Jane Wills - Locating Localism: Statecraft, Citizenship and Democracy

LOCATING LOCALISM

Statecraft, citizenship and democracy

Jane Wills

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

Policy Press University of Bristol 1-9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK Tel +44 (0)117 954 5940 e-mail

North American office: Policy Press c/o The University of Chicago Press 1427 East 60th Street Chicago, IL 60637, USA t: +1 773 702 7700 f: +1 773-702-9756 e:

Policy Press 2016

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ISBN 978-1-4473-2304-4 paperback

ISBN 978-1-4473-2303-7 hardback

ISBN 978-1-4473-2307-5 ePub

ISBN 978-1-4473-2308-2 Mobi

The right of Jane Wills to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Front cover image: Big Ben Tower Vectomart and UK map

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Readers Guide

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I am very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for providing the fellowship that allowed me to complete the research and writing involved in this book. Andrea Gibbons, Erica Pani and James Scott provided invaluable research support for different parts of the project. Kerry Cable at Business Friend completed all the interview transcriptions to a very high standard. Ed Oliver has done a brilliant job in (re)producing all the figures that are used in the text. Emily Watt, Emily Mew and Laura Vickers from Policy Press have been very encouraging throughout the process of commissioning, writing and editing Locating Localism.

My life at Queen Mary is blessed by having a wonderful group of colleagues, some of whom have been friends for more than 20 years, and I am especially grateful to Alison Blunt, Tim Brown, Kavita Datta, Beth Greenhough (now moved to Oxford), Al James, Jon May, Cathy McIlwaine, Catherine Nash, Miles Ogborn, Alastair Owens, David Pinder (now moved to Roskilde in Denmark), Simon Reid-Henry, Adrian Smith, Stephen Taylor, Philippa Williams and Kathryn Yusoff. I am always mindful that we owe a great deal to Roger Lee, Philip Ogden and Nigel Spence for creating a collegial workplace culture before we arrived.

Over the past decade I have explored the ideas in this book with many students, but especially those studying for the Masters and Postgraduate Certificate in Community Organising which I taught between 2010 and 2015. These classes and my learning were greatly enriched by the quality of the students taking the course and the additional teaching provided by Jonathan Cox, Sophie Stephens, Sotez Chowdhury and Maurice Glasman. The opportunity to teach with Maurice while he was developing the ideas that came to be described as Blue Labour, and which led to his elevation to the House of Lords, has been particularly formative in the development of my work over this time. For a few years, Luke Bretherton (now at Duke University in the US), Maurice and I were collaborating in our efforts to better understand the tradition of non-partisan community organising developed in the US and its implications for the UK. We combined the insights from theology, political philosophy and geography to make sense of a new approach to doing politics, and it took each of us in different directions.