By Michael Ward

Dave Wetzel, who has died aged 82, was a core member of the leadership group that ran the Greater London Council from 1981 to 1986, and an architect of the GLC’s flagship ‘Fare’s Fair’ policy.

Labour won the GLC election of 7th May 1981 with a radical pledge to cut London Transport fares by 25%, and to introduce a simplified, zonal fare system. Dave Wetzel, previously a Labour Councillor in the London Borough of Hounslow, was elected as the GLC member for Hammersmith. At the first meeting of the newly elected Labour council members, over the first weekend of May, Dave was elected Chair of the Transport Committee, with responsibility for implementing this pledge.

With Council Leader Ken Livingstone, and the Deputy Transport Chair, the late Paul Moore, Dave threw himself into turning Fare’s Fair from a promise to a fait accompli.

The GLC was funded through the rating system – a tax on residential and business property, later replaced first by the Poll Tax, subsequently by the Council tax. Raising the funds for Fare’s Fair required a mid-year rate increase – which the Council duly voted through in July. The fare cut was implemented in October.

Fare’s Fair was a contentious policy, opposed by the GLC opposition Conservatives and by some business organisations. But in the summer of 1981 it was not suggested that the policy was unlawful.

That changed in the autumn: the Conservative London Borough of Bromley led a challenge in the courts. Just before Christmas 1981, the case having gone to the House of Lords, Bromley won: the fare cut and the supplementary rate increase were ruled unlawful.

Dave’s initial response to the Lords’ decision was to refuse to implement it: he led a short-lived campaign of refusal to pay: ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay.’ He dressed up in a gorilla costume, boarded a bus in central London, and refused to pay.

But that was not the end of Fare’s Fair. Dave and Paul Moore worked slowly and patiently with council officers and legal advisers to construct a legally watertight case to bring fares down again – and avoid a further legal challenge. The London Transport fares issue certainly changed the way in which the GLC operated: after the House of Lords case; no potentially contentious policy was put to committees without robust legal advice. The government, however, thwarted on fares for a second time, took no more chances, and removed London Transport from GLC control in 1984.

Throughout his life, Dave was inspired by the ideas of Henry George, the nineteenth century American radical advocate of the taxation of land. Dave studied at the Henry George School of Social Science, and before that at Southall Technical College and Ealing College. For Dave, the rating system with which he worked as a Labour Councillor fell far short of Henry George’s ideals.

After the GLC, Dave returned to Hounslow Borough Council, serving as Leader of the Council from 1987 to 1991. He was closely involved with the Labour Land Campaign, serving as its President from 1982. After 2014, he joined the Green Party while maintaining his links with the land campaign.

Whatever his party, Dave remained a committed socialist. He had a warm personality, and great determination, winning the respect of colleagues who disagreed with him as well as his allies.

Michael Ward was Chair of the Industry and Employment Committee of the Greater London Council from 1981, and from 1982 was also the Vice-Chair of the London Community Builders Sub-Committee and the Supplies and Contract Services Sub-Committee. He was elected as a Member of the Greater London Council for Haringey, Wood Green on 7th May 1981 and served until the GLC’s abolition in 1986. 

Image: County Hall, the HQ of the GLC until its abolition. Source: County Hall. Author: Reading Tom from Reading, UK,  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.