This volume is a follow up to its highly influential predecessor, "Options for Britain," which in 1995 brought together a leading group of academics and policy experts to assess the key economic, social and constitutional policy options for Britain.
A decade on and the British political world is very different. Much of the analysis in "Options for Britain" has become accepted wisdom, and many of the policy proposals have become reality. However, there is also a sense of deja vu. The Labour government has been in power for a decade and governments find it difficult to refresh themselves in power, as the legacy of their own decisions build up. It is in these historical moments that outside thinking such as that embodied within "Options for a New Britain" can have a decisive influence, helping to inform the public and key commentators, and to provide a source of ideas and inspiration.
Leading policy experts examine what has happened over the last decade across a broad range of key policy areas, what are the current challenges and what options might an incoming government- regardless of political persuasion- have to address them.

The system for allocating public expenditure to the nations and regions of the UK has broken down. Money goes to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by the notorious Barnett formula, but this is collapsing and cannot last long. Money goes to the English regions by poorly-understood formulae that work badly. People in every region think that the system is unfair to them. The Fiscal Crisis of the United Kingdom suggests how the system could be fixed, drawing lessons from Australia and Canada. It recommends a Territorial Grants Commission.

In this exciting collection, Iain McLean and Colin Jennings bring together some of the most eminent social scientists to have advised British governments since 1964. Successive chapters show what went wrong in UK economic policy making in the 1960s and 1970s, what goes better now, and what still goes wrong. The editors explain how recent developments in economic theory have improved economic policy making. Contributors include two former Chief Economic Advisers at HM Treasury, and the co-designer of the successful '3G spectrum auction'.

Iain McLean reexamines the radical legacy of AdamSmith, arguing that Smith was a radical egalitarian and that his work supported all three of the slogans of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. McLean suggests that Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments , published in 1759, crystallized the radically egalitarian philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. This book brings Smith into full view, showing how much of modern economics and political science is in Smith. The author locates Smith's heritage firmly within the context of the Enlightenment, while addressing the international links between American, French, and Scottish histories of political thought.

The 1968 Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to one of the founders of public choice theory, James Buchanan, yet many people have only the vaguest idea what public choice is. The book offers and unusually clear and accessible introduction to an important subject. McLean examines the workings of public choice from two related perspectives - collective action and the aggregation of individual preferences into social consensus.

The book highlights the paradox at the heart of collective action- that self-interest in the public domain is frequently counterproductive. National defense and clean air are things we all benefit from - they are public goods - but we tend to resist contributing to them. The first part of this book examines how government choice in such areas is shaped, and by whom- political entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, interest groups and ordinary citizens. McLean uses the idea of a public market in which politicians sell what they hope voters will buy, and further considers how and when people (and animals) co-operate to produce public goods even without government coercion. In the second part of the book the author examines the consequences of combining individual preferences, arguing that there is no straightforward way of adding them up to form a 'social ordering' and assesing the implications of this both for electoral reform and for the status of 'the will of the people'.

In this accessible new book, Iain McLean explores the impact of information technology on democracy. Combining democratic theory, social choice theory and description of new technology at work in Europe and the USA, McLean explores democracy as it is and as it could be. The author begins in ancient Athens and moves through Pliny, Rousseau, Madison and J S Mill to modern representatives and direct democracy. Introducing the theory of social choice, he argues that democracy is about procedures, not results, and sets out some criteria for fair aggregation of individuals' preferences to society's. Exploring the impact of new technology on these procedures, McLean shows how it can save time, and increase accuracy and accessibility, but also how it can lead to manipulation and come up against Arrow's, Gibbards' and McKelvey's impossibility theorems.

In conclusion, McLean asks whether new technology widens or narrows our democratic horizons, and points to the technical and logical boundaries of democracy. "Democracy and New Technology" will be of great interest to students and researchers in politics, sociology, and media and communications studies. It is one of very few books to explain social choice theory in totally non-technical language and to explore what it means for democracy.

In this exciting collection, Iain McLean and Colin Jennings bring together some of the most eminent social scientists to have advised British governments since 1964. Successive chapters show what went wrong in UK economic policy making in the 1960s and 1970s, what goes better now, and what still goes wrong. The editors explain how recent developments in economic theory have improved economic policy making. Contributors include two former Chief Economic Advisers at HM Treasury, and the co-designer of the successful '3G spectrum auction'.

The system for allocating public expenditure to the nations and regions of the UK has broken down. Money goes to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by the notorious Barnett formula, but this is collapsing and cannot last long. Money goes to the English regions by poorly-understood formulae that work badly. People in every region think that the system is unfair to them. The Fiscal Crisis of the United Kingdom suggests how the system could be fixed, drawing lessons from Australia and Canada. It recommends a Territorial Grants Commission.