ABSTRACT
Q POLITICS, POLICY AND URBAN SOCIETY British society to-day exhibits a greater unwillingness to discover, to collect and to face up to the social facts of life than at any time during the last hundred years. . .Indeed, as the potentialities of the social sciences widen, the barriers to their effective utilization seem to become more formidable. Thus the paradox of better means to social knowledge and less inclination to use it. (O.R. McGregor, ‘Social Facts and Social Conscience’, Twentieth Century, 1960)
Has post-war British urban policy been a failure? It is all too easy to answer this question with an unqualified affirmative, and in the light of the foregoing chapters, readers may be surprised that we ask the question at all. Government, however, is the art of the possible not the ideal and any appraisal of this complex policy area must take account of the very real economic and political constraints on policy makers in modern industrial societies. According to many Marxist commentators, political reformers working through the organs of the state are always doomed to failure because the state at all times serves a master — capital — whose interests are wholly incompatible with those of the urban masses.1 In the light of the continuing inequalities characteristic of British and other Western cities this neat argument is quite compelling. One of our main objectives, however, has been to demonstrate that the state’s role in urban society has been highly variable and has changed according to historical period and, as important, according to urban policy area. To say that the state’s role has been variable does not, of course, put an end to the matter because much depends on the nature of state intervention and particularly on the consequences of intervention for different social groups. In this context, our final chapter has three main aims. First, to outline and summarise the configuration of forces responsible for setting the policy agenda in each of the areas covered in earlier chapters. By policy agenda we mean the courses of action available for discussion and debate at the central level, including ‘feedback’ from implementation experience. Our second aim is to explain why the policy agenda has taken the shape it has and to discuss the implications of this for different social groups. In attempting the latter, we must dwell on the effectiveness of and prospects for party government for, as we noted in Chapter 1,
parties are liberal democracy’s main vehicles with the potential for mobilising and articulating class interests and translating these into policy.
