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.     

Blair's Commission for Africa: Problems and Prospects for UK Policy

This article examines the recommendations contained within the Commission for Africa's report Our Common Interest , and asks what they might mean for the UK's Africa policies. After discussing the choice of the Commissioners and summarising the main recommendations made in their report, the article identifies some of the central problems raised but not resolved by the Commission in the relation to issues of security, political economy and governance. The article concludes that the Commission's report raised the profile of an important set of issues but neither resolved them conceptually nor set out a persuasive plan to implement its numerous recommendations. In particular, the Commission did not convincingly explain how neo-patrimonial regimes in Africa could be reformed to ensure that they pursue genuinely national development policies instead of the current strategies that benefit their supporters and weaken their political opponents.     

The Growing Power and Autonomy of House of Commons Select Committees: Causes and Effects

This article is an examination of the rising prominence of House of Commons select committees during the 2010–2015 Parliament, which takes into account the impact of the Wright reforms. The new system of electing committee chairs and members is explored as a central reform that has burnished the autonomy, independence and credibility of the committees. In addition, the characteristics of the coalition government and circumstances entailed by a two‐party executive are seen as factors that have made more robust the neutrality of the committees, which have been looked to ever more urgently as impartial scrutineers of government policy and personnel. As the system has been strengthened and received greater attention from the government, the public and the media, select committees have also come to present a platform upon which certain members and chairs have grown their profile. This phenomenon in turn has added to the desirability of roles on committees, which now present an alternative career route to the ministerial ladder.