In the run-up to the Greater London Council elections on April 9, the capital may show few signs of urban malaise to the visitor, in town to concentrate on the tourist or business merry-go round.Seen from a taxi or a double-decker bus, the patient seems to be doing pretty well, with almost all that could be asked for in the way of free-wheeling atmosphere, neon lights, local hippie colour, good, if expensive, food, shops, theatre, music, newly polished monuments, and carefully cultivated parks. Outside the centre, there may be endless drab, damp rows of terrace housing but at least there is no tin-can shack town on the green belt fringe. Yet most Londoners, residents and commuters alike, know that this is pleasant but superficial urban icing, a picture postcard cover-up for a vast metropolis, in which the common place of life gets increasingly difficult and exhausting. There can be little doubt that London life, after three years of Tory council rule, has changed, if anything for the worse, just as it did under their Labour predecessors. The bus service is more erratic. At some Underground stations recently the moving staircase has become a joke. The Tube trains are no cleaner - no less painfully crowded, and traffic jams suburban shopping streets. Unfurnished flats are more difficult to find. Homes to buy are beyond the means of the vast majority. Slabs of old housing have slumped just that little bit nearer final decay. New families continue the exodus to a Iife beyond the green belt. More open space is to be nibbled off for roads. Planes bellow their way into Heathrow airport London. The crime rate has risen. Bad development proceeds apace, except at Piccadilly where there is still no progress. Families with small children still find their way into skyscraper flats because the choice of a home on the ground is not theirs to have. Fares go up and make the longer journey to work even more expensive. Corner shops are boarded up and the new shops, if there are any, charge higher prices. Blight abounds. It is not altogether the GLC’s fault that there has been so little impact, stuck as it is as a glamorous but largely ineffective pig in the middle between central and local government. There would have been more homes but for a temporarily excessively cost-conscious Whitehall. Rents would have been higher which might have freed some flats and houses for families on long waiting lists. The dearth of unfurnished property is a result of a largely successful Rent Act. Whitehall too has sat upon any glossy dreams of a new transport terminal at Victoria Station to tie in with Gatwick and Heathrow. Power was so finely balanced between the GLC and boroughs under the 1963 London Government Act that inter-authority friction can delay city progress on almost any front. The GLC can urge the outer boroughs to shoulder their share of the badly housed (often immigrants) from, say, Lambeth and Brent, but the complacently suburban Bromleys and Harrows can refuse to play the game. The GLC can pinpoint major shopping centres on the map, but neglected rival boroughs can do their best to see that trade is given every encouragement to come to their territory as well. The GLC can sketch in its plans for new roads but cannot plan the land alongside so as to minimise social and physical disruption. The potential for conflict is obvious.