The party's over. You might not have known it was a party, but it was. Still, in every crisis, there is an opportunity, and the silver lining, if there is one in these difficult financial days, is that while efficiency savings and cuts are going to be the order of the day, there may, ironically, be a boost to what New Labour has struggled with for the last decade – empowerment and co-production. The challenge is that while most people like government offering ways to get involved, and the promise of being listened to, they are mostly too busy to turn up. The actual proportion who tend to get engaged might be, at best, 2% of the population. This is still a lot of people, but nothing like some of the rhetoric which is routinely wheeled out. But, much slower growth and real hardship for many, may do what masses of consultancy has failed to achieve. One of the biggest drivers of engagement is actually negative – more people get engaged to stop things happening (new roads, airports, bail hostels, etc) than to start things happening. As Hackney, for example, has turned itself around – one of the few councils to see a rise in satisfaction in the latest Place – the proportion of its residents who want to get involved with it has fallen. They are happy that it is sorting out the public realm, and don't need to protest by bringing unemptied bins to Mare Street. The diet of cuts to all sorts of services over the next five years or more will be just the sort of thing to bring people together throughout Britain. A key question is whether this can be channelled into solutions or simply angry protests.
