Development of English Local Government 1689 1835

by Sidney Webb, Beatrice Potter Webb

The Webbs study not merely the state but the tangle of half-forgotten institutions among which people lived their ordinary lives--the parish and the county, the manor and the borough, their officers and their procedures.

207 pages, Hardcover

First published April 23, 1986

About the author

Sidney James Webb, 1st Baron Passfield was a British socialist, economist, reformer and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. He was one of the early members of the Fabian Society in 1884. He wrote the original Clause IV for the British Labour Party.
He served as both Secretary of State for the Colonies and Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs in Ramsay MacDonald second Labour Government in 1929.
The Webbs were supporters of the Soviet Union until their deaths. Their books, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (1935) and The Truth About Soviet Russia (1942) give a very positive assessment of Joseph Stalin's regime. Marxist historian Al Richardson later described Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? as "pure Soviet propaganda at its most mendacious".