ABSTRACT
At least since the Second World War, councillors and officers as well as academic students of local government have been warning of its imminent demise. Thus, for example, the Town Clerk of Stockport did so in 1948 (Glen, 1949) and Professor John Griffith did likewise in a lecture to the Association of Municipal Corporations in 1961 (Griffith, 1961). The Layfield Committee argued in 1976 that a clear choice needed to be made between accepting the creation of a centralised governmental system and enabling local authorities to govern their areas with a significant amount of local autonomy. John Stewart (1983) has likewise urged the recognition and acceptance by the central government and others, of local authorities’ right and ability to make local choices. However, local government has so far survived all these warnings and it continues to survive, despite the onslaught on its powers, functions, structure and the financial freedom of manoeuvre of local authorities which was conducted by the Thatcher administrations. In the first edition of this book, the caution was administered that local government has cried wolf too often; that caution is still valid. Although local government is often seen as a patient passively undergoing a series of painful operations at the hands of ministers and their advisers (see Chandler, 1988, for example), it nonetheless has the potential to reassert its vigour and its independence, if those involved in it choose to do so rather than constantly issuing dire warnings about its imminent assassination by arrogant ministers and unsympathetic civil servants.
