The Public on the Public The British Public as Trust, Reflexivity and Political Foreclosure

The Public on the Public argues that in the United Kingdom efforts to resuscitate the public as a popular opposition to global capital's narrowing elite are largely misguided. Tracking Britain's understanding of the public from the inception of its state, this discussion intervenes in longstanding debates about the decline of the public in order to stress the public's ongoing and anti-popular constitutional role as the continuity of financial trust. It follows the fiscal duties of the social and cultural life of the public, and describes how the public protects itself from popular sovereignty through systems of self-reporting within and across politically foreclosing institutions. From the party system to the BBC, and from the imperial remnants of commonwealth heritage through to media, arts and educational efforts to galvanise 'public value', the public has insisted on a mode of compulsory inclusion that recent constitutional fissures have allowed us to look beyond in the search for more substantial bases of popular and political action. Here the contention is that, in Britain's case, the resistance to popular determination enabled by the public has been so successful that the term public must be re-read as politically paralysing. Indeed, the problem, or our problem, is the public – that which we are so often told will bring us together and provide for us.