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AFTER the little flurry of dispute recently whether Sir Keith Joseph should or should not have been invited to address the LA conference in Sheffield this year, the Secretary for Industry has himself withdrawn, on the grounds that he now finds himself obliged to lead an overseas trade delegation at the same time as the conference. Thus hot air doth dissolve into the atmosphere, as Hamlet might have said (but did not).

Mr. Michael Marshall MP, Parliamentary Under‐Secretary of State for Industry, has told Parliament that Sir Keith Joseph has recommended that the Privy Council advise that a Royal Charter should be granted to establish The Engineering Council and that Sir Kenneth Corfield has agreed to become its Chairman designate.

Since 1980, the principal form of crop loss assistance in the United States has been provided through the Federal Crop Insurance Program. The Federal Crop Insurance Act of 1980 was intended to replace disaster programs with a subsidized insurance program that farmers could depend on in the event of crop losses. Crop insurance was seen as preferable to disaster assistance because it was less costly and hence could be provided to more producers, was less likely to encourage moral hazard, and less likely to encourage producers to plant crops on marginal lands. Despite substantial growth in the program, the crop insurance program has failed to replace other disaster programs as the sole form of assistance. Over the past 20 years, producers received an estimated $15 billion in supplemental disaster payments in addition to $22 billion in crop insurance indemnities.

While leaders of both the major political parties are hiding behind a pay policy smokescreen, the strong unions are out on the battlefield causing industrial havoc. What can be done to restore order? Stanley Alderson examines events leading up to the present disruption and the lesson which can be learned.

IT WAS in the mid‐1970s when, having been in the habit for a year or so previously of commenting on public library authorities' annual reports in a partially analytical manner, I observed a decline in the arrival of the same in my post. A decline which has been maintained, I may add, and which has led me to the conclusion that, while it is OK on the sender's part if I remark how splendid has his service been, he would nevertheless be happier if the ammunition was withheld for me to observe that his annual loans cost x‐pence more each than those of such‐and‐such an authority!

Denis Healey once said that he would squeeze the rich until the pips squeaked.Now, in the different context of Tory economic policy and its effect on jobs and industrial investment, Stanley Alderson argues that the monetary curbs have put Britain on a disaster course.

The cardinal point to note here is that the development (and unfortunately the likely potential) of area policy is intimately related to the actual character of British social policy. Whilst area policy has been strongly influenced by Pigou's welfare economics, by the rise of scientific management in the delivery of social services (cf Jaques 1976; Whittington and Bellamy 1979), by the accompanying development of operational analyses and by the creation of social economics (see Pigou 1938; Sandford 1977), social policy continues to be enmeshed with the flavours of Benthamite utilitatianism and Social Darwinism (see, above all, the Beveridge Report 1942; Booth 1889; Rowntree 1922, 1946; Webb 1926). Consequently, for their entire history area policies have been coloured by the principles of a national minimum for the many and giving poorer areas a hand up, rather than a hand out. The preceived need to save money (C.S.E. State Apparatus and Expenditure Group 1979; Klein 1974) and the (supposed) ennobling effects of self help have been the twin marching orders for area policy for decades. Private industry is inadvertently called upon to plug the resulting gaps in public provision. The conjunction of a reluctant state and a meandering private sector has fashioned the decaying urban areas of today. Whilst a large degree of party politics and commitment has characterised the general debate over the removal of poverty (Holman 1973; MacGregor 1981), this has for the most part bypassed the ‘marginal’ poorer areas (cf Green forthcoming). Their inhabitants are not usually numerically significant enough to sway general, party policies (cf Boulding 1967) and the problems of most notably the inner cities has been underplayed.

This paper focuses on the strategic role of elites in managing institutional and organizational change within English public services, framed by the wider ideological and political context of neo-liberalism and its pervasive impact on the social and economic order over recent decades. It also highlights the unintended consequences of this elite-driven programme of institutional reform as realized in the emergence of hybridized regimes of ‘polyarchic governance’ and the innovative discursive and organizational technologies on which they depend. Within the latter, ‘leaderism’ is identified as a hegemonic ‘discursive imaginary’ that has the potential to connect selected marketization and market control elements of new public management (NPM), network governance, and visionary and shared leadership practices that ‘make the hybrid happen’ in public services reform.

The Industrial Injuries Joint Authority and the Secretary of State for Social Services, in exercise of the powers conferred by the provisions of the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Acts 1965 to 1973 set out in Parts 1 and II respectively of Schedule I to this instrument, and of all other powers enabling them in that behalf, hereby make the following regulations, which contain no provisions other than such as are made in consequence of the National Insurance and Supplementary Benefit Act 1973 or concern the amount by which the rate of disablement pension may be increased under section 15(1) of the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act 1965 where constant attendance is required, and which accordingly, by virtue of section 9(5) of and paragraph 2(1) of Schedule 6 to the said Act of 1973, are exempt from the requirements of section 62(2) of the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act 1965 (reference to Industrial Injuries Advisory Council):—