ABSTRACT
The artist Adam Dant has satirically drawn the UK Houses of Parliament as "a giant storehouse devoted to bric-a-brac". Wandsworth and the Greater London Council had demonstrated the potential and power of local politics: civitas made conscious. Local government seems to have earned – or to have had imposed on it by hostile governments – a catalogue of brickbats, pettiness, triviality, veniality, corruption, parochialism and stupidity. Local government at its best was an attempt to provide, monitor and improve collective resources, from roads to education, from drains to social support – for the people, researchers know in the place that they know. Ron Young was so focused on his local government theorizing that he did not notice that the job was almost impossible, nor that my appointment, as a feminist, was problematic. Innocent young children and needy parents will blossom with researchers help, the same kind of feel-good thinking that later informed the UK Labour government's Sure Start programme.
