Letters
Patrick Jenkin's razor
Sir: Thank goodness more of the intelligent Right are starting to realise some of the snags in Patrick Jenkin's present plans for local government. That includes not only the cancellation of elections, the creation of transitional nominated councils, and eventual abolition of the GLC and the metropolitan counties, but also the rather more complex areas of grant penalties and rate-capping. Hitherto, most of the oPposition on the Conservative side has come from a curious coalition of patrician wets, erYpto-liberals and disappointed
Inacemen.
You yourself (Politics, 21 April), quote the argument that 'the authorities should be abolished because they greatly increase the level of public spending, thus undermining the Government's objectives, and because they perform few useful functions that Other authorities could not assume.' Since the £770 million which the Department of the Environment itself says those authorities overspent last year represented Only half of one per cent of total public expenditure, that argument will not wash. And the chief executives (i.e. town clerks) of the London boroughs, which are supposed to assume most of the GLC's functions, have identified some 17 such functions that still need to be performed on a London-wide basis after the GLC itself has gone. . Some of us Conservatives involved in local government at the sharp end .are beginning to fear that Patrick Jenkin's Policy could end by doing for Mrs Thatcher What devolution did for Mr Callaghan and a statutory prices and incomes policy did for Mr Heath. Mr Jenkin himself might reflect that People who shave in the dark risk cutting their own throats!
Neville Beale Members' Lobby,
County Hall, SE],
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