ABSTRACT
The essays in this volume have addressed the linked questions of the manner in which regional developments and policy debates in the early to mid 1990s showed an advance on those witnessed in the 1960s and 1970s, when the regional agenda was last prominent. The essays overall suggest that there were a number of notable changes strongly linked to the changing contexts of state reform and European integration. The purpose of this chapter is to draw them out, explaining their origins and discussing their implications within a broader framework of analysis. We offer three perspectives which arise from observations of how structural change impacted upon political and policy debates, and of how elites, both in the regions and in the parties at Westminster, responded to this change. Section one identifies four novel political and policy-related pressures at the regional level, and discusses their effects in terms of the advent of new forms of regional governance and a broader basis of elite support for devolution and regional reform. Section two considers how the Conservative approach to the government of Scotland, Wales and the English regions changed during the 1970s to one which excited territorial opposition and was inherently more problematic. The final section assesses the development in opposition of Labour Party policy on devolution and regional reform, concluding that the advent of New Labour made some important differences to the validity of the project in comparison to that of the 1970s.
