Abstract: Nearly a decade ago Maureen Mackintosh, introducing a special issue of Soundings on 'The Public Good', commented that "we seem to have lost confidence in our ability to construct a public sphere which promotes the public good".While people continued to pursue efforts to sustain and nurture public services, public speech and public action they did so "against a tide of malevolent divisiveness which has its roots in public policy" 1 .The debates on how notions of the public and publicness are being remade in contemporary politics and culture have continued in Soundings and elsewhere.Yet I remain deeply concerned about the difficulty of speaking the language of public and publicness in contemporary discourse.Despite the focus by all of the main political parties on public services -this is one of the areas in which any notion of 'clear blue water' between Labour and Conservative appears elusivethe publicness of those services is viewed as somehow outdated, part of the old world of the universal welfare state rather than the new world of flexibility, modernity and consumerism.But this is not just a matter of looking back regretfully (and nostalgically) at a vanishing social democratic public sphere.The simple equations of publicness and state can no longer hold, especially if we take account of the critiques of the social democratic state that emerged from a succession of social movements over the last three decades.Given the new forms of politics these produced, how can we now understand the shifting configurations of 'the public' while at the same time attempting to defend it from the onslaughts of neo-liberalism?In this paper I want to 1 Soundings, 4, winter 1996