The idea of direct participation of the public in the business of collectively governing their lives has been a vision and an aspiration that has fascinated politicians, political theorists and political commentators down the centuries. In contemporary times it can be seen, for example, in the intense interest across western democracies associated with Robert Putnam's work on the collapse of civic engagement in the US and its potential for revival (Putnam, 2000), and in talk of a need for greater social solidarity and cohesion. It can be seen too in the flurry of work in political science on ‘deliberative democracy’ which will be discussed in detail in Chapter Two. The hope expressed in the opening quotation by Tessa Jowell, at the time Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in the UK government, also reflects this. For her, the vision of citizen participation calls up the possibility that people might influence in a very direct way the environment and services that are available to them – not just by reading the newspapers or watching television, but by having a say in hard decisions about issues of resource allocation and policy direction. She wants a new focus on what the ‘public realm’ could and should be: creating a collective solidarity and combating what she calls a ‘poverty of aspiration’ to engage with politics. At the particular moment of her writing – in April 2005, as New Labour prepared for a third term of office – this was the refreshing of an ideal, building on a theme of democratic renewal that had already been threaded through reformed structures of governance under the banner of modernisation. In visionary political writings such as these, troubling questions about the conditions under which ‘enriching shared experiences’ for citizens could be produced in the public realm, quite reasonably perhaps, can be set aside.