# City of London The **City of London** is the "Square Mile," the historic core of London and its main financial district. It is not governed by the Mayor of London. It has its own local authority, the City of London Corporation, whose origins are older than Parliament, and whose voters include businesses. ## How it is governed - **Its own government.** The Corporation traces its privileges to before the Norman Conquest and has had a mayor since 1189. It is run by the Court of Common Council, with 100 members and 25 aldermen elected from 25 wards. The Lord Mayor of London, a different office from the Mayor of London, is chosen each year by the members of the City's more than 100 livery companies, the descendants of the medieval guilds. - **The business vote.** About 10,000 people live in the City and roughly 300,000 or more work there. Businesses appoint voters on a sliding scale based on the size of their workforce, and those votes far outnumber the residents'. The rest of Britain abolished the business vote in 1969. A 2002 law expanded it in the City. - **Its own police and its own money.** The City of London Police is separate from London's Metropolitan Police. Alongside ordinary local taxes, the Corporation draws on a centuries-old endowment known as City's Cash. - **A voice at Westminster.** The Corporation promotes the interests of the British financial sector, and an official called the Remembrancer looks after its interests in Parliament. ## The critique Critics call the Corporation a plutocracy with a medieval costume. In 2012 John McDonnell, later Labour's shadow chancellor, pledged to scrap it along with the business vote. Abolition has never come close. London mayor Sadiq Khan, himself a Labour politician, dismissed the idea. ## From the City to Canary Wharf Historian [[Quinn Slobodian]] uses the City in *[[Crack-Up Capitalism]]* as a medieval ancestor of the modern zone: a self-governing commercial enclave where business had the vote. The modern version came in the 1980s a few miles down the Thames. [[Margaret Thatcher]]'s government created enterprise zones exempt from normal planning rules, handed the old docks to a development corporation that could bypass local councils, and abolished the elected Greater London Council in 1986. The result, [[Canary Wharf]], was nicknamed "Hong Kong-on-Thames." ## Why it's on the map The City is the oldest working example of what [[Charter City]] and [[Network State]] advocates want to build from scratch: a jurisdiction inside a country where firms hold the franchise. It also shows what the new projects lack. The City's privileges took centuries to accumulate and rest on the consent of the British state. They were never an exit from it. ## See Also - [[Crack-Up Capitalism]] - [[Network State Experiments Roster]] - [[Offshore Financial Secrecy]] - [[United Kingdom]]