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The local state and restructuring social relations theory and practice

by S. S. Duncan and M. Goodwin

I Introduction: problems and objectives

Despite the fact that the term ’local state’ has become quite fanuliar, not to say popular, since the publication of Cockburn’s book of that name in 1977, the concept still remains rather uncertain in its usage and application. The term itself could equally refer to ‘autonomous local state’ or ‘local institution of the central state’, and both meanings are present in the literature. Confusion is not confined to the semantic level, but also results from conflicting and imprecise ideas of the status of the concept in relation to historical events and to theoretical interpre- tations of the capitalist state as a whole. Consequently, it is difficult t o apply the concept to empirical research except in a general, prescriptive way - the ’local state’ distinguishes a particular area of interest in the real world which can be subjected to analysis. ‘Local’ refers to the importance of local variations in action and consciousness, ‘state’ t o the links with national processes, and also to the style of analysis - traditional pluralist and positivist policy analysis rarely speaks of the capitalist state, still less does it overtly see the nature of the state as part of the problem.

However, the use of the concept in this way still begs the question: what is the meaning of ‘local state’ over and above ‘local government’? In most discussions ‘local state’ can easily be replaced by ‘local government’ with little effect on the argument (and sometimes writers slip from one term to the other with little clear rationale). So why use ‘local state’ at all, if the two terms are interchangeable? Or is this just another case of radical rhetoric?

Our contention in this paper is that more use can be made of the concept ‘local state’ than just denoting a methodological approach or an area of social and political interest. In order to utilize the concept, however, it is necessary to relate the use of ‘local state’ t o overall concepts of social relations and social change. Accounts often (if usually implicitly) see the local state as a static thing, more a set of physical institutions than a process of social relations. However, rather than concentrate on descriptions of things or structures which are essentially outcomes of social processes, we feel it is more profitable to focus on the social relations themselves. It should then become more possible to explain the nature

158 The local state and restructuring social relations: theory and practice

of state actions and changes in them. For rather than given, apparently autonomous and socially inexplicable changes in institutional ‘things’, state forms and actions become a part of changing relations between groups of people. (For a wider discussion of the concept of social relations, especially capitalist state relations, see Duncan and Goodwin, 1982; Dickens et al., forthcoming.)

When used in this way, the concept of the local state should be able to provide an aid in the search for an adequate analytical understanding of local-central relations, and the ‘problem’ of local government, in franchise democracies. We aim to evaluate this claim below, first by developing further the concept of the ‘local state’, and then by using it to look at crucial periods of change in central-local relations in Britain. Finally, we hope this will enable us to provide some historical and social explanation of current policy over and above description of legislative change alone. For just as the capitalist state is a historically formed social relation, so are state institutions at the local level; we cannot expect given and unchanging local state forms. Instead, local level state institutions are constantly being re- structured, and this change is not at all independent of changes in the form of capitalist social relations. Nor, as the term ‘relations’ implies, is this process necessarily functional for capital; still less is it merely the progress of an overall plan ordained by some supercapitalist - the state. Rather, as we shall see, local government and other subnational state institutions in Britain emerged as part of conflict and compromise between intimately linked groups of varying interests, ideas, and powers. There may have been hbalance of power; passivity there was not.

We shall try to outline this process of restructuring, both conceptually and historically. This project seems particularly important in the present context. Current Conservative policy amounts to a major reorganization of both local government itself (greater than 1974), and of local-central relations (see Stewart, 1980). This has been recognized by political commentators both on the right and the left who have seen the threat of the complete abolition of local government (local autonomy?).l Moreover, this current body of legislation displays in

See Burgess and Travers (1980); Hird and “heen (1980); McAllister and Hunter (1980) for detailed accounts of the Local Government, Planning and Land Act, which received royal assent on 13 November 1980 after considerable delay and opposition. But what better than to quote from parliamentary debates on the Bill, thus Lord Mishan (a Labour peer) said

If provisions like this are passed by Parliament, then one had better alter the name of local authorities because I do not know what authority they are left with. They ought to be called local agents for national government (quoted in me Guardian, 9 July 1980).

Or Geoffrey Ripon (a leading Conservative MP):

this Bill, and its financial provisions in particular . . . constitutes a threat to local democracy (quoted in Cheetham, 1980).

A. Beaumont-Dark (a Conservative backbencher) can provide our conclusion:

It is unique to have a bill on which all local government associations of whatever com- plexion are sensibly united against the Government’s measures.

It is also unique that no-one outside the Government has spoken up for the Bill (quoted in Jacobs, 1980).

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an acute and overt manner some of the general contradictions of state policy and of state institutions. In the very same speech - speaking as Secretary of State - Michael Heseltine can say first:

Local government must be very clear about the implications of deciding either deliberately to ignore or t o fight against measures which a democratically elected government wants to see achieved for the longer term interests of the nation . . . if individual authorities choose that path it must be open to me to take whatever action I feel is necessary to secure our essential ends. This is not intended as a threat. It is simply a reflec- tion of the importance of success (Secretary of State, 18 July 1979, para. 15, quoted in Stewart, 1980).

Seven paragraphs later, he continues:

We will sweep away tiresome and expensive controls over local government. Local councils are directly elected. They are answerable to their electorate. They do not need, they do not want, the fussy supervision of detail which now exists. I am determined to clear the way for local action at all levels (ibid., para. 22).

Description of legislative changes alone cannot explain why policy can be internally contradictory, even less how one facet relates, contradictorily, to the other. Both must be related to something else, the dimension of social relations underlying state action. This, perhaps, is where the value of the concept ‘local state’ may lie.

11 The capitalist state and theorizing the local state

Our essential aim is to develop an abstract account of the local state in capitalist society, which can then be used in the analysis of real situations. A successful theory should be able to relate historical differences and changes to those social processes crucial in causing such specific situations. And, if these crucial processes are different for national and subnational state institutions, then we can talk about a ‘theory of the local state’.

In order to do this we need to carry out two major tasks. First of all, we need to indicate the nature of those social relations institutionalized in the capitalist state; why are relations of production, the family and the community not sufficient for the reproduction of society in advanced capitalism? We must understand the specificities of the state as a particular form of capitalist social relations. Second, given that some of the social relations of capitalist society do partly take place in - and change their form in - state institutions, we must clarify whether these transcended relations also have a ‘local’ dimension. That is, do local social transactions take place in local state institutions, specific to local areas and autonomous from those taking place in the national state. We are asking, in other words, if social relations and social consciousness (especially class relations and class consciousness) are unevenly developed and if so, does this matter to the development of a local level of state institutions?

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1 Existing accounts of the local state

Our initial analysis of preexisting theories of ‘the local state’ (see Duncan and Goodwin, 1982) concluded that the inadequacies of radical work in answering these questions largely stemmed from a concentration on ‘things’ (such as functions or institutions) rather than the social relations that give rise to such things. Cockburn (1977) and Saunders (1979, chapter 4) seem alone in making explicit attempts to provide a theoretical account of the local state in capitalist society, and both show this inadequacy well. Others, whde talking about local state institutions, in fact, make no distinction between national and local states. The former is simply applied to the local level as if the two were interchangeable.

To return briefly to Cockburn and Saunders, two overall conclusions can be drawn whch are both important for the development of our argument. First of all, accepting that we should not expect a one-to-one correspondence between causation and hstorical outcomes (cf. Sayer, 1982), in virtue of what is the capitalist state able, or caused, to carry out apparently given functions? (Such as social reproduction, or providing physical infrastructures.) Relative autonomy, however expressed, is no good answer. All this concept does is to replace empirical questions (e.g. What are the limits to particular state actions?) with a theoretical definition which at the same time lacks a theoretical basis. Such a basis might be, for example, a theory of those crucial processes which actually make capitalist states relatively autonomous. Rather, all that is designated by the term is a certain room for man- oeuvre within constraints. This is fair enough in itself, perhaps, but it completely lacks any reference to mechanisms actually enabling, or causing, the capitalist state to act or function in particular ways. This is why, in practice, ‘relative autonomy’ often comes to depend on an economic determinism of the last resort. But usually either the links of this determination remain unspecified (so that it can only be rhetorical) or the determination actually becomes the simplistic determinism of the first resort. A firm basis for such claims can only be provided by analysis of the external and internal social relations of states. Second, why cannot the capitalist state institutionalize contradictory functions and processes? As Miliband (1 969, 49) pointed out in a crucial insight ‘subcentral. government’ is at the same time both ‘instrument of central control and obstacle to it’. This essential perception, which has become lost in the more recent literature, becomes more possible to maintain if we begin with the analysis of social relations, rather than with a description of things.

Indeed, the contradictory nature of the capitalist state, summed up in the tension between democracy and control, is a major feature which runs throughout the paper. It was brought out clearly by Heseltine’s speech and appears promin- ently in later discussions on the restructuring of local-central state relations. If the local state is viewed as a dialectical process of social relations, rather than as a functional institution, it becomes possible to examine it as simultaneously ‘agent and obstacle’ instead of reducing it merely to ‘agent’.

2 The capitalist state and class relations In this section we aim to sketch out those crucial social relations which produce

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the capitalist state. Perhaps the essential preliminary idea is that capitalist states have developed historically as one part of the social relations between subordinate and dominant classes. They did not suddenly appear as an autonomous entity standing above society in order to regulate the squabbles of competing capitals, nor were states just called into being by dominant classes as a convenient tool in their subordination of other classes. Capitalist states might have these functions (among others), but, by definition, dominant class behaviour, and indeed its very existence, rests upon its relationship with subordinate classes. Similarly, capitalist states may well fail in carrying out these functions, or may indeed make a mess of things for capital. There is no guarantee whatsoever that British monetarism will be in any way functional for British capital, either in terms of relations with other capitals or with subordinate classes. Rather our theory should be able to problematize why state actions can be functional for capital, and why this is not guaranteed.

A linked idea is that class relations in the state should not be seen as somehow divorced from class relations elsewhere, such as those at work. This is partly because production relations and economic changes themselves depend upon wider class relations, such as those of ownership and control. These wider relations also underly the development of states, and capitalist states are deeply involved in them, In this way an ‘economic crisis’ can never just be economic. It is a crisis of class relations - not just in the workplace, but in the class relations of dominance, ownership and control in general. The present situation in Britain is a good example of this. The Conservative government’s attempt to solve the economic crisis is overtly linked to the need to ‘reduce the power of the unions’, to reduce the autonomy of local government and, even, to send women back into the home.

Similarly, the reproduction of ‘the economic’ (more accurately, the reproduction of capital which is a social relation) depends on the reproduction of the working class and its relationship with dominant classes. This is a basic part of Marx’s theory of capitalism, although such interlinkages are often neglected in marxist work. We might add, however, that this implies that capitalism survives by changing, and this change is never assured or given. For the reproduction of social relations is likely to mean a certain production of new relations. Reformism and the development of social democracy is a good instance of this. Indeed, local government in Britain emerged as an important element of reformist, social democratic class relations and, as we hope to show below, the advantages - or the political necessity - of reproducing the working class (in housing, health, etc.) and acceding to demands for political influence also meant modification to relations of ownership, power and control.

In contrast, accounts have often reduced social democracy to little more than another mechanism of capitalist domination, developed by some unexplained supracapitalist (cf. Cockburn, 1977). Rather, in our view, social democracy in- stitutionalizes one outcome of class conflict and class compromise, and this has meant creating new social forms, such as electoral local government. Middlemass (1979) gives.a detailed empirical account for the British case at the national state


level. This outcome retains capitalist domination - but only to a specific extent and with the assent of the dominated. It is precisely this bounded extent that underlies many of the current problems for the British ruling class, and also the current attempts to change this difficult situation by finding a concensus to replace social democracy with ‘realism’ (cf. Hall, 1979; 1980; CSE State Group, 1979). It is no accident that a major plant of current policy is precisely that of diminish- ing local government autonomy and spending. But because the dominant depend on their relationship with the subordinate (capital is an appendage of labour just as much as the other way round), capitalist relations are rarely static and bourgeois hegemony is never assured. Reorganization of social relations - whether in, say, the labour process, government or the family - however necessary it may appear to maintain capital is also a risk to capital, and to the dominant classes. And then other people have their own ideas about reorganization.

In this view of the capitalist state as a historically conditioned form of the capital-labour relation we follow, with qualifications, ‘state derivation theory’ (i.e. the state is not autonomous but comes from basic social relations: see Jessop, 1977; Holloway and Picciotto, 1977). There are several qualifications that we would wish to make. Firstly, state forms are not simply understood by stating that they are related to the capital-labour relation. If they are, we also need to know how and it is inadequate to bring on history as some sort of error term to explain how a pure derivation has been changed to a real form. Partly, relations and changes may be outside the theoretical range of categories taken from Marx’s critique of political economy. (Marx’s provision of analytical categories is not the same as a ready theory of reformism, or patriarchy, that just needs application.) Partly, also, it is historical class relations that produce and change the capital-labour relation.

Second, it is functionalist, and to an extent ahistorical, simply to claim that the state ‘is necessary’ to separate political and economic relations in capitalism, ‘so as to ensure’ the apparent separation of relations of force and dominance from those of production, in turn necessary for maintaining the wage relation and so the extraction of surplus value (cf. Holloway and Picciotto, 1977). Again, we do not disagree that this is one function of the capitalist state. Rather, we take the implication of their argument against structuralism and functionalism. The function of separating the economic from the political must also be problematized and explained historically.

We would also stress that we would place more emphasis on the production of new relations in the attempted reproduction of old ones. As we have already indicated social democracy, and the entirely new set of social relations that it entailed, is a prime example. This was partly due to an attempt to restructure earlier forms of state relations, as we shall see below for the particular case of local government. Such a restructuring inevitably produces different forms of social relations. Moreover, these new forms are never the ‘complete solution’ but themselves produce conflict and contradictions which stimulate further change.

So far, then, we have only cleared the ground in making clear the preliminary


idea that capitalist state relations are one historical form of capital-labour relations. But what is particular about this form? How is the capitalist state linked to this relation? As the CSE State Group intimate, but have not as yet adequately developed, capitalist state relations can be seen as legal relations revolving around the idea of citizenship and the mechanism of the contract.

In order to disentangle ideas of the state as a thing, and the state as a social relation, the CSE State Group (1979) have used the distinction between ‘state form’ and ‘state apparatus’. We will follow the usage here. The latter refers to a set of physical institutions (such as local government), the former to relations between dominant and subordinate classes (the local state may be one example). A similar and more familiar distinction is that between the firm and the ‘labour process’. The CSE State Group maintains that the importance of the state lies not so much in what it does (its functions) but in how it does it. In those capitalist states with bourgeois democracy (the franchise, representative parliamentary politics), crucial socioeconomic relations and differences between social groups - such as those of classes, sexes or races - are transformed to the legal relations of supposedly individual, equal or identical citizens. The form of the state re- produces bourgeois relations, so that working-class consciousness or action becomes transformed into the less threatening behaviour of abstract and atomized citizens.

This is an important statement for our argument, and we must immediately specify its applicability more closely. Many capitalist states do not embody bourgeois democracy. The state form of citizenship is most developed in social-democratic ‘welfare’ states, and it is in these states that bourgeois ‘rights’ are more commonly universalized. Hence, our comments will have widest applicability for these cases. However, the concept and the effects of citizenship will still be important in all ‘franchise’ capitalist states (those with political democracy), and even though the effects may be limited, the concept of citizenship may still be important in non-franchise capitalist states. This importance rests on the ideal of capitalism itself, where people have been ‘freed’ and can supposedly dispose of their time and labour as they see fit, an ideal that is common to all capitalist states. Rather we would say that it is in social-democratic societies that the ‘false’ idea of citizenship has been given most reality. The universality of the state is only partially false in these societies; there is a tendency towards political equality and the welfare state does deliver (cf. Wolfe, 1974). Otherwise we can only retreat into a crude ideological determinism, where the ruling class simply and easily fills the rather dull heads of the working class with its own ideas. In other words we see the notion of citizenship as being central to any abstraction of those crucial social relations of the capitalist state; historically, however, with reference to particular states, the state form of citizenship has varying effects and reaches a culmination in social democracy.

Thus, we locate the essence of capitalist state relations in the separation of social relations (including class relations) from political relations, through the notion of citizenship. This abstraction of the political from class relations is specific to the capitalist state and Marx (like many others) saw the artificial separation

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of the state from society finally occurring in an undisguised way with the French Revolution and the birth of ‘the citizen’. With this event,

the class distinctions in civil society become merely social differences in private life, of no significance in political life. This accomplished the separation of political life and civil society (Marx, 1975, 146).

Class relations are broken down, individualized and absorbed into artificial legal relations of equal citizens - although, since the world is not actually made up of these equal citizens, the real distribution of power is replicated as the state acts out artificial equality. But, as the CSE State Group is at pains to make clear, there is nothing guaranteed or assured about the maintenance of the state form of social relations. Rather, they claim, dominant classes must constantly work to reimpose the state form as it tends to break down under the pressure of the real nature of socioeconomic differences between people and classes. And as the state form breaks down these differences become revealed all the more.

In what ways, and how, does citizenship transcend the fundamental inequali- ties of social relations and transform them into equal legal relations? Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls and Britain’s senior judge, illustrates this rather well. Thus in 1971 he summed up his judgement of a court action taken against squatters with the words:

The courts must, for the sake of law and order, take a fiim stand. They must refuse to admit the plea of necessity to the hungry and homeless and trust that their distress will be relieved by the charitable and the good.

The law cannot recognize the socioeconomic relations of squatters or property owners, judicially they must be seen as equal. In contrasting the ‘modern’ alienation of the state with the ‘traditional’ alienation of religion, Marx wrote:

Just as Christians are equal in heaven though unequal on earth, the individual members of the people become equal in the heaven of their political world, though unequal in their earthly existence in society (Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the state, edn 1975, 146).

The important point is not that people enter into legal relationships, but that these relations confer an illusion of individual equality. Hence the custom of contract between supposed equals, where a multinational firm is fictionally seen as a ‘judicial person’ in principle no different from a real individual. Like all social illusions, this misleading idea can be reflected in reality - but the partial success of the damages campaign over thalidomide, and indeed the very difficulty of achieving success which came to depend on the intervention of the national press, is one exception that proves the rule. As these real examples suggest, just because legal relations are formal and abstract, the basis and content of ‘equal’ political relations in the capitalist state is unequal real society; in denying the reality of social and economic divisions the state comes to rest upon them - but all the while denying it does so.


In the capitalist state, social relations, including the very important element of class relations, are transcended into the legal relations of citizenship. This maintains the illusion of equality in the political world at the same time as actively maintaining inequality in the ‘real’ socioeconomic world. Citizenship is one relation that makes class domination in capitalism appear neutral in the state just as it appears neutral in the market. The fetishism of commodity relations is comple- mented by the fetishism of state relations.

Yet, we repeat, this process of transcending social relations in the state is far from unproblematical. The rise of working-class institutions, such as trade unions, is just one problem in maintaining this situation. Modified forms of capitalist state relations are one response, notably the ‘corporate citizen’ in the corporatist state. Citizenship is no longer necessarily given an individual form, but is extended to corporate bodies representing many individuals albeit in a predetermined and limited way. The overall qualities of citizenship remain, however, in this corporatist form; class relations are transcended into ideal relations of individual (corporate) equality. It is now corporate bodies that are seen as equal in the heaven of their political world; tripartite agreements between business organizations, national governments and trade unions are one example (see Middlemas, 1979; Jessop, 1980, for detail).

This misleading separation of the economic and the political provides the basis for a whole framework of social relations (see CSE State Group, 1979; CSE London-Edinburgh Group, 1979). It becomes quite inadequate, when seen in this light, to analyse .the state as a political institution pure and simple, concerned with supposedly separate matters of government. This applies just as much when these matters are seen as ‘social reproduction’ or ‘collective consumption’ if the links with some (usually unexplored) totality of processes are ignored. Indeed, writers often restrict social relations to the sociology of ‘urban politics’, concerned with collective consumption (cf. Dunleavy, 1980). Analysis becomes pared down to narrowly political and urban levels, where the crucial linkages outside urban sociology - where it is people who actively make these links - are theoretically rejected (see Stedman Jones, 1971, for an instructive contrast). For instance, the ‘urban politics’ of factories, or domestic activity, certainly seem full of life and are often crucial to urban and regional change (see for example Stedman Jones, 1971; Foster, 1974; Friedman, 1977; Beynon and Wainwright, 1979; Mackenzie and Rose, 1982). But to admit the workplace or the home as ‘local politics’ would call into doubt the a priori divisions made between ‘urban’ and non-urban, and between allocation and production, which maintain this ‘new urban sociology’.

As we will go on to suggest, it is the links made between these spheres, and the uneven development of class relations and consciousness, that may often be crucial in understanding the local state. In ignoring these links we are unable to get much leverage on the uneven development of social consciousness and political action, which seems to be heavily influenced by the people’s experiences at work and in the family, as well as by local politics themselves. Nor, as we dis-

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cussed more generally above, is it much help simply to accept the local state as being ‘relatively autonomous’. This just begs the question. But if it is the concept of citizenship which is crucial to the emergence of the ‘state form’ in capitalist societies, how might this involve a subnational dimension? Is there a ‘local state’ in these terms? The next section tackles this question both theoretically and historically.

111 Restructuring social relations and the local state in Britain

1 The local state

How can the concept of the local state aid an adequate conceptual and analytical understanding of local-central relations and the ‘problem’ of local government in Britain? We feel that the answer to this can be found in two ways: first of all in turning emphasis towards the social relations of the capitalist state and secondly, in linking these to the importance of social consciousness in creating historical change. And both are unevenly developed.

Orthodox political science has usually seen local government as just the local agent of the central state. Paradoxically, marxist work has often come to repli- cate this view. As Dearlove puts it, in his book The reorganization of localgovern- men t:

the marxist tendency to see the state as a ‘centralized unity’ so that ‘there is no question of there being separate pieces of the state’ (Poulantzas, 1973; 1975) has meant that the emerging tradition of local political economy has chosen to accept the cogency of orthodox description and explanation (Dearlove, 1979, 216).

Cockburn’s theory of the state is just one example (although, fortunately, not her empirical work: see Duncan and Goodwin, 1982).

In contrast, Dearlove goes on to identify ‘the particular and enduring problem of local government’. He states:

. . . in all this century[this problem] has been one that transcends the immediate moment of any economic crisis . . . the problem of local government centres on its relative autc- nomy from both the concerns of the central state and the impact of dominant classes. Related to this, local government is especially vulnerable to working class demands, pressures or even control (1979, 24445).

Dearlove drew these conclusions from his study of local government reorganization in Britain. The problem - as expressed by the reformers - was one of substandard ‘councillor calibre’ and inefficient local units. This problem could be solved by creating large, bureaucratic, business-like local authorities. Dearlove suggests that one of the effects of reorganization was to diminish working-class control and its relative autonomy in local government. This, rather than ‘councillor calibre’ was the real problem. In small local units working-class councillors were more likely to bypass the official state form, maintain close links with class-conscious supporters,

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and take the welfare state as a gain for labour - to become ‘financially irresponsible’. Other commentators give a similar interpretation of local government reorganization and the spread of corporate management (Benington, 1976; Cockburn, 1977). Citizenship relations were reimposed over class relations. Indeed to an extent the perceived problem of ‘councillor calibre’ was replaced by that of ‘the loss of democracy’ and ‘participation’ - although this apparently did not necessi- tate a similar response.

Clay Cross, between 1968 and 1974, was a classical example (see Skinner and Longdon, 1974). A number of radical councillors, in a small ‘one-class’ local authority represented an extension of class relations and class consciousness from work and home to the council chamber. Against all national guidelines, the authority in- sisted on taking public housing as a social service and as a social right - and spent accordingly. Not entirely fortuitously, the authority was abolished with reorganization in 1974, and absorbed into a much larger and less class conscious unit. The separation of class relations from the political (based on legal relations of citizen- dup in the state) was reestablished.

Dearlove stops short of pursuing his objection to functionalist marxist studies by stressing the ‘relative autonomy’ of the local state. But this does little to solve the problem, for we need to know how did the ‘relative autonomy’ of local government appear, how relative is it, and why is local government so vulnerable to working-class demands or even control. To begin to answer such questions we must turn again towards the social relations of the capitalist state - the state form (which Dearlove is describing empirically).

Social relations, however, including class relations, are not a given category. They are indeed relational and intersubjective. Historical changes do not respond mechanically to given structures of social class, but they are created as people think about, enact and respond to these relations. The neglect of consciousness has indeed become a key part of current criticism of recent socialist thought and practice, a criticism partly raised by the feminist movement acd all the more telling in relation to the activities of socialist groups themselves. Cockburn’s empirical work on Lambeth, stressing consciousness in the family as just as important as work or politics, is one example. The authors of Beyond the fragments - a summary of this movement - ‘ironically’ quote Mandel when he says:

The immediate experience of workers [we should add ‘and other oppressed people’ - HW] is always partial and one-sided. Real workers, as opposed to idealized ones, are active in one factory, in one branch of industry, in one city. The lessons they draw from their immediate experiences are therefore always partial. The spontaneous activity of the working class, while it may be quite varied, is always fragmented and therefore, always tends to lead to fragmented consciousness (Rowbotham et al., 1979,243).

Fragmented and unevenly developed consciousness cannot therefore be reduced to given categories. The modelling of the state as an instrument of capital, rather than concentrating on social relations in the state, reinforces such reduction. If consciousness is unevenly and differentially developed so will be class relations and political relations. Specific social relations occurring in subnational (local)


areas cannot then be simply reduced to or equated with those occurring at national level. Indeed, one reason for the emergence of local government in its particular form was specifically to counter certain Zocal situations - although of course these social relations are in no way created by local government districts or likely to,be independent from national relations.

In a similar manner, national patterns of class relations should not be reduced to the international world relations between classes. The nation state specifies class relations historically in forming a particular set of institutions in a particular part of the space-economy, Tellingly, of course, the actual tendency has been to overemphasize this national state specificity at the expense of international (and local) relations. The latter have been neglected because the specification of consciousness and action is so strong at the national level, but this is by no means a permanent or natural phenomenon. Local relations were far more important than national ones in feudal society, and at present international relations are becoming more and more important. Indeed, not only are we witnessing a growth of international institutions, such as the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Court and the EEC, but the latter now has an international, elected parliament transferring the notion of citizenship across national boundaries. There is no good reason why it should be assumed, a priori, that national level institutions are all inclusive or, indeed, necessarily dominant.

If we include consciousness as an essential part of social relations we then cannot reduce local state relations to national relations. Quite possibly the apparatus of the state may, in its local forms, amount to an extension of the national state. But these local institutions of the state do not in themselves produce local class relations, even if - to a variable extent - they come to define these relations. (Or, indeed, seek to define them in a particular way.) Rather we should see such local state institutions as a response to local class relations. And in a franchise state these institutions will incorporate some electoral and even democratic element.

To return to the problem of ‘councillor calibre’, and to the ‘particular and enduring’ problem of local government. This can now be seen as the problem of imposing the state form - bureaucratic citizenship - onto local consciousness of class relations; local government can be one way of reducing local class relations to the legal relations of abstract, individual citizens. But alternatively, it can become one means of realizing and expressing such consciousness (cf. Miliband, 1969, and his references to the local state being simultaneously ‘agent ’and obstacle’).

We must stress that this remains very much ‘a problem’. In creating new social institutions in response to mounting pressures, and where such creation is a compromised and contentious process, no royal (or functionalist) road to success is assured. Quite the contrary, in fact. The social democratic compromise in Britain, whereby working-class political and economic organizations were involved in government, meant creating some considerable political and economic gains for the subordinate classes, and the process of involvement was itself fractious and


fractured (see Middlemas, 1979). This raises the question, why have local state institutions which incorporate an electoral and democratic element emerged at all? Why, as it were, raise the whole problem of local government in the first place? After all, capitalist states have usually worked fairly well without such institutions - in terms of functionality for dominant classes local agencies of national state are probably sufficient. Early nineteenth-century England is one example. Justices of the Peace, combining both judicial and administrative power, were the chief props of local authority in the rural areas and most towns. Like the oligarchic and self-appointed corporations of the ‘incorporated’ towns, they owed nothing to electoral politics. But, beginning with the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act (the local equivalent of the 1832 Reform Act for incorporated towns) and culminating in the 1894 Local Government Act, this ‘functional’ local state system was largely replaced by a system incorporating electoral politics based on near- universal male suffrage.

This new system was far from inevitable, however. A more ‘functional’ solution would surely have been to update the administration of the old incorporated towns, keeping a restricted suffrage and non-electoral institutions, and extending this solution to the developing industrial towns. The local government system would have resembled New Town corporations on a national basis, or the current idea of Urban Development Corporations, In these cases local government is largely a matter of local departments of the central state, and these have proved efficient enough for urban administration. They are probably more effective, from the viewpoint of central government, than all the ‘inefficiencies’ of local democracy. (As we shall see, this is indeed one strand of current policy.) Functionalism cannot tell us why an apparently more functional system was not adopted, and why a particular and specific form - including electoral politics and universal suffrage - was adopted.

Partly this is because functionalism only presents one-dimensional explanations (see Stedman Jones, 1977). As is well known, the old pre-1835 local government system had shown itself incapable of actually managing, physically, the new industrial towns. Just as seriously the old system was breaking down socially: in many of these towns the working class was developing its own centres of local power, as we shall see. And finally, the old system was differentially functional for different ruling-class groups. Thus many Tories, quite correctly in some respects, saw the 1835 legislation as a Whig plot to gain local political power (see Fraser, 1979). It is more a question of ruling groups being forced to respond by changing social relations and the social and physical forms so produced. This response was always partial and internally contradictory. Its functionality was never assured and affected different groups in different ways. Above all, it was trying to accommodate the quite different functionality of working-class groups.

Cockburn (1977,2) misrepresents this process in stating:

Local councils don’t spring from ancient rights of self-government but are, and under capitalism always have been, an aspect of national government which is in turn part of the state.


This is perhaps necessary enough in tilting against ahistorical views of a neutral and benevolent state perfectly representing the wishes of the people. But it is also a somewhat ahistorical account in its turn; an account which reinforces her theoretical view of the state as simply an invention of capitalist domination. An- cient rights of self-government in Britain (which did exist to an extent for those counted as full members of the community, e.g. females and a large class of slaves were usually excluded) were indeed fairly well extinguished in the feudalization of Enghsh and Scottish society and the conquest of the Celtic ‘fringe’. For male members of the bourgeoisie and the propertied classes in general, democratic political rights were regained between the sixteenth and mid nineteenth centuries, including violent spasms like the English Civil War and the ‘Glorious Revolution’. For the male working class in Britain these political rights were successfully fought for during the nineteenth century. An integral part of this success was the establishment of a national system of local government where (perhaps for the first time since archaic Anglo-Saxon society) representatives with local executive power were elected through near-universal male suffrage. Since then, ‘the local-central state system has been a periodic battleground, as we shall outline later. What- ever the outcome of these conflicts, local government has been no static or simple instrument of capital. Cockburn’s dichotomy of ancient rights of self-government or agencies of the national state is far too simple - local government with elections based on local suffrage was achieved in class conflict over access to political power, and conflict has continued over the way in which this system should evolve.

The question which now faces dominant classes is how to respond to, and best accommodate, the implications of local electoral politics. Dearlove describes one instance with the so-called ‘councillor calibre’ problem. One answer in that case was to replace small local authorities by larger, more remote ones. Another was to introduce corporate management, replacing the external rationale of the public service with the internal rationale of a corporate unit. Both spending and decision- making would be defined by corporate goals rather than service goals (see Benning- ton, 1976; Cockburn, 1977; Dearlove, 1979). To generalize, one response to the problem of local government is to attempt to restructure it in order both to transcend class relations with bureaucratic relations of the ‘state form’, and to remove important social transactions from the domain of electoral local politics. Another response is to maintain hierarchical and bureaucratic work processes within state services and institutions. The electoral element may have to be democratic, but service provision should continue to resemble the ‘fetishism of the commodity’.

Clearly we cannot provide a history of British local government here (see Keith- Lucas and achards, 1978). What we will do, however, is to interpret from this viewpoint some key periods of change in central-local relations, and give some particularly illustrative examples of the interaction between state form and class relations. In this way we can provide some historical and social explanation of current policy as well as drawing out further those themes introduced earlier. Our attention will be primarily directed to three cases; ‘radical’ Oldham between 1814 and 1847, Poplar and poplarism in the 1920s; and the Local Government,


Planning and Land Act 1980 (see Duncan and Goodwin, 1980; Dickens et al, forthcoming, for more detail.)

2 Radical Oldham, the executive of the bourgeoisie, and the transition to social democracy

Radical Oldham in the first half of the nineteenth century comes nearest to a ‘local state’ in the sense of independence from the central state. Simply put, in many crucial repsects the writ of the central state - still the classic ‘executive of the bourgeoisie’ - did not run in Oldham. This was because the working class took over or rendered impotent local state institutions and so stripped the local executive of the bourgeoisie of political power. Local working-class control was effective between 1812 and 1847, with virtual working-class political hegemony in the 1820s and 1830s (see Foster, 1974, on which this account is based). Al- though Oldham was an extreme case, it was not atypical. In many northern towns local state authority was quite precarious at that time. One often quoted illustra- tion is that in 1813 more British troops were stationed in the West Riding of Yorkshire than were fighting the French in Spain.

The working class in Oldham was able to conduct wage bargaining in combination and conduct organized union activities despite the illegality of most of these actions throughout the period. Similarly, the New Poor Law of 1834 could not be implemented in Oldham until 1847. The law of the land did not always apply in Oldham and in large part this resulted from the loss of central state control over local administration. The local police, vestry commissioners, poor-law guardians and other local officials refused to cooperate with outside authorities, and were controlled by, or made up of, the unenfranchised and illegally organized working class. Despite their inability to vote workers managed to get their preferred radical candidates elected as MP from 183247 using boycotts, political patronage and social pressures in general.

This system of local working-class control broke down in two ways. First, one ruling-class response was to attempt to restructure the mechanisms and institutions of state authority in their favour, and to reduce local autonomy in favour of the national state in which they were clearly dominant. Control over the police was a key example. Despite a number of attempts to displace working-class control by various legislative measures, this did not succeed until the establishment of a county police force in 1839, with no local electoral element whatsoever. In 1842, for instance, local activists could be arrested in dawn raids in a way quite impossible before. Together with the erection of a permanent barracks (to maintain a permanent military presence without billeting) this allowed the reactivation of the spy system (many had gone over to the opposition!) and the authority of JPs.

But perhaps more important than outright repression and the failure of the direct working-class challenge to capitalist social relations (and therefore the national state of the time) was the gradual process of restructuring these relations. According to Foster, both ruling-class and working-class consciousness changed in the direction of class compromise, articulated both nationally and locally in


the period of liberalization starting in the 1840s. Partly, this was because working- class consciousness per se was replaced by a more sectional consciousness. But fundamentally, as Foster is at pains to make clear, these two trends were not the autonomous machinations of an all-knowing super capitalist, but were responses developing in reaction to the advances of the working class, both directly and indirectly. (For example, the transition from absolute to relative exploitation of labour, which facilitated the emergence of a sectional aristocracy of labour, was in turn partly forced by working-class political and economic pressure.) Similarly, restructuring of state relations could not simply return to stage one; both liberalization and repression created new forms, as well as reestablishing some of the old. The same can be said for class relations in general.

The attempt to accommodate the problem of the worlung class through liberalization set in process the whole chain of events leading to social democracy. Middlemas (1979), who interprets modern British history as essentially the problem of integrating working-class political and economic power, and institutions, so as to avoid collapse, considers this compromise largely established by the 1920s, if substantially consolidated after 1945. One part of the process, almost predic- table for observers in the 183Os, was political democracy for the working class. This was finally achieved for men in 1918, although the majority of working- class men had the vote after 1884. Clearly it would have been a nonsense if local government had been excluded from this settlement. However, just as sharing the central state with working-class political and economic institutions raised as many questions as it solved, so did sharing local government. The contradictions between central and local state institutions were reaffirmed.

It is not that representative and electoral local government in itself inevitably produced the ‘particular and enduring problem’ described by Dearlove.* It is rather the case that this system laid local state power open to a particular problem - vulnerability to class conscious working-class groups. Real class relations and class conflicts constantly interrupt the state form and disturb the class compromise so delicately assembled. Especially, perhaps, is this most likely locally, where class relations are more easily discerned, consciousness more directed and the links between council chamber and the world outside more easily made. And when this happens, then one response by dominant classes using the national state is the attempt to restructure central-local relations and the form of the local state, so as to relieve or circumvent these problems.

3 The franchise state and the dangers of local government autonomy

Following the extension of the franchise in 1884, and the establishment of representative local government, local politics became important to the growth of

Compare with Lord Salisbury’s reassurance to his fellow peers that landed interests would survive the passage of the 1888 Local Government Bill. Not only would, they still rule, now through the new County Councils, but this rule would be all the more secure in resting on democratic election (Middlemas, 1979, 17). Recent work suggests that agricultural labourers have little independent local political voice (Newby er al., 1978).


the labour movement, both as a political springboard and as a means of attaining socialist objectives. Often it was political and policy change at the local level whch forced changes at national level, as is shown quite clearly with housing provision (Byrne and Damer, 1980; Melling, 1980). This independent and in- fluential socialist intervention in local politics clearly left the dominant classes with a problem, especially when the Labour Party and Trade Unions had not been fully integrated into compromise politics. The case of Poplar and ‘poplarism’ thrust these problems into the face of the national state, and shows up well the processes making both poplarism possible and the response of restructuring local- central relations. The results of this conflict were also historically important; they effectively set the bounds for local-central relations and spheres of influence up to the 1970s.

In Poplar between 1920 and 1927 the councillors and poor-law guardians took direct and sometimes illegal action to relieve poverty and unemployment in the borough. These actions were self-consciously seen as part of a programme to establish as much of socialism as possible within the area, including such policies as minimum local authority wages and equal pay for women. The effect was to force some important national policy changes, such as the equalization of costs and services between richer and poorer areas, or poor-relief minima. Moreover, poplarism also challenged all the accepted general principles of labour discipline and moral economy established by the 1834 Poor Law, opened up the whole issue of income redistribution, and questioned the relationships between unemployment, wages, profit levels and poor relief (see Branson, 1979, from which our account is drawn). By the mid 1920s about 200 local Boards of Guardians (who administered the poor-law locally) and many councils were following the example of Poplar in defying central government by spending heavily on local poor relief and other social services. These Boards and Councils were mostly in east London, south Wales, northern England and central Scotland, that is areas of local working-class consciousness and organization, and for the same reason it seemed impossible to limit local autonomy and local spending.

In response to poplarism ‘the cabinet came within a hair’s breadth of disen- franchising hundreds of thousands of citizens, and each time it only drew back for fear of the political repercussions’ (Deacon and Briggs, 1974, 364). As well as considering removing the franchise from those on poor relief, the cabinet also considered reintroducing plural votes for business interests, and was thus ready to counter the problem of local working-class control (or ‘councillor calibre’ in Poplar) by removing local political equality. This course of action was never followed, and instead local-central relations were reorganized to limit local autonomy and to remove important state services from the local electoral orbit. National government refused to sanction local board debts until they reneged on local policy goals and reduced expenditure, used powers to suspend local boards and replace them with government appointed bodies (at West Ham, Chester-le-Street, Bedwelty), and introduced legislation to surcharge and disqualify wayward councillors or poor-law guardians who sought to act for their local electorate in opposi-


tion to national government.3 (The same legislation was later used against the councillors of Clay Cross.) The locally elected Boards of Poor Law Guardians, who had shown themselves to be easily influenced by local elections and working- class organizations such as the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, were replaced by a centralized system. By 1928, 635 local Boards of Guardians were replaced by the National Insurance System, administered centrally by the Mini- stry of Labour. It is perhaps not so much that municipal socialism is inevitably impossible in a capitalist country, but that legislation like this makes it impossible to find out.

It is important to our argument to point to the contradiction between democracy and control embedded in social-democratic state relations that made the phenomenon of ‘poplarism’ possible, and helped to structure the responses to it. Although contemporary economic problems and economic dogmas made it seem imperative for the dominant classes to reduce public spending (as well as wages and taxes), the election of local poor-law guardians under universal suffrage led to ‘a quite unique degree of community involvement in social security administration’ (Deacon and Briggs, 1974, 352). This community involvement not only led to higher public expenditure in some areas, but also threatened to spread to local government as a whole with the municipal socialism of areas like Poplar. It appear- ed to the cabinet that a political movement for direct action and redistributive socialism was under creation, a ‘movement which could not be assumed to confine itself to local government’ (Deacon and Briggs, 1974, 352). Current parallels seems quite compelling. Indeed one part of the current crisis is the ‘ungoverna- bility’ of Britain, stimulated by inefficient and irresponsible ‘municipal marxism’.

Although threatened by the potential - and actual - consequences of working- class suffrage in local government, the cabinet of the 1920s was unable to restrict the franchise, despite the apparent need to do so. Not only were the British dominant classes too weak to undertake such a strong challenge to working-class power (compare with Italy after 1924, or Spain after 1939, where this challenge was successful) but these classes were too deeply embedded in class compromise to withdraw so easily. It would have been difficult to disenfranchise a large part of the Working-class without disturbing the ideology of political equality existing in

The Poplar councillors had shown themselves ready to go to prison and govern from prison. George Lansbury, leader of the Poplar Labour Group, declared, ‘If we have to choose between contempt of the poor and contempt of the court, it will be contempt of the court’ (quoted in Branson, 1979,46). Hence disqualification from office was introduced after imprisonment had failed.

George Lansbury described the 1927 Audit Act more vividly:

Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill, Birkenhead and the rest do not mind Labour or Socialist majorities that are content to keep things as they are. They do not object to a Labour government that is content to leave untouched the sacred ark of the covenant of capitalism . . . . Our governing class, with the ingenuity and cunning they know so well how to exercise, allow the workers to retain all the outward signs and symbols of democracy. We elect municipal councils and other authorities, but after election if they dare to put socialist principles in operation, then the ‘artful dodgers’ who rule us scheme and plot to overthrow Labour majorities (quoted in Branson, 1979, 224-25).


abstraction from real social relations, an ideology held by dominant groups just as much (if not more) than subordinate ones. As we have seen, the restructuring of state procedures and institutions proved a safer and ideologically more justi- fied course of action in response to working-class advance (see Deacon and Briggs, 1974)! Even then, and this is also important to our argument, it seems that it was difficult for restructuring to proceed until working-class organization became weakened after the failure of the 1926 general strike.

An ultimate threat in the problem of local government is that local state institutions may move outside, or bypass, official state forms and instead become part of a locally class-conscious, and popular, labour movement. The council chamber becomes just another working-class institution. Poplar in the 1920s and Clay Cross in the early 1970s are just two examples. At times this threat becomes more generalized, as in Sweden in the early part of this century. In this case workers’ ‘local authorities’ (arbefarekommun) were set up in parallel with official local authorities (kommun) in areas of working-class strength, to act as coordinating institutions for local working-class political, economic, consumer and leisure institutions. In some sense an alternative workers’ state was developing, based around local working-class institutions, whose decisions were merely rubber- stamped by the official authorities. (The ‘Fed’ in prewar south Wales appears similar in many respects: Francis and Smith, 1980.) With hindsight, rather than with functionalism - for one of the major aims of the Swedish labour movement at the time was universal suffrage - enfranchising the male working class in 1909 may have been one of the more effective means of absorbing this potential alternative workers’ state into an official capitalist state of equal citizens.

It must be pointed out that the working class are not the only ones able to gain from local autonomy. In many ways alternative bourgeois states are main- tained today. (Saunders, 1979, describes such a situation in Croydon, where council policy was locally determined in the Chamber of Commerce and Rotary Club rather than the arbefarekommun or Miners’ Lodge.) Similarly, local governmeqt autonomy may benefit different interest groups among the bourgeoisie, witness the landowners and large farmers who were able to protect their interests through amendments to the 1980 Housing Act.5

Such- historical examples do, however, dlustrate two important points. First of all they suggest the danger for class domination inherent in local political democracy, where the state form is particularly vulnerable to replacement by class relations. Unfortunately for the dominant classes, such democracy is an integral part of compromises enacted to maintain capitalist relations in social democracy

When mandatory council house sales threatened the costs, or even the survival, of the agricultural labour force as their houses disappeared into second homes, pressure from the Country Landowners’ Association and the National Farmers’ Union resulted in successful amendments to the 1980 Housing Act in the Lords. Restrictive covenants, or preemptive covenants, on council house sales have been allowed in National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and in designated ‘rural areas’ on application to the Secretary of State. This shows how local authority autonomy can be useful in protecting the interests of particular ruling class groups, especially useful perhaps for weaker sectional or regional interests.


and cannot simply be withdrawn. Second, the examples underline the importance of a generalized political consciousness based around local situations in the articu- lation of this ‘problem’. Local class relations cannot be simply reduced to national relations just because the institutional apparatus of the state is designed that way.

IV The Local Government, Planning and Land Act (1980) revisited

We have come a long way from Heseltine’s 1979 speech, with which we ended section I. In this final section of the paper we will draw on the preceding theoretical work to further our central concern; an adequate conceptual understanding of current government policy towards local-central relations. As we argued in the introduction, we require an understanding of the reasons for such policy changes, which goes beyond the description of legislative change in isolation, and which does not depend on ahistorical notions of the all-knowing state acting precisely in the interests of capital.

As we suggested in thc last section successive British governments have faced continuous pressure to maintain, and hence restructure, capitalist social relations as institutionalized in the ‘state form’. This is Dearlove’s ‘particular and enduring problem of local government in all of this century’ (1979,244). Present legislation cannot be seen as an isolated item of policy, introduced purely as a response to current economic crisis or particular ‘Thatcherite’ ideology (however important these are as contingent factors). Rather, recent Conservative legislation should be seen as the latest stage in a long history of government restructuring in local- central relations although of course it constitutes a significant step in this process. As long ago as 1933 Robson could write:

It is indisputable [that the introduction of the Block Grant in 1929 and the National Economy Act of 1931) betoken a subordination of local autonomy to the dictates of the central power, which if pursued, will be the virtual end of local government (edn 1966,53-54).

Note that the language employed is almost exactly mirrored by the current debate where - among other things - the proposal is t o reintroduce a centrally controlled block grant. Robson also points out that the ‘partnership’ between central and local government had first been broken almost 130 years before he was writing with the 1834 Poor Law Act. And, as we have seen, the origins of the present system of local government in Britain can be traced back as far as the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act.

The main provisions of the 1980 Local Government, Planning and Land Act are for a new Rates Support Grant (RSG) system, for the setting up of Free Enter- prise Zones, and for the establishment of Urban Development Areas to be administered by government appointed Urban Development Corporations. Beside these considerable extensions of central control, ‘rolling back the state’ is mostly confined to a host of petty provisions and repealing the Community Land Act (but


even this is not unambiguous, see Duncan and Goodwin, 1980). Both Free Enter- prise Zones and Urban Development Corporations are presented as freeing entre- preneurship from state control. But, as we shall see, this begs the question. When ‘the state is rolled back’ this generally means that the state providing social services, public safeguards or public intervention is rolled back; the state extending central power over local autonomy is rolled forward. The 1980 Housing Act - which makes it mandatory for local authorities to sell council housing and extends central government power to ensure such action - is perhaps even clearer in this respect.

We will not pursue here the details of this legislation. Nor will we relate the considerable criticism of its intentions, methods and likely effects (see Forest and Murie, 1978; Anderson, 1980; Burgess and Travers, 1980; Hird and Wheen, 1980). Rather, we will attempt to draw out some implications for local-central relations and local autonomy. How will local state restructuring proceed in this case?

The combination of Free Enterprise Zones and Urban Development Corpora- tions shows well one possible response to the ‘inefficiencies’ of local democracy. Essentially the response is t o remove it. Free Enterprise Zones allow exemption from development land tax, commercial and industrial rates and training levies. Planning controls are relaxed and capital allowances increased. At the moment, Enterprise Zones seem set only to subsidize employment shifts from one area to another, rather than create‘ new employment, and it is quite likely that property interests will be the major benefactors. Even this will be achieved at the expense of what few rights local residents now have to object to industrial and commercial development.

Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) represent even more of a major change in local-central relations. The only restriction on the Secretary of State in establishing a UDC is that it should be ‘in the national interest’ (whatever that is). A UDC’s major powers include the ability to acquire public land within its boundaries and extended rights to compulsory purchase private land, effectively removing road-building, planning and housing policies over such land from local authorities. The general aim seems to be commercial development without local authority involvement or indeed without pressure from any sort of local politics. Ironically enough, in the London docklands where George Lansbury and his fellow Poplar councillors achieved overwhelming electoral mandates in their pursuit of municipal socialism, the UDC now almost completely bypasses the electoral process. Local political organizations - the Labour Party and the Joint Dockland’s Action Group alike - are cut off from important areas of local government. As Geoffrey Rippon (a leading Conservative MP, and former Minister for the Environ- ment) put it, UDCs will ‘transfer t o a statutory corporation - essentially the crea- ture of the minister involving wide powers of patronage and control - many of the normal functions of local government’ (The Guardian, 16 July 1980).

The preamble of the 1980 Local Government Bill describes itself as, ‘A Bill t o relax controls over local government’. Heseltine, in 1979, claimed to reverse the situation where ‘the liberties of local government have been eroded by the

178 712e local state and restructuring social relations: theory and practice

interference of central government’ (quoted in Stewart, 1980). It seems clear enough that this rhetoric refers to rolling back the welfare state; the liberty of local government to follow a different policy evokes quite a different response. The new Rates Support Grant system gives central government power to investigate every aspect of local authority spending, and individual councils can now be pena- lized both for spending above a centrally defiied norm, and for levying rates above a certain level. These measures combined with the control of all capital expenditure represent new and increased constraints on local authority freedom, much greater than the controls relaxed by the Act. Any latter-day poplarism will be difficult to achieve, and if Oldham in the 1830s approached one extreme of the ‘local state’ (independent local state) Docklands in 1980 approaches the other (local agent of national government).

Thls extreme only exists in two areas at present (London docklands and Mersey- side). Nor, we assume, could UDC powers themselves readily be generalized very far. Nonetheless, they do set an important precedent in local-central relations. Certainly Geoffrey Howe seems to see it like this. Talking about Free Enterprise Zones in 1978, he said:

the remedies that need to be applied generally should be even more dramatically applied in the more afflicted areas . . . the idea would be to set up test market areas or labora- tories in which to enable fresh policies to prime the pump of prosperity, and to establish their potential for doing so elsewhere (26 June 1978, quoted in Anderson, 1982).

The inability of local democracy to act fast for commercial development could well become generalized as another ‘councillor calibre’ problem - although this time the problem would be widened to ‘local government calibre’. At the present moment the government is considering compulsory ‘extraordinary audits’ of local authorities, the reintroduction of the ‘business vote’ in local elections, and new legislation going even further to curb local government autonomy than the ‘dicta- torial’ 1980 Act (see The Guardian, 7 March 1981, 17 January 1981, 23 March 1981). The government is preparing new legislation to extend to England and Wales what Heseltine has called the ‘Scottish solution’ to the problem of local government.6 The new bill will limit the level of business rate increases, and tighten up further the audit system. Any extra spending over a centrally stipu- lated ‘reasonable’ level must be financed from domestic rates, subject to compulsory local referenda where ‘Ministers believe that political and media pressure will usually ensure electoral disapproval’ (i%e Guardian, 3 July 1981). Even this is not a final solution. Apparently the government would ideally like to abolish the metropolitan county councils and the Greater London Council entirely - all controlled by Labour after the 1981 elections, and most committed to higher public spending so as to pursue ‘progressive’ policies. Under this scheme, public

Under the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) (Scotland) Act 1981, money paid in rate support grants can be stopped to counterbalance ‘excessive and unreasonable spending’, and local authorities are unable to levy supplementary rates or borrow to make up for this. Under this legislation Lothian Regional Council is currently suffering huge cuts of E47 million.


transport, police and strategic planning would follow social services out of local electoral politics (The Guardian, 19 June 1981).

The contrast between ‘rolling forward state power’ and ‘rolling back the welfare state’ is repeated in other policy areas of current legislation. We might rename this contrast as the contradiction between control and democracy established in social democratic states. At the time of Poplar this was seen as the difficulty of reconciling ‘sound finance’ with ‘popular consent’. Heseltine in his 1979 speech talked of the need to secure his government’s ‘essential ends’ against possible irresponsibility on the part of local government; Tom King (Local Government Minister) is more colourful - if more distasteful - in condemning the ‘municipal marxism’ of ‘townhall Pol Pots’ who do not support government approved policies. Ian Bancroft, head of the Home Civil Service, appropriately speaks less wildly (and in fact he was attempting to defend the Civil Service from the right): ‘the process of government administration’ he says ‘can be seen to be inherently in- consistent and even inherently inefficient, almost by definition’. The problem is one of the ‘fundamental inefficiency of any democratic process’ (The Guardian 10 August 1980).

We shall finish, as we began, with Heseltine speaking about the problem of local government:

I might have to go back to Parliament and to ask people that the traditional relationship between central and local government be changed. I don’t want this to happen, because I think it would probably involve me asking for powers of a sort that would be, in the normal run of things, to be avoided.

But the nature of my problem is such that I cannot allow the government’s economic strategy to be deliberately ignored for the party polical reasons, by the sort of authority that is beginning to emerge on the left of the political spectrum (The Guardian, 23 March 1981).

Although local government was worth defending as a valuable part of the British constitution, central government had to be able to govern: ‘In the end it must prevail’.

V Concluding discussion

In this paper we have tried to link the present reorganization of central-local relations in Britain to a social and historical context, and in this way to provide a conceptual understanding of current events. In part, we carried this out by developing the concept of the ‘local state’, attempting to identify crucial social relations specific to the state and existing autonomously on the subnational level. This attempt to ‘rescue’ the concept of the local state itself begs other important questions, however, like that of ‘consciousness’. Nevertheless, we hope to have demon- strated at the least that to understand changes in state policy - like Heseltine’s 1980 Local Government Act - it is necessary to connect them to the development

180 l%e local state and restructuring social relations: theory and practice

of social relations, especially class relations, and to the basis of these relations. State action does not appear in isolation, but neither is it simply responding to apparently pregiven functions. In this way appealing to the ‘relative autonomy’ of the capitalist state is little better in explanatory terms than seeing legislation as self-explanatory. In virtue of what does a specific state have these functions, and what mechanisms cause it to be relatively autonomous or to carry out particular actions?

In this view current legislation is not only an attempt to introduce major change in central-local government relations. It also attempts to restructure capitalist social relations. For instance, greater central control over local government policy and spending also means further extension of the bureaucratic, apparently class- less logic of the ‘state form’ over local political consciousness. The political process leading to ‘municipal marxism’ in Sheffield or Lambeth can be replaced by ‘neutral’ civil service procedures in Marsham Street. At one extreme, if the principles of UDCs were to become generalized, this would amount to one of the most sub- stantial changes in political relations since the late nineteenth century (cf. Hesel- tine’s hints about the need to change ‘the traditional relation between central and local government’).

Equally, we can see that this process of restructuring is indeed a process, not an imposition from above by an all-powerful state. The Local Government, Planning and Land Bill as originally presented to parliament was already a compromised document; Free Enterprise Zones, for instance, are only partly the ‘Hong-Kong’ solution originally envisaged. The Bill only just survived a stormy passage in the House of Lords - Tory opposition representing the Association of County Councils was only bought off at the last minute by a number of concessions (see 7he Guard- ian, 6 October 1980). Moreover, Heseltine has had to change completely his intended 1982 Local Government Act in the face of a threatened revolt by his own Tory MPs, who were alarmed at the proposed referendum to be held if a council wished to increase its spending. Restructuring is not simply predetermined, or worked out in advance and then imposed from above; rather its form is determined as a historical process of social relations.

Indeed, restructuring can work both ways. The authors of Red Bologna were at pains to point out (quoting the mayor) that, even if Bologna was a notable exception to the administrative chaos of Italy, red islands are not possible in ‘the modern world’ (Jaggi et al., 1977, 187). However much of Bologna’s ruling communist party wants to think and act in a socialist manner, the local authority is dependent on financial policies, legal relations and a legislative framework which are all dominated by central government. The media, and other influences on cultural life, are often largely autonomous from local pressure but very susceptible to central interests; the town shares the authoritarian and patriarchal attitudes of Italy as a whole. Nonetheless, the mayor claims that Bologna still has a significance. This lies in the fact that:

. . . its achievements have not been the results of technocratic - Fabian decisions from the top, but of i! framework of local democracy which has involved wider and wider strata of the population (Jaggi, 1977, 27).


According to the authors, the combination of changes occurring at the central level of Italy, together with new forms of participation at the local 1evel;like those in Bologna, offers the possibility of overcoming the separation of political society from civil society which they see as the cornerstone of the bourgeois state.7

Another major conclusion is that, although we might be concerned with those social relations institutionalized in the British state, such relations cannot be easily cut off from other components of capitalist social relations. For instance, this century has seen a massive restructuring of the labour process and the workplace as well as relations in state institutions. Changing methods of working are dependent on, and often largely concerned with, a changing methods of domination and control. In other words restructuring of work is just as much social, cultural and political as economic. In many cases formal political relations and alterations are an integral part of change at work as a glance at labour history or industrial history quickly shows. Social relations in the family have also changed considerably, and this is not unconnected with the increased participation of married women in the labour force - without which recent industrial restructuring would have taken a different course (see, for instance, Friedman, 1977; Massey and Meagan, 1979; 1982).

At the time of writing f a d y life is changing again, as spending cutbacks reduce state services in reproduction and welfare. As with Poplar in the 1920s or Oldham in the early nineteenth century, local and national, economic and political are interrelated, and the old contradiction between democracy and control is once more highlighted by the difficulties of reconciling ‘sound finance’ with popular consent. Current attempts to dismantle parts of the welfare state should be seen together with the restructuring of local state relations, where the latter has made it increasingly difficult for conscious opponents to control decision-making bodies and so oppose or stop cuts in public spending. Or how would the government deal with over three million unemployed - and cut social security simultaneously - if state assistance was still administered locally by elected bodies, or if the drastic legal actions introduced in 1927 to disqualify and surcharge overspending councillors did not exist? Similarly, both dismantling and restructuring are explicitly seen as just one component of the larger problem of tackling Britain’s economic crisis, and injecting a new‘realism’ into political life.

Finally, we should turn to one of the major lacunae of the paper - that of social consciousness. This was seen as one crucial element of the specificity of the local state - with consciousness local social relations could not be simply reduced to national ones. Nevertheless, the term is introduced without much amplification and the question of how and why different levels and natures of social consciousness develop is largely neglected.

Fortunately, research is beginning to turn towards this crucial area. For instance, the level and nature of social consciousness seems to be heavily influenced

The authors of Red Bologna, drawing on the Italian New Left, also show an early appreciation of the importance of the ‘state form’ of political equality and citizenship in abstracting from real class relations. (See Jag i et al., 1977, 25-28).


by people’s experiences at work - factors such as the level of independence of workers, the nature of their cooperation, working methods and organization seem important here (see, for example, Cooke, 1981). This is not just a matter of paid work, of course; the apparent possibilities of social mobility, or the nature of family life are also likely to be important to ideas about the social and political world and the individual’s place in it (see Mackenzie and Rose, 1982). The sexual division of paid and unpaid work, and the nature of parent-child relationships will also affect this. Partly, also, experiences at work will be interpreted at home - and while the separation between work and home is important, case studies nor- mally show that this is not an unbridgeable, or unbridged, chasm. It is how this separation is bridged that is important. The apparent possibilities of changing things, for example in local government itself, is also important. In certain locali- ties or regions a radical working class gains cultural hegemony (see, for example, Francis and Smith, 1980; MacIntyre, 1980) and sometimes this hegemony is reflected nationally (see Scase, 1977, for an interesting comparison of Swedish and Engllsh workers). We must then become concerned with the strength and origins of opposing ideas.

For instance, in Britain the political consciousness of the industrial bourgeoisie and much of the middle class in general seems to have been heavily influenced by the internal class relations of landowners and gentry, far more than elsewhere in Europe. Here too, regional political cultures are apparent (e.g. in Catalonia or West Yorkshire). It may be that state policy is sometimes more a matter of regional class conflict and compromises, institutionalized nationally, than national class relations (as the cases of British housing policy and regional policy seem to suggest: see Melling, 1980; Massey and Meagan, 1982). It is perhaps in the analysis of regional and local social consciousness that the concept ‘local state’ will find most utility.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful t o Andrew Sayer, the urban and regional studies seminar at Sussex University, and our colleagues on the research project ‘Housing and the state in Britain and Sweden’ for comments on earlier drafts.

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L‘Ctude vise i replacer la reorganisation actuelle des relations &tat central4tat local en Grande- Bretagne dans un contexte social et historique, et par l i , d’apporter une comprkhension con- ceptuelle des kvknements du moment. Elle developpe tout d’abord le concept d’ %tat local’ en tentant d’identifier les relations sociales cruciales propres I’Btat capitaliste et ayant une existence autonome aux niveaux subnationaux. Pour cela, il y a eu lieu d’examiner les in- suffisances des theories recentes sur I’ktat local par rapport i la conceptualisation de 1’6tat capitaliste dans son ensemble. L‘etude se base ensuite sur cette discussion pour analyser le changement historique des relations &tat local - &tat central en Grand-Bretagne. Cette partie met en kvidence certaines pkriodescles de changement et certains exemples illustrant parti- culierement bien l’action rkciproque entre la forme de 1’6tat et les relations de classe, la lumiere de la legislation actuelle. Enfin, le developpement inkgal de la conscience sociale et politique est mis en evidence comme etant un element crucial du caractere specifique de I’ %tat local’.

Die Arbeit versucht, die derzeitige Umstrukturierung der Beziehungen Zwischen Zentral- und Lokalverwaltung in Grofibritannien in einem sozialen und historischen Rahmen zu betrachten und damit ein Konzept zum Verstandnis der derzeitigen Ereingnisse zu schaffen. Die Verfasser entwickeln zuerst das Konzept des ’lokalen Staates’, indem sie versuchen, wesentliche soziale Beziehungen zu identifizieren, die fur eine kapitalistische Gesellschaft charakteristisch sind und autonom auf subnationaler Ebene existieren. Hierzu war eine Untersuchung der Unzu- langlichkeiten jiingster Theorien iiber den Lokalstaat in bezug auf das Konzept des kapital- istischen Staates als Ganzes erforderlich. Auf der Grundlage dieser Erorterung analysieren die Verfasser sodann die historischen Veranderungen bei den Beziehungen zwischen Lokal-und Zentralverwaltung in Grofibritannien. Dieser Teil der Arbeit befal3t sich mit einigen aussch- laggebenden Perioden der Veranderung und einigen besonders anschaulichen Beispielen fur die Interaktion zwischen Staatsform und Klassenbeziehungen - einschliefilich der derzeitigen einschlagigen Gesetzgebung. Abschliefiend wird die ungleichmaige Entwicklung des sozialen und politischen BewuBtseins als wesentlich fur den spezifischen Charakter des ‘lokalen Staates’ identifiiert .


La ponencia trata de vincular la actual reorganizacidn de las relaciones entre el estado local y el central, en Gran Bretaza, a un context0 histdrico y social, con el fin de proveer un enten- dimiento conceptual de 10s acontecimientos actuales. Primero, la ponencia desarrolla el con- cepto de ‘estado local’, tratando de identificar las relaciones sociales crfticas especificas a1 estado capitalista, y existiendo autdnomamente a nivels subnacionales. Para esto fue necesario el examinar la insuficiencia de teorfas recientes del estado local an relacidn con la concep- tualizaci6n del estado capitalista en su totalidad. Luego, la ponencia hace us0 de esta discu- sidn para analizar cambios histdricos en las relaciones entre el estado central y el local en la Gran BretaGa. Esta secci6n de la ponencia examina algunos periodos claves de cambio, y algunos ejemplos especialmente ilustrativos de la i teraccidn entre la forma del estado y las- relaciones entre clases, incluyendo la legislacidn ackal. Finalmente, se identifica el desarrollo poco uniforme de la conciencia polftica y social como de importancia crftica para la especi- fidad del ‘estado local’.

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