The Local State and Local Economic Policy: Why the Fuss?

Abstract

In the last decade, and especially since the accession of a radical right wing government to power in 1979, local government and the ‘local state’ has re-emerged as an important area of debate and public interest in Britain. This is not just a matter of academic journals, professional politicians and the inside pages of ‘serious newspapers'. Local government has become front page and even TV news material. Right-wing popular papers sell copy through sensationalist headlines about ‘Red Ken’ (the Greater London Council leader), the dangers of ‘municipal marxism’ and ‘socialism on the rates’. This is mirrored, and also exaggerated by the more earnest and less manipulative reports in the left wing press on local socialism, decentralisation, popular planning, and the scope for local economic regeneration. Even those shadowy local state institutions outside the orbit of officially public electoral policies, like police authorities, water boards and health authorities, now share some of this interest. Above all, there is a clear, continuing and at times rather dramatic crisis in relations between central and local government. Furthermore, this is a crisis which often cuts across party lines or becomes identified with internal party conflicts—localist v. centralist, left v. right, Thatcherite v. the wets, monetarist v. patrician.