CITY RULES OK? POLICY COMMUNITY,POLICY NETWORK AND TAKEOVER BIDS

This paper uses the concepts of policy community and policy network to analyse the particular set of industrial policy issues related to the conduct of takeover and merger bids. Within the general context of the law, the regulatory climate is governed by the principle of voluntary self-regulation, which since 1968 has been partly articulated in a written code whose rules are interpreted and enforced by a non-statutory body, the City Takeover Panel. The panel is one of several 'insider' organizations identified and categorized in terms of policy community. Relationships between it and other 'insiders' in the policy processes are analysed in terms of policy network and 'rules of the game'. It is argued that the stability of that network is increasingly threatened by the environmental turbulence provoked by the Guinness affair and the passage of the 1986 Financial Services Act.     

New Labour Legacy: Comparing the Labour Governments of Blair and Brown to Labour Governments since 1945

The election of the Conservative–Liberal coalition in May 2010 provides the opportunity to start to map out the record of the Labour governments between 1997 and 2010. This paper deals with the specific question how the Brown/Blair governments performed on public expenditures when compared to the records of UK Labour governments since 1945. Did the public expenditure record of the 1997 represent a departure from that of previous Labour governments? This is important to ascertain since there are strongly held beliefs that New Labour was not committed to Labour's historic commitments of income redistribution and universal benefits. The analysis that follows is constructed around five major public expenditure programmes that reflect Labour's priorities. These include total expenditure, expenditure on health, education, housing and social security.