The slow road to ‘modernisation’

Abstract

In Britain, the inter-war years were dominated by a resurgent Conservative Party, many of whose members' sympathies still lay, as regards local governance, on the Salisbury plain of a dual polity. However, fears that urban government might be captured by socialists and used to further ownership of the means of production compelled Conservatives to reluctantly interfere in local politics. Even Conservatives, such as Neville Chamberlain, who sympathised with new liberal values of equality of opportunity tempered their support for the larger enterprising local authorities once poplarism suggested to them the dangers of the cat being in charge of the jug of cream. This chapter looks at the British local government's slow road to ‘modernisation’, the growth and rivalry between authorities, the decline of municipalisation, the ending of the local Poor Law, local finance and the decline of the dual state, the inclusive professional authorities and local government's relations with the central government in the 1930s.