The medieval, unaccountable Corporation of London

This is a somewhat scary expose:

The medieval, unaccountable Corporation of London is ripe for protest | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

In it we learn that democracy is a non-starter in the Square Mile:

"among local authorities the City of London is unique". You bet it is. There are 25 electoral wards in the Square Mile. In four of them, the 9,000 people who live within its boundaries are permitted to vote. In the remaining 21, the votes are controlled by corporations, mostly banks and other financial companies. The bigger the business, the bigger the vote: a company with 10 workers gets two votes, the biggest employers, 79. It's not the workers who decide how the votes are cast, but the bosses, who "appoint" the voters. Plutocracy, pure and simple.

Indeed:

The City of London is the only part of Britain over which parliament has no authority. In one respect at least the Corporation acts as the superior body: it imposes on the House of Commons a figure called the remembrancer: an official lobbyist who sits behind the Speaker's chair and ensures that, whatever our elected representatives might think, the City's rights and privileges are protected. The mayor of London's mandate stops at the boundaries of the Square Mile.

We also learn:

The City has exploited this remarkable position to establish itself as a kind of offshore state, a secrecy jurisdiction which controls the network of tax havens housed in the UK's crown dependencies and overseas territories. This autonomous state within our borders is in a position to launder the ill-gotten cash of oligarchs, kleptocrats, gangsters and drug barons. As the French investigating magistrate Eva Joly remarked, it "has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to a foreign magistrate". It deprives the United Kingdom and other nations of their rightful tax receipts.

It has also made the effective regulation of global finance almost impossible. Shaxson shows how the absence of proper regulation in London allowed American banks to evade the rules set by their own government.

Monbiot suggests that one interesting effect of trying to draw up a written British constitution would be to expose some of this jiggery-pokery; after all, how would one possibly defend this in order to put its preservation on a 'proper' footing. It certainly makes one wonder if the Occupy LSX protest should be attempting to bring some of this into the light of day. Indeed, is the stuff with St Paul's cathedral some clever diversion?