This article analyses the political, economic and social contexts of Liverpool's successful bid to become European Capital of Culture, 2008. It highlights the juxtaposition in the Liverpool 2008 process of discourses of urban entrepreneurialism and a strong emphasis on community involvement....

The election of more than 60 British National Party (BNP) councillors across England from 2002-2007 does not sit easily with the conventional analysis of far-right parties in the UK, which has tended to dismiss the extreme right as an insignificant political force. Building on a recent...

This article assesses the role of urban policy as a testing-ground for various policy experiments. In particular, it considers how the failure and controversy stemming from the property-led regeneration experiments of the 1980s have recently led to a major re-organisation of urban policy which...

Despite growing cross-party support for the principles of localism, the coalition's radical devolution agenda looks set to provoke a level of tension in central–local relations not seen since the 1980s. This article argues that the central cause of this friction, the front-loading of cuts...

During the 1980s local economic policy became an issue of major political concern. The polarisation of the New Right marketâ€led strategies advanced by the Thatcher governments and the New Left-inspired counter-response, typified by the last years of the GLC, reflected the tenor of national...