How Is The City Built?

As the City of London prepares to usher in its new Lord Mayor this week, the Occupied Times asks: just how does the City elect its leaders anyway?

The City’s residents get a single vote each; businesses get anywhere up to 79 votes depending on how many employees on payroll. ‘Qualified’ voters – such as ex-company directors and those who’ve worked in the City for five years or more – get to vote twice, once in City elections and again in their home electorate.

For comparison, the business vote in 2009 was about 24,000 — compared with just 9000 votes from people who actually live there.

Those votes don’t have anything to do with deciding the mayoralty, though. That role is the sole preserve of the City’s livery companies – a medieval cross between industry lobby groups and Masonic lodges – who decide between themselves in a meeting known as Common Hall. The Common Hall also elects the City’s two Sheriffs, who each hold a yearlong sinecure at the Old Bailey “so that he may be tried as to his governance and bounty before he attains to the Estate of Mayor.”

So where do those votes go? Well, they decide the ‘aldermen’ who each represent one of the City’s 25 wards, and another 100 ‘common councilmen.’

Aldermen get a six-year tenure and do not need to live in their ward or even live or work in the Square Mile. Those common councilmen on the other hand get four years, must own land in the City and have been a resident for at least 12 months. But there’s one thing they both have in common — no-one is allowed to stand for either office unless they have first been recognised as a ‘Freeman of the City’, meaning they must have been recognised as a suitable candidate by those livery companies we mentioned earlier.

And uniquely among district councils, the City of London Corporation – whose supposedly elected members are directly vetted by business lobby groups and whose rates come from the City’s big businesses – also directly controls and funds its own territorial force, the City of London police. In other words, the councillors who have threatened eviction and the officers who would enforce it are respectively selected and paid for by the same companies Occupy London Stock Exchange is protesting against.

So who’s to say the City doesn’t tolerate democratic discourse?

By Rory MacKinnon