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New Labour
and Planning
This event was held was held in September 2007 to generate debate about the impacts of New Labour's ongoing reforms to the planning system in England. The event was well attended and provided an interesting days discussion and debate. Many thanks to all those who contributed.
New Labour's planning agenda has been difficult to understand and although there was no clear consensus on the day the debate will hopefully have helped to generate furhter thought.
Tim Marshall and Andy Inch are currently collecting the papers from the day and will hopefully be compiling them as a special issue of the journal Planning Practice and Research. Anyone interested in reading pre-submission drafts of the papers can find out more by contacting Andy.
The schedule and outline of the event are below:
9.30 Coffee
10.00 Understanding
ten years of new labour.
Chair: Tim
Marshall (Oxford Brookes)
'The Political Ideology of New Labour' by Alan Finlayson (Swansea University, author of 'Making Sense of New Labour')
'The Politial Economy of New Labour' by Matthew Watson (Warwick University)
'New Labour
and local government' by Stuart Wilks-Heeg (University
of Liverpool))
Lunch
1.30 Understanding
new labour and planning.
Chair: Greg
Lloyd (University of Liverpool)
Modernising Planning by Mark Tewdwr-Jones (UCL)
'Lobbying inside New Labour' by Kelvin MacDonald
'Mediating Space and the Third Way' by Andy Inch (Oxford Brookes)
Close.
Outline of the event:
The symposium
intends to provide an opportunity to reflect on understandings
of the ideological implications of the current Labour
government, the extent of its debt to an essentially
neoliberal inheritance, the changes that have been wrought
by a decade of third-way governance and the prospects
for the future beyond Tony Blair. Planning offers an
insightful lens through which to reflect on many key
issues of New Labour’s legacy. The system and
profession have been subject to a complex, extended
and ongoing process of modernisation reflecting the
Government's relentless drive for public sector reform
and its impact on local governance, as well as the overriding
concern for the competitiveness of the UK economy.
Indeed, given the scale and contested nature of the planning reform process it is somewhat surprising, and even alarming that these issues have received little critical attention from academic analysts within the discipline (though see Allmendinger and Tewdwr-Jones 2000, Allmendinger 2003), certainly when compared with the level of scrutiny devoted to Thatcherism (see especially Thornley 1993, Allmendinger and Thomas 1998). This work drew extensively on broader debates and interpretations of the New Right to examine the specific implications and extent of change to the planning system.
The symposium is concerned to rekindle this kind of critical scrutiny, arguing that there is an urgent requirement to facilitate debate about the nature and direction of change in British planning today, and the extent of essentially neoliberal continuity between New Right and New Left. It aims to do this through a broad inter-disciplinary approach, inviting a combination of contributions on New Labour that seek to juxtapose broader analyses alongside reflections on more specific implications for planning. By doing so it is hoped to explore the opportunities and challenges facing those concerned with reviving both a more progressive planning and a wider progressive politics.
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