Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access originally published online on February 6, 2008
Parliamentary Affairs 2008 61(2):408-413; doi:10.1093/pa/gsn001
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© The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Debating Nationhood and Governance in Britain, 1885–1939
Reinventing Britain: Constitutional Change under New Labour
Public Matters: The Renewal of the Public Realm
Duncan Tanner, Chris Williams, W.P. Griffith, and Andrew Edwards (eds), Debating Nationhood and Governance in Britain, 1885–1939, Manchester University Press, 2006, 262pp. £60.00.
Andrew Mcdonald (ed.), Reinventing Britain: Constitutional Change under New Labour, Politico's 2007, 256pp. £19.99.
Patrick Diamond, edited with the Public Services Reform Group, Public Matters: The Renewal of the Public Realm, Politico's, 2007. £18.99
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It has become a commonplace to suggest that the period since 1997 has been an era of constitutional reform–devolution, House of Lords reform, the Human Rights Act, the Freedom of Information Act and so on. In the last nine years, declares Andrew McDonald, the editor of Reinventing Britain, we have seen the institutional architecture of the state remodelled and the relationship between citizen and state refashioned. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to characterise the changes since 1997 as being comparable in scale to those in two previous eras of constitutional reform—the 1830s, and the period from 1911 to 1922 when the Parliament Act, the third and fourth Government of Ireland Acts and the Reform Act giving the vote to men over 21 and women over 30, were passed.1 But, as McDonald remarks, the constitutional revolution has been a quiet revolution, not in the sense that the reforms have been