> London has it relatively easy; the only layer of government above it is the national one.

Is that actually true? I mean, are there no vestiges of England, Scotland and Wales in the UK?

Scotland and Wales have devolved governments. England does not. There is no English parliament; there are no English courts—there are English and Welsh courts; there are many English ministers but no ministers in right of England.

The once-English institutions of parliament, the crown, and its ministers became those of Great Britain first and the United Kingdom subsequently. But the remit of the UK government in devolved matters is limited in some cases to some subset of {England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland}, e.g., the first two and the fourth. Those powers are exercised qua the British government, not qua some English, English and Welsh, or English, Welsh, and Northern Irish (i.a.) government, none of which exist.

There is a body of law peculiar to England. It is administered by the English and Welsh courts, from which an appeal may lie to the UK Supreme Court or the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as the case may be.

A large exception to these remarks is the Church of England; the Churches of Ireland and Wales were disestablished in 1869 and 1914 respectively.

Yes for Scotland and Wales but not for England. The discrepancy is known as The West Lothian Question

Not really. The West Lothian Question is "why can Scots vote on English laws but not vice-versa?", which wasn't true at the time it was asked (1977), and especially isn't true now.

Firstly, note that all constituent countries elect MPs to the UK's Westminster parliament, because there are many laws that affect the entire country, and are controlled centrally.

Between 1707 and 1997 (20 years _after_ asking the question!), _all_ laws for Scotland were made in Westminster, and voted on by _all_ MPs. Laws for Scotland get their own bills because Scotland retains its own legal system. Likewise Northern Ireland, but _not_ Wales. Wales shares the same legal system as England, which is why the phrase "England and Wales" appears often.

Since Scottish devolution, certain powers were _reserved_ for Westminster, and the rest of the laws for Scotland are now made in a separately elected Scottish parliament. But there are still plenty of laws which affect Scotland, sometimes _exclusively_ affect Scotland due to the reserved powers having the ability to override choices that Scotland has made for itself. Those laws are still made in Westminster, English MPs can still vote on them and easily win, and so Scots still need representation in the Westminster parliament.

The main part of the West Lothian question, which is where there are sometimes laws that _exclusively_ affect England and Wales, why do Scottish MPs get to vote on them?, was handled by the Scottish MPs voluntarily not voting on them. They managed to do this for centuries without any formal process. Then after the 2015 election, the UK government brought in the EVEL process (English Votes for English Laws), which gave English MPs a "veto" on laws that only affected England. Since the pandemic, Westminster chose to drop EVEL, presumably because the voluntary system of Scottish MPs abstaining from voting on England-only bills worked just fine!

What's relevant for this discussion is that _London_ has an elected mayor, which makes it a special case. It has its own autonomy, within England, which supposedly doesn't have any special carve outs unlike Scotland/Wales/NI... in reality, it has quite a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directly_elected_mayors_in_Eng...

>The main part of the West Lothian question, which is where there are sometimes laws that _exclusively_ affect England and Wales, why do Scottish MPs get to vote on them?, was handled by the Scottish MPs voluntarily not voting on them. They managed to do this for centuries without any formal process.

Did they? Wikipedia says this:

> In establishing foundation hospitals and increasing student tuition fees in England, Scottish votes were decisive in getting the measures through.[10] The vote on foundation hospitals in November 2003 only applied to England – had the vote been restricted to English MPs then the government would have been defeated.[11] Had there been a vote by English MPs only on tuition fees in January 2004, the government would have lost because of a rebellion on their own benches.[12]

While Wikipedia does note that, I'd say those are two pretty rare examples of shenanigans out of several centuries of daily politicking.

In another case of shenanigans, it's an established procedure that if you can't physically turn up to the HoC to give your vote, you find an opponent and pair off with them, they abstain in order to give the equivalent outcome of you turning up to vote. What if they go back on their promise and vote anyway? It happened: https://theconversation.com/pairing-and-why-it-matters-in-th... - has anything been done about it? Not really.

The politics of Westminster are not in the habit of looking at every infraction and locking down process tightly. If Scottish MPs habitually voted on English-only legislation, and if it affected the outcome (which is very rare indeed as there are only 59 Scottish MPs versus 533 English MPs), there would be more concern, but as they generally don't and it generally doesn't, the formal process giving English MPs a veto on English-only legislation only lasted 5 years out of the past 316.

There's also the county government layer that cities must adhere to in addition to state/national.

London and unitary authorities don't have a county above them.

I assumed that was in the context of the US. Country governments in the US vary a lot in how powerful they are from being mostly a judicial unit or organization to being pretty powerful (e.g. parishes in Louisiana).

New York City, which is implementing this, is a bit of a weird case in that it actually sits above the counties, not below them. New York's five boroughs are technically five counties.

Hmm, depends a lot on the State.

You can generally make two generalizations about local governments in the United States: they are local governments and you can’t make any other generalizations about them because everything depends on the State and sometimes a locality’s specific circumstances.

In California, municipalities do not adhere to the counties they are in, the county is a legal subdivision of the State which might also have a charter and cities are municipal corporations with a monopoly on the land use within their cities. School districts are also a form of local government here, as are special purpose districts like BART.

In some parts of New England, and I’m not going to go into specifics because when I looked into this more than 10 years ago this had changed or some States were changing it, the State is divided into counties and the counties were divided into townships which are the basis of the New England township system. Somewhere in there, there are also cities, and Maine has a couple of severely underpopulated places designated as Plantations.

So, congestion pricing in the US: NYC, LA, San Francisco and probably Seattle absolutely have the power to this if they wanted to, although I’ll say for San Francisco that would have made a lot more sense to try before the pandemic than now, cuz now, well now downtown is dead so what would it really do? Fairly certain Boston could as well. Everywhere else, I’m less certain, like in Texas I’m fairly certain cities there could, but I’m also fairly certain the Texan legislature under their own laws has the power to step in and go “No. None of that. Shame on you.”

NYC can only do it if granted the home rule authority by the state legislature - which it has.

In general, counties are pretty weak in New York.

You see, this kind of thing is why I led with this:

"You can generally make two generalizations about local governments in the United States: they are local governments and you can’t make any other generalizations about them because everything depends on the State and sometimes a locality’s specific circumstances."

That is good intel though. I thought NY was a home rule state, but is that only for municipalities which have had home rule enabled by legislation? This table doesn't really go into that many specifics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_rule_in_the_United_States

Effectively home rule exists at the mercy of state legislation in NY due to the current legal precedents around the state constitution.

One weird NYC thing is that it is the only city I am aware of in the US that sits above the county level. The five boroughs are the five counties and mostly used for administrative management, since four of the boroughs are million plus cities in and of themselves; but the boroughs have no lawmaking powers.

In practice, there are no explicit constitutional protections for municipalities. So really, it's all states that can stomp on municipal legislation with impunity if they really felt like it. There might be a state constitution or two on the way, but those are easy to change, and many a state government is capable of either outright ignore constitutional changes brought in by voters, or do some aggressive deception in the drafting of summaries for constitutional propositions as to make them seem to do the opposite of what they really do. See a recent, pro-gerrymandering change to the Missouri constitution, which talked about independent commissions and cutting political donations, but really overrode earlier anti-gerrymandering language, and gave the governor total control over the process.

So broadly, the rights of local governments only go as far as the whims of the state government and the courts anyway, across the board.

There you go making generalizations about 50 separate sovereign entities with 50 different legislatures, constitutions and court systems independent of each other.

But yes, legislatures can change laws on a whim, which is quite a bit more of a process than when I do something on a whim. Given the half-a-hundred entities that are the subject of your comment, some variability in the laws and political processes creating different outcomes depending on their jurisdiction is an expected result.

Does the revenue go to the state of NY, NYC or the federal government? I imagine a split between all if it needed federal approval?

Current plan is for revenue to accrue to the MTA, a public benefit corporation owned by NY State.

It needs federal approval because it covers interstate crossings.