This chapter explores the ways in which the book's three overarching themes weave through comparative experiences of municipal strategies in Britain and the US that work with communities and social movements to tackle the legacies of slavery and colonialism (Blunkett and Jackson, 1987; Mackintosh and Wainwright, 1987; Jackson, 2021). These experiences illustrate some of the challenges involved in the promotion of decolonisation as an ongoing process, questioning predominantly held ideas – the prevailing ‘commonsense’ of neoliberal globalisation – and providing the basis for promoting more inclusive policies and practices. Building on the experiences of community development programmes from the late 1960s, social movements began to engage with municipal authorities to respond to these challenges by developing strategies for equalities and international solidarity.

Whatever their inherent contradictions, programmes such as the US War on Poverty and the UK Community Development and Urban Programmes had promoted community participation, strengthening social movements in a number of contexts, as Chapter 4 has already outlined. There were positive legacies here as well as negative ones, providing the basis for neighbourhoods, communities and social movements to work with – as well as against – the local state, finding spaces for the pursuit of progressive agendas. This was despite the increasing predominance of neoliberal policies at national levels during the Reagan/Thatcher years of the 1980s.

A number of towns and cities reacted progressively when faced with these pressures and challenges. Together they developed a range of alternative economic, social and political strategies, working in collaboration with the trade union movement along with community-based organisations and social movement campaigns (Blunkett and Jackson, 1987; Mackintosh and Wainwright, 1987; Newman, 2014; Jackson, 2021). This is in no way to suggest that such collaborations were without their own inherent tensions and conflicts. They were not. But there were possibilities for progressive collaborations all the same, with examples from Britain and the US for illustration, demonstrating the scope for alternatives to neoliberalism as developed by the new urban Left. These alternatives focused on the promotion of equalities and social solidarity rather individualism and hostility to the ‘other’, whether the ‘other’ was being characterised as the ‘enemy within’ – such as striking miners – or the enemy without – the refugees and migrants who were supposed to be threatening to ‘swamp’ Thatcher's Britain.