UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown would surely love his political legacy to include a significant contribution to constitutional reform. Certainly he inherited, on succeeding Tony Blair in 2007, a substantial agenda of unfinished constitutional business: devolution, House of Lords reform, the electoral system, a bill of rights, a written constitution. Two years on, though, major progress on any of these ‘big’ topics seems most unlikely before a probable 2010 General Election. Which might mean a rather modest constitutional legacy, based mainly on bringing some prerogative powers under MPs’ scrutiny and control, and, in other comparatively minor ways, boosting the role of Parliament. One such low profile, though not unimportant, initiative is Brown’s revival of the Speaker’s Conference, a constitutional device that many supposed had become extinct with the creation in 2000 of the Electoral Commission.

The large-scale settlement of hundreds of thousands of individuals from the New Commonwealth countries into Britain since World War II has brought into sharp relief issues of race, class, and equal opportunity in the United Kingdom. Significant research on racism and social change in Britain has emerged over the past two decades (see Solomos, 1989; Braham, Rattansi, and Skellington, 1992; Gilroy, 1987; Rex and Tomlinson, 1979; Sivanandan, 1982; Goulbourne, 1990). Much of this research has focused on the changing racial character of British immigration policy, the impact of the black vote on the fate of the Labour party in national elections, and the election of black members to parliament from predominantly black boroughs in London. Only recently has serious attention been given to the local politics of race in Britain outside the London metropolitan area (see Ben-Tovim, Gabriel, Law, and Stredder, 1986; Goulbourne, 1990).

This Framework outlines key considerations for developing a party’s gender policy, and addresses a variety of thematic areas essential for the advancement of women and promotion of gender equality within political parties, including leadership formation, internal decision making, internal oversight and institutional development, candidate recruitment, party programmes and platform development, outreach to voters, and campaigns.

The book explores the claim that English local government exists in one of the most centralised relationships with national government. Such a position fundamentally undermines any notion of local self-government and makes the term ‘government’ in local government a misnomer. The book will examine how the erosion of the autonomy, powers, roles, functions and responsibilities of English local government came about, the arguments of centralisers and localisers to support their view of the constitutional status of local government, and its overall role in the government of England. The book offers an antidote to the onward march of centralisation by offering a new vision of local government which emphasises both ‘local’ and ‘government’.   

The Imperative of Good Local Governance is a true state-of-the-art volume in the field of local governance, decentralization and local democracy summarizing a substantial part of the insights from original research in the last decade. It is also a future-looking volume with explicit policy relevance, paving the way for innovative thinking (and acting) on the next phase of development in the field. In a unique way it brings together authoritative contributions from authors that to a large extent have been defining the field for the last decade or more. From a theoretical perspective it is adjoining top–down and bottom–up rationalities, which is further illuminated through a wide variety of key case studies. The case studies are selected for their relevance for the theoretical perspectives offered, as well as for their paradigmatic power in the current global evolution of decentralized policies and politics. The volume concludes that overall, local development and local politics will not go away – it has a huge potential – but also that the field is full of unfulfilled promises, some of which could be remedied through the perspectives revealed in this volume.