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The UK government's 'Industrial Strategy' is a product of a Conservative party in power, coming to terms with a particular set of economic and political circumstances. In contrast, international bodies have commended long-term concepts of 'green growth' rather than conventional industrial development, whilst individual local authorities in the UK and elsewhere have been working towards economic regeneration policies that are both environmentally aware and also related directly to local communities. Taken together, the UK industrial strategy, the reports of international agencies and the efforts of individual local authorities raise the question as to the possible shape of a national strategy that reflects ideas of green growth and applies these ideas to processes of urban regeneration, urban development and planning. This paper gives a brief outline of such a strategy, suggesting that green growth must deal with towns and cities, both as causes of pollution, carbon emissions and resource consumption and as places where people should be able to enjoy a good quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews changes over the last 10 years in the governance arrangements and processes involved in sub-national economic development and cross-boundary collaboration. It begins with a summary of the institutional changes in the main countries of the UK, in the dual context of fiscal retrenchment and neo-liberal deregulation. The picture that emerges is one of a confused patchwork in England; incremental modifications in Scotland; and embryonic developments in Wales. This is then contrasted with a range of experiences in other countries, involving wholesale recentralisation and a sidelining of local and regional institutions at one end of the spectrum, to resistance to restructuring through repurposing, increased mutual collaboration and improved management at the other. However, enhanced economic links and benefits do not automatically flow from any particular form of rescaled governance arrangements. As our original article found, the key ingredients are robust and inclusive political and decision-making processes, a suite of appropriate policy instruments and deployment of sufficient resources to ensure that they have an effect. The paper also concludes that a more comprehensive theoretical framework is needed to advance understanding of what lies behind different forms of state governance rescaling, and what makes a given instance more (or less) effective than another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By contrast to major constitutional reforms elsewhere in the UK, in England's eight regions beyond London New Labour has favoured administrative decentralisation. This paper examines these institutional arrangements and assesses their capacity to develop a more integrated approach to territorial development. It confirms a growing awareness of the need to ensure greater coherence between policies to promote economic, social and environmental wellbeing. Nonetheless, a complex regional institutional architecture, inconsistent sector-based strategies, a lack of strategic leadership and blurred accountabilities hamper moves towards policy integration and the delivery of joint outcomes. Moreover, despite ongoing reforms, the absence of a clear regional agenda in a functionally designed Whitehall raises fundamental questions about the ability of sub-national bodies to work collectively to develop and implement a more coherent approach to regional policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic growth and change in eighteenth-century Britain, both the expansion of pre-industrial commercial society and the industrial revolution itself, have been explored using a variety of approaches. This article highlights a relatively ignored aspect of the problem, arguing that the state, politics, and political economic ideology played a central role. In particular, the early eighteenth-century political victory of a version of political economy associated with the Whig party, which centred on manufacturing and consumption, was a prerequisite for the economic developments later in the century. The article begins by describing a political economy of manufacturing and its rival, a political economy of re-exporting associated with the Tory party. It then explains how and why a political economy of manufacturing became dominant, examining both political elites and ordinary voters and petitioners. The growth of manufacturing and consumption must be understood, therefore, as political as much as economic events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how counterterrorism policing strategies and practices ill tile United Kingdom have changed in tile face of recent terrorist attacks. It considers tile evident limitations of these developments and how a local, democratic style of neighborhood policing could be used to manufacture the community intelligence ‘feed’ that offers the best probability of preventing and deterring future forms of such violence. These substantive concerns are set against a theoretical backdrop attending to how policing can respond to risks where the contours of the threat are uncertain. Tile analysis is informed by interviews with U.K. police officers involved in intelligence and counterterrorism work conducted during the early part of 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most profound challenges facing the Labour party in the post-war period was its ability to understand and make policy to reform the private sector. Before the Attlee government, Labour had little to say on this issue, but that government's experience exposed the dangerous ‘vacuum’ this involved. In the 1950s the nature of the capitalist firm ranked alongside the alleged ‘embourgoisement’ of the working class as an issue framing Labour's ideological and policy debate. The centrality of this issue reflected the fact that understanding the firm was inextricably linked to a raft of broader arguments within the Left about the nature of modern capitalism. The benign view of the corporation that flowed from the revisionist wing of the party was challenged by the ‘declinist’ politics of the 1960s, and in office after 1964 Labour pursued a modernizing agenda which centrally involved seeking to shape the behaviour of the private sector in order to deliver the higher economic growth that Labour so much desired. The failure of this growth to materialize led to great disillusion across the party about the policies pursued by the Wilson government, and this in turn led to a fundamental rethink of policy that was to underpin the radical agenda of the party in the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses key experiences to show how the institutional channels linking democracy and economic growth are evolving with Great Britain's economy. Property rights; Contract enforcement; Human investment; Egalitarian human capital.