New Labour and Local Governance in Britain
The argument of this chapter is that the Labour Government elected in 1997 in Britain has developed a distinctive approach to the reform of local government. It has a vision of local governance that marks it out from the predecessor Conservative governments and which challenges many of the cherished views of the local government community of academics and practitioners. As the Prime Minister puts it the solution to the problems experienced by local government in recent years "does not lie in local authorities gathering again unto themselves all the functions and roles they once had ..a flawed model is not the answer to to-day's problems (Blair 1998a:12). New Labour demands ‘a new a different local government' (Blair 1998a: 13) to con tribute to the task of modernising Britain