Since i’m heading away for a couple weeks I thought it was best for me to open up the discussion thread regarding the future of MLondon so that you can all discuss, debate and propose whilst i’m gone.

In general I have seen three options proposed so far by vaious people and they will most likely be included on the ballot paper:

• Resuming MLondon as before (with tweaks to the modifiers for GE’s and more effort from community members)
• Electing only the Mayor of London (in conjunction with England’s other metro mayor’s)
• Abolition (not ‘abolishment’)

Any ideas which gain a bit of traction here will also likely be included in the final vote so its really worth paying attention to what each other proposes.

My viewpoint is that abolition is the most practical way forward. London devolution is different to the Celtic Nations but primarily in the sense that there isn’t a lot of power (annual refuse strategy, anyone?) which makes modelling it rather dull and repetitive. Furthermore, with the Assembly being only an advisory body, the Mayor must be active throughout the whole term for it to really work - this is an insane workload to place on one person when most of our PM/FMs do not last a full 6 months in the job.

Furthermore, the election of Metro Mayors might be nice for flavour, but there’s no real point in doing this when the Mayor’s will not have any actual work to do in their positions, we aren’t going to start modelling councils, let alone combined authorities. This means that they would simply be increasing the workload of the Devolved Speaker with no real benefit to the game, when no one is going to remember or care about who was elected Mayor of Cambridge 4 months ago.

It would have been nice for MLondon to work but with the current size of our community i feel that this just isn’t feasible and that therefore we should let it die a natural death.