Background
The commission was established in a response to a resolution passed by the London County Council in 1919. During the First World War the two main parties on the council, the Municipal Reformers and the Progressives effectively formed a coalition. After the ending of hostilities there was initially agreement between the leaders of the two parties and the smaller London Labour Party that public utilities such as electricity supply and public transport in the wide Greater London area needed to be co-ordinated in order to provide for adequate planning for the capital. It was argued that an overhaul of local government was needed, involving the absorption of the central City of London and the outer suburban areas into an enlarged London. There was further impetus for enlargement as London experienced an acute housing crisis caused by both financial shortfalls and land shortages. A large housing programme required expenditure that the limited rate base of the County of London could not meet, while land costs within the county were very high in comparison to those of the surrounding counties.
Read more about this topic: Royal Commission On London Government
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)