Reviews
| Date | 01 September 2000 |
| Published date | 01 September 2000 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9299.00226 |
REVIEWS
THE NATURE OF BRITISH LOCAL GOVERNMENT
John Stewart
Macmillan, 2000. 310pp. £45 (hb), £14.99 (pb)
Any book by John Stewart is likely to be rich in the insights that the author has taken from
and fed back to local government over many years. This book draws upon John’s extensive
programme of visits to authorities between 1983 and 1998.
In opening the book John offers the thought that it is easier to write about uniformity than
diversity. But as the purpose and justification for local government is diversity and difference,
the book seeks to draw out the richness of different experience and circumstance which charac-
terizes different councils, their members and staff.
There is a danger that a description of diversity will be a series of anecdotes – it is much
easier to weave a theory around uniformity than to link the diverse experience of local auth-
orities into a coherent thesis. A series of anecdotes from John Stewart is no bad thing – his
lectures and talks have always contained the illuminating evidence of individual experience
to illustrate a point – but can this book succeed in developing a theory of diversity, perhaps
even provide a genuine antidote to the pressure for uniformity which has underpinned
national political action (and probably thought) about local government’s role over the past
few decades?
This is a fascinating book to dip into and enjoy John’s stories about how politics and culture
in local authorities combined with personalities of members and officers to produce diverse
outcomes. Sometimes you want to know more – ‘there must be more to it than that!’ Or in
the cases where the reader does know more, a desire to see the full detail of the real experience
fully explored. There was more to Hertfordshire’s experience in the early 1990s with town
and parish councils than ‘parish friends’. And more careful proof reading would have cor-
rected some unfortunate misspelling of the names of some important local government figures.
But it is churlish to complain. In 300 pages this book has a breadth and depth of what consti-
tutes local governance which should help members and officers in local authorities everywhere
recognize and rejoice in the opportunity to be different and continue to resist the pressure for
uniformity that government, media, national parties and sometimes our own lack of self-
confidence engender.
And, of particular interest to the reviewer, John has some cautionary messages for the Local
Government Association – a national association for local government is almosta contradiction
in terms’. The dangers, he says, are that the senior players come to accept the assumptions
of the Whitehall village and lose contact with the reality of local government, and that the
grind of consultation causes the association to be reactive – and end up working to the govern-
ment’s agenda. The tensions of uniformity and diversity meet at the association and can only
be successfully managed by being aware of the dangers and constantly reminded that the role
is to promote the merits of difference and diversity and to promote notions of added value –
in service, responsiveness, democracy – from local discretion. John comments that the present
Public Administration Vol. 78, No. 3, 2000 (715–722)
Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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