Published: 08/04/2004, Volume II4, No.5900 Page 22

An examination of how the 'public domain' in Britain has withered away is compelling, although its proposed solutions for reviving public institutions prove less compelling, says Lyn Whitfield

Decline of the Public The hollowing out of citizenship

By David Marquand Publisher: Polity Press ISBN: 0745629105£14.99

What is the chief threat to democracy in Britain today? A terrorist attack? The collapse of the house-price and credit bubbles?

David Marquand argues for something much more 'insidious': the decline of the public domain.

This he defines as the aspect of our social lives in which we act as citizens and pursue the public interest, rather than our commercial or family interests.

So, although its boundaries are fuzzy, goods that fall within the public domain are those distributed by need rather than access to economic resources or personal ties. Uncontestable examples include defence and justice;

more recent additions include health.

Marquand argues that this public domain took most of the 19th and 20th centuries to build, but that it is now under threat on two fronts. The first is the 'revenge of the private' - the rise of the idea that the private and public cannot and should not be separated.

One of the many consequences is what Marquand calls the 'privatisation' of leadership.

Leaders must not only lead, but also show they are 'authentic human beings'while doing it, at a terrible cost to themselves and to public debate. For, with no other authority to cite, they must fall back on populism.

As if all that were not bad enough, Marquand also argues that the public domain has been under a 30-year assault or kulturkampf from governments pushing market solutions to its problems. This has led to a raft of privatisations and partprivatisations and the imposition of audit and other market-derived control mechanisms. It has also led politicians to undermine the professionals on which the public domain depended - and with it, trust in the institutions in which they work.

'Thatcher the crusader' created the internal market in the NHS, which led to 'an explosion of administrative costs' and reduced medical autonomy by subjecting clinical professionals to quangos.

Marquand, a former professor of politics at Sheffield University and principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, is thought of as a 'left wing' academic, but Decline of the Public echoes concerns being heard across the political divide.

Worries about the decline of public trust in politics and institutions and the rise of populist politics are widespread.

They are shared by some NHS managers, although there is little in Decline of the Public to comfort them, since, as indicated above, they are presented as marketisers and eroders of professional autonomy and institutions.

This may seem unfair. After all, Marquand himself says that what matters is the ethics that motivate providers - and many managers would say they have an ethic of public service and seek to uphold NHS 'values'.

What really seems to matter is action. Are managers, when they work the internal market, run audit bodies or seek to introduce consumer mechanisms to the NHS, actually working within the rules of the public domain?

Marquand would say not.HSJ readers might like to think about it.

Foundation hospitals, he says, may 'offer a locally embedded form of social ownership escaping both the intrusive state and the voracious market' but may also pave the way for a new form of market. On Marquand's own terms, however, even this cautious optimism seems misplaced, since foundation status is currently reserved for those trusts most in line with government demands.

Marquand advocates a public domain in which the public has more voice. But what this amounts to is calls for more citizens' juries, the replacement of 'crude, mechanistic targets' for 'subtler' ones 'based on dialogue between professionals and their stakeholders', and more decentralisation.

It is hard to see how this ragbag of modish, leftish thinktankisms can revive the idea that we have a public dimension to our lives or re-invigorate the institutions that once gave expression to it. But Marquand's analysis of the problem is compelling - and certainly worth worrying about.