The Uneven Path of UK Devolution: Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Regionalism in England – Cornwall and the North-East Compared

Joanie Willett and Arianna Giovannini

Political Studies, 2014, vol. 62, issue 2, 343-360

Abstract: type="main">

Within the context of the devolution process in England, Cornwall and the North-East stand out in contrasting comparison. The North-East was given the opportunity to vote for a regional assembly, which it rejected in 2004, while the strong popular movement for an assembly in Cornwall was ignored by central government. This is reflected in the literature on the English question and regionalism in the UK, which focuses on the example of the North-East, and largely overlooks the grassroots support in Cornwall and the opportunities for understanding regionalism that this could provide. In this article, we explore why this might be the case, developing a comparison between the two areas in the context of the campaigns for setting up directly elected assemblies. We look at the territorial status of the two areas, how the respective campaigns were organised, the types of group involved, the motives that were driving activists, and each region's political significance to Labour. We find central control of the political agenda to be a key issue behind the failure of English regionalism.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/1467-9248.12030 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:polstu:v:62:y:2014:i:2:p:343-360

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0032-3217

Access Statistics for this article

Political Studies is currently edited by Matthew Festenstein and Martin Smith

More articles in Political Studies from Political Studies Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().