CONFUSION AND REALITY IN PUBLIC POLICY: THE CASE OF THE BRITISH URBAN PROGRAMME*
. The paper concentrates on the realization of an inner city or urban problem in British politics in the mid-1960s. Rejecting the conventional explanation of the resultant‘urban programme’as solely the consequence of Labour reactions to Enoch Powell's ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968, the paper assesses the utility of a number of explanations for the gestation and ultimate shape of this new policy direction. Interest-group, elite and Marxist interpretations are also rejected, while amorphous academic ideas and bureaucratic domination of an embryonic policy agenda are offered as the two most plausible explanations of the subsequent shape of the ‘urban programme’. The paper concludes with an assessment of the impact of poorly conceived policy responses in generating more viable alternatives.