2134/4425
John Harrison
John
Harrison
The political-economy of Blair’s “New Regional Policy”
Loughborough University
2009
New Regional Political Economy
Economic Regionalisation
Democratic Regionalism
England
New Labour
Earth Sciences not elsewhere classified
2009-03-31 15:36:41
Journal contribution
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/The_political-economy_of_Blair_s_New_Regional_Policy_/9481187
The ‘region’ and ‘regional change’ have been elusive ideas within political and
economic geography, and in essence require a greater understanding of their
dynamic characteristics. Trailing in the backwaters of the devolution to the
Celtic nations of Britain, the contemporary era of New Labour’s politicaleconomic
ideology, manifest through ‘third-way’ governance in England
places the region and its functional capacity into the heart of geographical
inquiry. Drawing upon a new regionalist epistemology, this paper seeks to
recover a sense of (regional) political economy through a critical investigation
of the development and formulation of Blair’s “New Regional Policy” (NRP). I
address how New Labour has attempted to marry economic regionalisation on
the one hand, and democratic regionalism on the other. This paper
specifically questions the wisdom of such a marriage of politically distinct
ideologies through a critical investigation of the underlying contradictions of
their strategy from both a theoretical and empirical standpoint. Demonstrated
both in the North East no vote in 2004, and in the post-mortem undertaken by
the ODPM Select Committee in 2005, the paper illustrates how a loss of
political drive gradually undermined the capacity of devolution to deliver in
England. Finally, I argue that through the lens of the NRP we can speculate
on some of the wider issues and implications for the study of regional
governance.