ABSTRACT
Amidst debates on Scottish and Welsh devolution between the late nineteenth century and the 1970s, regionalism in England was not a subject which merited much serious public attention. Strong regional identities existed, but they seldom found political expression and there was little agreement at a popular level over boundaries or the role of regions in government. There was little that approached the regional ethnic nationalism that could be said to exist in Scotland and Wales. Yet during the post-Second World War period, regional government became a common feature of many West European states. Indeed if we extend the concept as a ‘decision space’ to include intermediate government in general — the meso, that is, the level between basic communal, or municipal, government and central government per se — it became virtually universal among the danger West European states (Sharpe 1993a).
