It would not be much of an overstatement to say that citizenship should be and is the key term for understanding the relationship of individuals and modern democratic states. It combines belonging, solidarity, rights and responsibilities into something powerful, normatively freighted and often very diffuse. For all its complexities and fuzzy borders, citizenship is a powerful tool to understand the normative and political issues at work in the UK's territorial politics.

Devolution shapes citizenship in the UK, but going beyond platitudes demands looking into some areas of policy, such as intergovernmental finance and European Union (EU) policy making, that are not always associated with citizenship theory. Citizenship theory is often inattentive to the concrete mechanisms that underpin rights. But a formal right to something depends on implementation, and implementation depends on the kinds of legal and administrative issues that the authors discussed in Part II to this volume. And so normative social theory leads directly into the thickets of empirical social policy.

In those thickets we find scholars of devolution, territorial politics and policy making. Despite the rising number of citations to Marshall, and the developing interest in the territorial politics of welfare states, most devolution scholarship focuses on formal institutions and politics – the causes and consequences of specific devolved institutions. In the same way, studies of policy divergence typically focus on the fact of policy divergence and on what it tells us about the policy-making systems. They are less likely to stand back and consider the overall stakes, and the trends that emerge when we stand back from the examination of individual policy decisions.

The limitation of a focus only on the politics and policy making, about small decisions and lessons about institutions, is that it can obscure the larger stakes. Those stakes are high. They are people's rights – the social rights that underpin a measure of equality amidst the larger inequality of society. Public education and health are not just corrections for market failure; they are also social components of citizenship itself. Just as citizens are equal in the privacy of the voting booth, they should enjoy equal access to schools and health facilities.