Joseph Chamberlain and the Municipal Ideal
'... a kind of Ken Livingstone of his day', Britain's great imperialist made his early reputation as a civic radical, promoting public control of local amenities such as water and gas.
It is one of the paradoxes of the history of Victorian England that a society wedded to the principles of self-help, nevertheless created an administrative state with broad social and economic functions. An important part of the historiographical debate on this paradox concerns the apparent conflict between laissez-faire and state intervention in such fields as the relief of poverty and the control over conditions of work. In such questions the ideological implications were often faced head-on. In other areas, particularly those involving the local work of town councils, there was a process of collectivism by stealth.
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