ABSTRACT
When the history of New Labour comes to be written, one of the main challenges will be to explain its Janusfaced attitude to power. By devolving power to the Celtic nations and London, New Labour claims to have introduced a truly significant reform of the territorial structure of governance, allowing the UK to jettison its image as the most centralized state in the European Union (EU). What is more, if current proposals for devolving power to city-regions, local authorities and neighbourhood communities are ever realized, then it can rightly claim to have done more than any other government to build the foundations of a polycentric state in the UK. This can be defined as a state where there are multiple centres of democratic deliberation, where pluralism informs the warp and weft of everyday political life and where decision-making is part of a lattice-like structure of lateral connections, all of which is far removed from the centralized, hierarchical, London-centric state that dominated the political life of the UK throughout the 20th century.
