would support democratic systems of government and are inclined to support the devolution of power. Government must be based on the consent of the governed. Consent is the basis for its legitimacy, its right to rule. Government agents should be accountable to the elected representatives of the people. Thus government must represent the interests of all the people, not just of interest groups. Indeed
’s small government ideology, Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, mobilized a policy of deregulation, defunding, and devolution: Deregulation meant not simply regulatory reform or consolidation, but halting outright the growth of federal regulations, and relaxing existing ones that were targeted as especially burdensome by the regulated industries. Defunding meant drastic cuts in the regulatory agencies’ budgets, along with large tax cuts to prevent future
-national government, most obviously in the form of legislative devolution to Scotland and Wales. Hence the central state, which was the main forum through which equality would be achieved for Crosland, has lost power in three directions: outwards, upwards and downwards. In such conditions, Bogdanor argues, there is very limited scope for the introduction of social democracy in Britain, where neo-liberal reforms went further than in many countries. There would therefore seem to be very little scope for a revival of a form of social democracy that is more radical than the one we have
machineries and the state bodies involved in policy making, then the question of access to government becomes critical. There are five areas where a democratization of the state/government is required in this context. First, there is the issue of devolution or decentralization. This might be considered at the two different levels of political devolution and of privatization. While many states are considering devolved government under pressure from ethnic or regional movements and economic possibilities within their polities, we need to consider the gender
feelings. Officially at least, the ‘nation’ in question was Britain; but Conservative governments after 1979 had neglected the ‘Celtic fringe’ to the extent that the party had been wiped out outside England. Devolution was the inevitable consequence, once the Tories had lost power in 1997. Thus when Hague toured the country in a last-ditch attempt to save the ‘nation’ of Britain, he was battling on behalf of an abstraction that his own party had hollowed out. Ideology and the Conservative Party 123 Conclusion At the time of writing, the Conservative Party does seem to
national in the NHS. Klein argues that there has been ‘oscillating progress between devolution and centralisation, and back again’ in NHS policy from the organisation’s inception, caused by the conflicts between dependence on public funds and the devolution motivated by their perceived inadequacy. 42 Richard Biddle has traced the local impact of the Hospital Plan of 1962, identifying first ‘optimism’ and subsequently ‘anger’ in Reading over its ‘hierarchical regionalism’ amid public-sector interest in economic and social
ongoing development of health devolution. 21 Activism was shaped by the idea that the NHS was an ideal. Reflecting on this, respondents suggested that the ‘good strong brand’ of the NHS attracted many people to this cause, or that campaigning was ‘easier in some ways because most people want to keep the NHS’. Respondents also emphasised that, while other campaign groups had to define ‘more narrowly what they are “for”’, for NHS campaigners, specifically, ‘its [sic] enough to say you are for “it”’. Thomson
continental European state-societies, unfavourably with the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, on the basis of its incremental restructuring programme ‘at the margins’: ‘Instead of relaxing general employment protection provisions, some governments have preferred to introduce short-term contracts and liberalise employment protection for part-time workers in small firms (e.g. Germany, France, Belgium)’ (OECD, 1997: 8). Despite some apparent concessions to the discourse of flexibility, seen for example in greater devolution of bargaining to the workplace and wage
strategy of “crossing the river by groping for stepping-stones” have been the 253 The Asian financial crisis catalyst behind China’s phenomenal economic growth. The core of this strategy has been “decentralization.” In the Chinese context, decentralization has meant, on the one hand, devolving the power of decision-making from the central to local governments, and on the other hand, from planning authorities to state-owned enterprises. It is widely recognized that the devolution of government power and authority from the central to sub-national or local governments (the
Swinford Union’. 13 A year after the IAOS's foundation Plunkett looked to build upon that achievement by engineering political agreement over the devolution of agricultural policymaking from Westminster to Dublin. The subsequent foundation of the DATI in 1899 represented a landmark in Ireland's political history and evidence of Plunkett's tenacity as he introduced a second major agency of agricultural progress to Ireland. Although described by critics as ‘the Institution that teaches hens how to lay eggs’, the Department helped to develop the theory