Devolution and the Shifting Political Economic Geographies of the United Kingdom Introduction and Context

Abstract

In the aftermath of its sweeping election to power in 1997 the New Labour government moved quickly on its preelection pledge to deliver for the United Kingdom a comprehensive programme of devolution and constitutional change. To a certain extent devolution was considered to be the Labour Party's`unfinished business' following an eighteen-year period that had witnessed a gradual decline in the legitimacy of Conservative rule in the Celtic nations (Mitchell, 2006). It was also heralded as a timely modernisation of territorial government, whereby the uneven and differentiated administrative devolution that had unfolded across the UK's landscape since the late Victorian eraöfeaturing a Scottish Office (since 1885), a Welsh Office (1964), a Stormont parliament in Belfast (1921), and the Government Offices for the Regions in England (1994)öwould be injected with new democratic credentials and an enhanced policy relevance befitting the era of globalisation and the multilevel government of the European Union. To this extent the peculiarity of the UK's historical and political geography was given due expression in the new constitutional map that emerged in 1999, featuring an elected Parliament for Scotland, elected Assemblies for Wales and Northern Ireland, a directly elected Mayor and Assembly for London, and unelected regional development agencies (RDAs) for the rest of England. Not surprisingly, this momentous agenda of political and institutional reform provoked intense interest from academic and research communities, as throughout the early-to-mid 2000s The Leverhulme Trust's Nations and Regions programme ran in parallel alongside the ESRC's Devolution and Constitutional Change initiative. It is impossible here to do justice to each programme and their respective projects, but there is little denying that they offered a profusion of valuable periodical monitoring and mapping of the newly formed institutional arrangements (eg, Trench, 2004) as well as substantive analyses of emerging tendencies (eg,

Housing policy in the UK: the importance of spatial nuance

“…Processes of devolution therefore need to be situated and understood within the context of this wider and varied political environment. As well as fundamental differences between political parties, the changing economic context and implementation of austerity measures also marks a shift in the wider political context between the early and latter periods of devolution (Danson et al 2012;MacKinnon 2015). This is where the literature on interpretive governance and social constructionism can be insightful (Jacobs et al 2004;Bevir and Rhodes 2006), providing an important theoretical backdrop to understanding tensions and constraints in the UK constitutional settlement; points that will be returned to in section three.…”