Introduction

Abstract

It is over a decade since Harold Wilson announced his urban programme from the steps of Birmingham Town Hall. In that time government expenditure on special programmes directed to the inner city has increased more than twentyfold. Yet in spite of this increase there are few who would argue that inner city residents are better off today than they were before the programme was launched.

If, in this country, democracy falls, it will fall, not through any fortuitous combination of unfriendly circumstances, but from the insincerity of some of its professed defenders, and the timidity of the remainder. It will fall because, when there was still time to make it unassailable, public spirit was too weak, and class egotism too strong, for the opportunity to be seized. If it stands, it will stand, not because it has hitherto stood, but because ordinary men and women were determined that it should, and threw themselves with energy into broadening its foundations. To broaden its foundations means, in the conditions of today, to destroy plutocracy and to set in its place an equalitarian society.¹

R. H. Tawney