New Labour's Spaces of Competitiveness

Abstract

New Labour's engagement with sub-national economic governance was a stuttering and uneven story marked by both significant achievements and jolting failures. While devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the introduction of Regional Development Agencies in England represented early successes, the bold rhetoric of New Labour's programme was not in reality matched by solid ideological foundations and a coherent policy approach. Rather, the decentralisation project was constructed around a distinctive ‘rationality’ based around the role of place in driving competitiveness in the face of a global, knowledge-based economy. This had significant implications for the level and clarity of political commitments in this sphere, and the durability of new forms. After the comprehensive ‘no’ vote in the referendum for the North East Elected Regional Assembly in 2004 and the subsequent collapse of the English regional agenda, a period of hiatus gave way to an emerging sub-regional agenda, where developments were influenced at least in part by bottom-up pressures and allowed for some degree of local autonomy and flexibility in the construction of new governance forms. Yet the continuing absence of a clear ideological drive emphasised the ad-hoc nature of these changes and accentuated the lack of an over-arching political resolution. In this context Labour's proposals for sub-national economic governance were muddied, raising questions over the sustainability of new arrangements. The paper concludes with a brief commentary on the experience of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government following the general election on 6 May 2010.