ABSTRACT
The main thing wrong with London today is its structure of government. The late Greater London Council had few friends, but its spiteful, impulsive abolition in 1986-a Nietzschean folly Brendan O’Leary (1987) called it-left a system that has fewer. Agreement on this point is so widespread that we may be in danger both of exaggerating the defects of the current system and expecting too much of proposed alternatives such as the Labour Party’s Greater London Authority (Labour Party 1991).
