
So, in the year 2000, as a Millennium present, what did they get? A “GLC 2” in the form of the London Assembly, filled with a succession of wasters, political oddballs and busybodies, soaked in the usual Party Political claptrap (of all colours), arguing the toss with each other over which of them would make a worse job of running the capital. Many of them were not elected directly by the voters of London but were chosen by their parties under the PR “list” system. Of course they needed a “small staff” (of about 1,000) to cater for their every need.
A Mayor to take decisions about transport strategy policing and other capital-wide matters would be useful. The GLA is a waste of time, money and effort and simply impedes anything the Mayor might like to do. Following the latest election in London the situation will be even worse because it seems likely that the city will have a Tory Mayor and a Labour dominated assembly.
The people of the cities who chose not to have an elected Mayor chose wisely. They would almost certainly end up with another layer of useless, expensive government which would provide them with little or nothing. In London either the Mayor and the GLA or the London Borough Councils need to be abolished. There is certainly no need for both and I seriously doubt there is a need for either.