Active citizens are everywhere the focus of government attention but are not the invention of governments. Citizenship has been the focus of many expansive and transformatory struggles (Newman & Clarke 2009): in 20th and 21st century Britain, such struggles have centred on claims for political inclusion and social rights, for access and voice in welfare provision, and for equality and justice in the face of economic retrenchment and securitisation. We are currently witnessing an expansion of popular mobilisations and protest, not only on ‘local’ issues or claims on the part of particular disenfranchised groups but also through participation in global anti-poverty and environmental movements. Not all such mobilisations are progressive, of course – protests linked to economic retrenchment following the crash of 2008 have targeted both migrants (‘British jobs for British workers’ was a common refrain) and the political classes (in the 2009 scandal around MPs’ expenses), while ‘Fathers for Justice’ campaigns and the Countryside Alliance suggest a resurgence of anti-feminist and anti-cosmopolitan sensibilities.

Nevertheless, the prevalence of citizen mobilisations tends to undermine the idea that citizens have become passive, reliant on an overprotective state and on welfare services that produce dependence. What matters for governments is that citizens are active in ways that support, rather than challenge, their current political projects: it is not that citizens are not active, but that their activities need to be channeled to appropriate ends. As such, the last decades have seen a range of different political projects directed towards welfare service users, those living in run-down neighbourhoods, those without paid work and those considered to be irresponsible in the way they live their lives. Such projects have sought to dismantle the welfare settlements of the post-war years in Britain and to install new citizenship relationships and identifications. This does not necessarily mean the withdrawal of the state but a shift in its role towards the ‘empowerment’ of citizens in order that they might participate fully as partners in projects of modernisation and reform, and as self-steering consumers in the new economy of health and welfare services.

In this chapter I begin by tracing the contours of these political projects since 1979, then go on to analyse the forms of active citizenship mobilised in three sets of policy documents: those relating to the modernisation of the NHS, the transformation of social care services, and the renewal of ‘community’ and civil society.