What Do You Know About Local Authorities And The Central Government?

I presume again that you are referring to the British political system.  Central government is basically Parliament, the Law Courts and the Civil Service, because they make and implement decisions which are binding on the whole country.  When I say Parliament, I am including both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and the King or Queen, who is Head of State.  Things have changed somewhat recently with the addition of assemblies for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.  These are actually part of the central government, not an added tier of local government.

Local government is usually based on counties, whose offices and debating chamber would normally be based at "the shire hall", or in the case of a metropolitan area, "the city hall".  Things have become complicated over the last fifty years, as cities have expanded and county boundaries have been changed at least twice.  For example, Cambridgeshire has a city council, to cover Cambridge itself and several "District Councils", which cover the county.  Each village within the county also has its own "Parish Council".  These are elected by the villagers and are responsible for such things as street lighting, maintenance of footpaths and cycleways.  The parish council levies a tax (known as a precept) to do these things on the villagers, but this will be paid in one sum to the District council along with the main council tax and passed back to the parish council by the District.  All electors within the district have the right to vote for their own district council.  If you are in a city, this will probably be called a city council, and a city council will generally combine the duties of a district and a parish council.

The District/City Councils used to raise local taxes by a form of property tax known as "rates".  This was eventually deemed unfair, and Mrs Thatcher's conservative government changed it to a poll tax, which proved so unpopular that it was not really allowed to bed down properly, and was changed to a property/poll tax mish mash called Council Tax.  District/City Councils are responsible for providing affordable rented housing for those people who do not buy their own homes and cannot afford or find private rented accommodation.  They are also responsible for local waste disposal and such facilities as museums and public libraries.  They are also technically responsible for raising local taxes for the police, medical facilities and local education authorities (who run the schools)  In practice they have very little control over them, as the police are responsible to the central police authority (headquarters Scotland Yard in London), the local education authorities are responsible to the Department of Education in London and most medical facilities are run by local Health Authorities which are responsible to the Department of Health.  Most health funding goes directly to hospitals and local health authorities from central government.  Local authorities raise local taxes to fund their own police forces, but merely pass the     money on to them, either directly or through central government.  Likewise, local taxes raised for education get passed through either to central government or the local local education authority.

Is this complicated and difficult to understand? - Yes.  Does it work? - Probably not as well as it should.  There have been reports, for example, of Local Education authorities withholding for other purposes, money which has been passed to them from the central government for the purpose of maintenance, improvement and extension of school buildings.  Also recently the present New Labour Government has been taking local taxes from some of the Conservative held Councils in southern England and diverting them to labour held Councils in the North of England, thus depriving the taxpayers in the south of funding for some of the services they are paying for.  This is probably unconstitutional.  Over the last few years, an experiment has been carried out by appointing a Lord Mayor of London with powers more similar to a Mayor of an American metropolis such as New York than a traditional English city.  Many people are not happy with this as they feel it does not sit well with the English way of doing things, or match suitably with how our constitution works.  There is also a feeling in some quarters that attempts are being made to regionalise England into a set of federated quasi states.

Do local and central government in Great Britain ever end up in opposition to each other?  Sometimes.  The most extreme examples of this over the last thirty years have been some local councils declaring their areas "nuclear free zones" and using local tax money to put up signs to that effect.  This was largely ignored by central government and died a natural death after a while.  Liverpool city council at one point was flying the Hammer and Sickle above the City Hall instead of the Union Jack.  This could have been treason, and would definitely have been if any attempt had been made by the council to encourage a soviet invasion force.  This was not done and again central government ignored it and it went away.  The most extreme and dangerous confrontation was, again, in Liverpool, and occurred when the militant labour party took power in the City Council and vowed to create trouble and foment discontent in order to start a revolution to spread over the whole country beginning on Merseyside.  The Labour party themselves, in the main dealt with these dissidents as a matter of party discipline.  Then those guilty of actual crimes were brought to trial.  Moderate and civically responsible persons were then elected to power on the city council and the whole thing blew over.