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Reclaiming Social Work
Reclaiming Social Work
Challenging Neo-liberalism
and Promoting Social Justice

Iain Ferguson
© Iain Ferguson 2008

First published 2008

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or

private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be
reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means,
only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in
the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the
terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be
sent to the publishers.

SAGE Publications Ltd

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London EC1Y 1SP

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Printed in India at Replika Press Pvt. Ltd
Printed on paper from sustainable resources
 Contents

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction 1

1 A profession worth fighting for? 8

2 Neo-liberal Britain 22

3 New Labour, new social work 37

4 The market and social care 54

5 Consumerism, personalisation and social

welfare movements 69

6 The radical tradition 88

7 Critical social work: issues and debates 103

8 Challenging the consensus 120

References 137
Index 151
 Acknowledgements

Inevitably, a book of this sort is a collective production, in that it draws on

the work of many other critical writers, notably Chris Jones, John Harris
and Alex Callinicos, as well as countless conversations over the years with
friends, colleagues and comrades too numerous to mention with whom
I have been involved in a host of socialist and campaigning movements.
My thanks to all of them.
Thanks are also due to Anna Luker and Zoë Elliot-Fawcett at Sage
who have been a marvellous source of support throughout, and who have
shown infinite patience and understanding when it came to re-negotiating
deadlines.
Three special mentions are necessary. First of all, I have gained a
huge amount from the friendship of Mike Gonzalez over more than
thirty years. His creative, resolutely non-sectarian understanding of
Marxism, coupled with an apparently inexhaustible enthusiasm for
the struggle, has influenced and inspired me enormously, as it has the
thousands of others who have benefited from his talks and writings
over the years on every aspect of socialist theory, culture and history.
In the wake of the loss of his partner Clare after a very long illness,
I wish to put on record my thanks and appreciation to him.
Second, this book began life as a collaboration with Michael Lavalette.
Unfortunately, the demands of life as a local councillor for the Respect
Coalition in Preston, while holding down a full-time job as a Senior Lecturer
in Social Policy at Liverpool University, meant that something had to give,
and in this case, it was the book. Nevertheless, many of the ideas and
arguments which follow grew out of discussions with Michael and earlier
publications in which we were jointly involved, so thanks also to him.
Finally, Dorte, my partner, has had to tolerate long periods during the
writing of this book when I was present in body only. Despite this, she has
constantly encouraged me to complete the book and been prepared to be
bored to death as I ran yet another draft chapter by her. Between her own
commitments as a mental health service manager and a creative glass
artist, she has always found time to give support, suggestions and ideas.
Love and many, many thanks are due to her.
 Acknowledgements vii

Some chapters in this book draw on previous publications. Thanks

are due to Oxford Journals (Oxford University Press) for kind permission
to draw on ‘Increasing user choice or privatizing risk? The antinomies
of personalization’, British Journal of Social Work 2007, 37(3): 387–403
(Chapter 5). Thanks are also due to Sage Publications for permission to
draw on ‘Living in a material world: Postmodernism and social policy’
in M. Lavalette and A. Pratt (eds) (2005) Social Policy: A Conceptual and
Theoretical Introduction, 3rd edn, London Sage (Chapter 7). Parts of
Chapter 8 fi rst appeared in Ferguson, I. and Lavalette, M. (2006)
‘Globalization and global justice: Towards a social work of resistance’,
International Social Work, 49(3): 309–18 and again thanks are due to Sage
Publications. Finally the arguments on ‘the science of happiness’ in
Chapter 8 were first put forward in a paper entitled ‘An Attitude Problem?
Mental Health, Inequality and the “Science of Happiness” ’, delivered at
the Glasgow School of Social Work on 10 November 2006 as part of an
ESRC-funded Social Work and Health Inequalities Research Seminar
Series. I am grateful to the organisers of the series for inviting me to
participate and to those present for their helpful feedback.
 Introduction

In August 2006, along with other British social work academics, I was
fortunate enough to attend the International Association of Schools of
Social Work Conference in Santiago, Chile. The Conference was
memorable for many reasons. The keynote speech at the opening ceremony,
for example, was given by the recently elected President of Chile,
Michelle Bachelet. Bachelet’s presence at the Conference was powerful
and symbolic, not so much because of her politics (which are less radical
than those of other Latin American leaders like Evo Morales and Hugo
Chavez), nor solely because she is the first woman to hold the office of
president in Chile (though in a continent where notions of machismo are
still influential, this is no mean feat). Rather, Bachelet’s presence was
particularly powerful because she is a survivor. Like many thousands of
others, she, her mother and her father suffered horribly at the hands
of the Pinochet dictatorship which overthrew the democratically elected
government of Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973. All three were
held at the notorious torture centre, the Villa Grimaldi, on the outskirts
of Santiago. While she and her mother were released after an ordeal
involving horrors which one can only imagine, her father, a navy admiral
who was loyal to the elected government, died, like many others, at
the hands of the torturers. When Bachelet spoke, therefore, about the
importance of the social work profession and the struggle for human rights,
there was an awareness amongst those present that this was no empty
politician’s rhetoric but that she was speaking from first-hand experience,
both of the suffering she experienced and of the help she received.
Also memorable were the Conference contributions from the Latin
American delegates. For several years, Latin America has been at the
forefront of the global struggle against neo-liberalism, the ideology
which tells us that everything – public services, the environment, life
itself – should be subordinated to the requirements of the market and big
business. That experience of struggle was reflected in many of the papers
from Latin American social workers and social work academics, both in
their willingness to employ the language of a radical Marxism (with the
ideas of the Hungarian philosopher George Lukacs underpinning several
contributions) and in their attempts to make connections between social
2 Reclaiming Social Work
work and the social movements in recent years, including the Landless
Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil, and the Piquiteros movement
in Argentina.
For some of us, however, the most moving part of the whole week
came on the final day, with a Human Rights trip organised by the Chil-
ean Association of Social Workers. This began with a guided tour of the
Villa Grimaldi, now a Garden of Remembrance to victims of the dictator-
ship. It continued to the small rural town of Paine where the thirty or so
delegates met with the families of the seventy-nine local men who had
‘disappeared’ following the coup, due in part to their involvement in the
land reforms introduced by the Allende government. The trip ended at the
headquarters of the Chilean Association of Social Workers. Here, the walls
are lined with photographs of (mainly young) social workers who had
‘disappeared’ or had been murdered by the military, with each room in the
headquarters named after one of those who died that way. Social workers,
the President of the Association explained, were particularly distrusted
by the regime and a disproportionate number of them were tortured or
murdered. In addition, social work education was downgraded during
the years of the dictatorship and only recently has it become once more a
university-based profession.
The experience of social workers under the Pinochet dictatorship was,
thankfully, an exceptional one and in most respects, very different from the
experience of most social workers in the liberal democracies of the West,
where the risk of stress-related burnout is a more common occupational
hazard than the risk of violence, imprisonment or torture. Nevertheless,
the experience of those Chilean social workers connects with the current
experience of social workers in Britain and elsewhere in two important
ways. First, while ‘Thatcherism’ in Britain and ‘Reaganomics’ in the USA
are often thought of as the first attempts to implement economic policies
that opened up every area of life and society to market forces, in fact, as
Susan George reminds us, the real test-bed of neo-liberalism was Chile.
It was there, under the ideal conditions of the Pinochet dictatorship, that
the group of economists known as the ‘Chicago Boys’ because they
had taken their degrees at the most neo-liberal university economics
department in the USA, swung into action, opening up the whole economy
to privatisation, removing all social safety nets and impoverishing huge
numbers of people (George, 2004: 20).
Since then, neo-liberalism has become the ‘common sense’ of most
governments throughout the world, whether the ruling party is right-wing
and conservative or, as in Britain, a Labour (or social democratic) Party
whose role in former times was seen as being to defend working-class
people from the harmful effects of these very same market forces. The
promise of neo-liberalism was that it would create a more prosperous
society, not only for those at the top, but also, as a result of wealth ‘trickling
down’, for those at the bottom. In fact, as I shall argue in the early chapters
of this book, the pursuit of neo-liberal policies in Britain, fi rst under
 Introduction 3
Conservative governments and, since 1997, under New Labour, has
created a much more unequal society, in which the lives of millions
(including millions of children) are still blighted by poverty.
While those who rely on State-provided welfare services have suffered
most as a result of such policies, neo-liberalism has also profoundly
transformed the jobs of those who provide such services and the organi-
sations in which they work. As Harris has shown in his important study
of the ‘social work business’ in Britain, every aspect of social work has
been profoundly affected by the imposition of a culture of managerialism
and competition over the past decade and a half (Harris, 2003). As recent
government-funded reports have shown, one consequence of that culture
has been to create a profound dissatisfaction amongst social workers over
what their jobs have become, a sense of a growing gap between their
day-to-day tasks and the values which brought them into the job in the
first place (Scottish Executive, 2006a).
Some flavour of how far that managerial culture has moved social
work from its original aims and ideals can be gleaned from the following
e-mail flyer sent out to social work staff by the trade journal careandhealth
in March 2007, advertising its forthcoming training programme for
managers:

2007 Is The Year For Advanced Performance Management

If you have not been trained in the latest advances in Time Compression and
Waste Elimination, or if the words Kaizen, Gemba, and Kanban are unfamiliar,
you need to re-tool your management skills to meet the demands of the
next phase of service delivery. The Certificate in Advanced Performance
Management’ equips senior managers with the skills to achieve radical and
tangible advances in the performance management of their organisations.
I am writing to remind you about CareandHealth’s upcoming Management
Training course – The Certificate in Advanced Performance Management – that
will be commencing in a few weeks, so book now to ensure your place. This City &
Guilds and CIPFA accredited course has been specifically designed to meet
the needs of senior managers charged with leading the performance improvement
of their organisations and sets new standards in developing performance
management in health and social care. It will provide you with intensive and
demanding training in leading edge tools and techniques that have proven
success in world class organisations. Integrates Lean and Six Sigma with
powerful new methodologies specifically tailored for the UK health and social
care sector. This advanced course has been designed specifically for high-level
experienced managers with the vision to achieve rapid service improvement
and the drive to acquire the skills necessary to affect it. The course is open
to experienced, senior performance managers wishing to further their skills
with the latest advances, as well as those who have previously completed and
passed Care and Health’s Certifi cate in Performance Management course.
After an intensive immersion in the latest tools and techniques, you will stand
out amongst your peers. (www.careandhealth.com)

Brave New World that has such managers in it!

4 Reclaiming Social Work
Paradoxically, however, as I shall argue in this book, in the dissatisfaction
that this managerial culture has bred lie the seeds of hope for the future of
social work, as well as the second point of connection with those Chilean
social workers. For despite the ways in which social work in the UK and
elsewhere has been undermined over the past twenty years, and
castigated by government and media as a ‘failing’ profession, the belief
that a concern for human rights should be at the core of social work and
that social workers should be on the side of the poor and the oppressed,
remains strong throughout the global social work community. It is a
belief reflected, for example, in the influential definition of social
work suggested by the International Federation of Social Workers
(www.ifsw.org.com.) and one which is present, if often unacknowledged,
in the day-to-day practice of many workers. In addition, as Cree and Davis
have shown in their study of the views of social workers, service users
and carers in the UK, the desire to ‘make a difference’, both to the lives
of individuals and to the society in which we live, remains the main motivating
factor for becoming a social worker (Cree and Davis, 2007). It is, above
all, the frustration of these hopes, beliefs and desires by ideologies and
policies which insist that the primary role of social workers is to ‘manage’
‘high-risk’ families or individuals, to ration increasingly meagre services,
and to collude in the demonisation of groups such as young people and
asylum seekers which is giving rise to current discontent. Neo-liberalism
in social work, in other words, is creating resistance. Moreover, since
managerial policies undermine all forms of social work practice and
values, ‘traditional’ as well as ‘radical’ or ‘emancipatory’, it is a dissatisfaction
and a resistance which goes well beyond the ranks of a small number of
politically committed individuals and embraces very large numbers
of workers who might not think of themselves as ‘political’.
That resistance has also been fuelled and reinforced by the emergence
of two types of social movement. First, there have been social welfare
movements such as the disability movement and the mental health users’
movement which have challenged traditional models of relationships and
services and which have also, in recent years, been at the forefront of the
struggle against government attempts to reduce welfare spending. More
significant in terms of overall impact, however, has been the global
movement against neo-liberalism – the anti-capitalist or global justice
movement – which has developed since the turn of the century and
whose central slogan, that ‘The world is not a commodity!’, reflects
the widespread feeling amongst many social workers that their practice
should be driven by values of respect and social justice, rather than
budgetary considerations (Ferguson and Lavalette, 2004). As I shall argue
in Chapter 6, in the past, social work’s commitment to social justice and
social change has been strengthened through its contact with wider social
movements. In the same way, social workers today can draw on the wider
resistance to the domination of every aspect of life by money to recreate
new forms of practice, while also re-discovering its own radical past.
 Introduction 5
These factors, then – dissatisfaction with what social work has become, the
rise of new movements of service users and their allies, and the emergence of
new global movements against neo-liberalism and war – are the ‘resources of
hope’ which were initially identified by some of us in the Social Work Mani-
festo in 2004 (Jones et al., 2004), and out of which, as I shall argue in this book,
a new engaged practice, rooted in social justice, can emerge.

Structure of the Book

In Chapter 1, I argue that, despite Conservative hostility and New Labour

ambivalence, social work has not only survived into the twenty-fi rst
century but has actually expanded, both in Britain and internationally.
As radical critics foresaw, however, it has often done so in the form of a
neo-liberal social work which places budgets and managerial priorities
above social work values. This chapter begins the discussion of the
possibilities for a different kind of social work, rooted in social justice,
through consideration both of the new movements against neo-liberalism
and war which have emerged in recent years, and through identifying
some elements of the ‘radical kernel’ which have been present in social
work since its inception.
Chapter 2 explores the promise and reality of the ideology which, for
most of the past two decades, has been the common sense of governments
throughout the world, regardless of the political party in power: neo-liberalism.
Focusing mainly on the experience in Britain under New Labour since
1997, I shall examine the ways in which neo-liberal policies (often wrapped
up in the language of the ‘Third Way’) have impacted on poverty, inequality
and insecurity, categories which most users of social work services know
only too well.
In Chapter 3 , the focus narrows to explore the roots of New Labour’s
oft-noted ambivalence to social work, and to examine the specific ways in
which governments under former prime minister Tony Blair have sought
to make professional social work ‘fit for purpose’. On the one hand, this
will involve discussion of the ways in which the moral authoritarianism
underpinning New Labour policies in areas such as youth justice and
asylum clash with core social work values, on the other, consideration of
three key elements of the modernisation agenda: managerialism,
regulation and evidence-based practice.
A core objective of the NHS and Community Care Act 1990 was the
creation of a market in care, with the private sector playing a greatly
increased role. Through consideration of the voluntary (or Third) sector,
the private sector and individualised budgets in the form of direct payments,
Chapter 4 explores the ways in which the provision of social care has been
transformed since the early 1990s, and critically assesses the neo-liberal
assumption that competition between service providers is the best
guarantor of high-quality services.
6 Reclaiming Social Work
It is now common in discussions of service user involvement to
distinguish between top-down, consumerist models, on the one hand,
and democratic models, often associated with collective service user
movements, on the other. In the first half of Chapter 5, I shall critically
assess the argument, propounded by John Harris amongst others, that
the potential of consumerist models for service user empowerment
(or social development) has been understated. In the second half of
Chapter 6, through discussion of the contribution made by the mental
health service users’ movement in the areas of worker/user relationships,
new services and policy and legislative change, I shall suggest that it is to
the collective discussions and activities of such service user movements
that we should look in the first instance for ideas and strategies which
can contribute to the development of genuinely empowering practice and
services.
Chapter 6 explores the radical tradition in social work. While often
identified exclusively with the movement which developed in Britain,
Australia and Canada in the early 1970s, I shall show, drawing on examples
from early British social work and from American social work in the first
half of the twentieth century, that radicalism in social work has a much
longer history. That said, the 1970s radical social work movement was of
particular significance and the second half of this chapter will be given
over to an assessment of its ideas and activities, as well as its legacy for
social workers today. A core concern of this chapter will be to highlight
the ways in which social work in the past has often been radicalised by
social movements in the wider society.
One element of that legacy has been the emergence since the 1990s of
critical social work, particularly in Australia and Canada. In Chapter 7,
I shall discuss two models of critical social work: a broad model which,
while critical of what it sees as radical social work’s overemphasis on class
and underemphasis on oppression, nevertheless, like its radical pre-
decessor, recognisably belongs to a tradition with roots in modernist or
Enlightenment assumptions; and a narrow model, based mainly on the
ideas of postmodernism. While acknowledging the commitment of critical
social work theorists of all hues to challenging oppression, I shall suggest
that postmodernism fails to provide social work with a clear foundation
for doing so.
Chapter 8 explores the ways in which growing opposition to the neo-liberal
consensus of the past two decades is opening up spaces for the development
of new, engaged forms of social work practice. One aspect of that
opposition, albeit as I shall show a rather limited one, is the ‘Happiness’
movement which has emerged in recent years and whose central tenet
is that consumerism does not provide a basis for satisfying living. Much
more significant is the anti-capitalist or global justice movement, already
referred to in Chapter 1. That movement, and its central assertion that
‘The world is not a commodity!’ finds a strong echo from within a social
work profession shaped much more by budgets and competition rather
 Introduction 7
than by core values. Dissatisfaction with the dominance of financial and
managerial priorities is, I shall argue, creating widespread resistance
across very broad layers of social workers. If that dissatisfaction can be
given voice and organisation, it may yet become an important resource in
the creation of a different form of social work, rooted in social justice and
more able to address the poverty, inequality and oppression which continue
to be the lot of a majority of service users in the twenty-first century.
 1

A Profession Worth Fighting For?

Introduction: After Social Work?

Throughout much of the world, the 1980s were tough years for those
involved in fighting for social justice and social change. The 1960s and
early 1970s had seen the emergence in many countries of powerful new
social movements, against war in Vietnam and for the liberation of women,
gays and black people, coupled with a resurgent trade union movement
in Britain, France and elsewhere. The rise of these movements had led
many to believe that real social and political change was on the global
agenda (Harman, 1988; Kurlansky, 2004). In contrast, the 1980s saw the old
ruling order re-establish itself in Britain, the USA and elsewhere, through
the vehicle of a new, aggressive neo-liberalism (Harvey, 2005). There was,
of course, still resistance, both internationally and in Britain. Whether it
was workers in Poland fighting to establish Solidarnosc – the biggest trade
union in the world – in the early 1980s, the campaign against Margaret
Thatcher’s hated poll tax at the end of the decade, or the magnificent, and
ultimately successful, struggle of trade unionists and activists in South
Africa to overthrow the brutal apartheid regime, people continued to fight
for change. Yet in the main, the social and political struggles of these years
were often bitter and defensive attempts to hang on to some of the gains
made during earlier periods, whether in the form of trade union rights or
a woman’s right to control her own body.
More than any other health or welfare profession, social work suffered
from the shift in the political climate during these years. In the 1970s,
social workers in Britain and elsewhere had begun to break from the
narrow, individualised and often pathologising focus which had
characterised much social work practice till then. The 1980s, in contrast,
was a period of retreat. As the decade progressed, a combination of factors
which included the rise of mass unemployment, a financial squeeze on
social work spending and a hostile government and media intent on
portraying social work as a ‘failing profession’ combined to reduce the
scope for progressive practice (Clarke, 1993). Again there was resistance,
and even some progress in social work education in the areas of anti-racist
 A Profession Worth Fighting For? 9
and anti-oppressive practice (albeit of an increasingly ‘top-down’
nature and within a narrow context of regulation and control – Penketh, 2000;
Langan, 2002). The growth of managerialism (or New Public Management),
however, from the late 1980s onwards, underpinning the extension of
market forces into social work, further squeezed the potential of social
work to act as a force for social change and added to a sense of alienation
amongst many front-line workers (Clarke and Newman, 1997;
McDonald, 2006).
Given this climate, it is hardly surprising that a mood of despondency
and pessimism should occasionally have affected some of those who
earlier had been in the forefront of the development of more radical
social work approaches. Jones and Novak, for example, writing in the
British Journal of Social Work in 1993, suggested that

It would appear that until the political climate changes and there is a widespread
revulsion against current trends and inequalities, social work might continue
as an occupation but perish as a caring and liberal profession. (Jones and
Novak, 1993: 211)

Further into the 1990s, Clarke, in a paper entitled ‘After Social Work?’
reflected on the ways in which managerialism and marketisation were
fragmenting both social work organisations and the social work task, and
posed the questions:

How can one struggle over what a ‘client-centered’ social work would look like
when the client has been abolished and replaced by ‘a customer’? How can
commitments to ‘anti-discriminatory practice’ be articulated within a managerial
agenda which is dominated by the quest for efficiency? The old points of
leverage have been marginalised, to be replaced by corporate visions, competition
and confusion. That multi-faceted dislocation matters both for those who
practise social work and those who receive it. For both, the future looks bleaker
after social work. (Clarke, 1996: 60)

Clarke’s paper was extremely prescient. The intensification of managerialism

under New Labour governments since 1997 has indeed meant that many
social workers in the UK do now work in organisations with managers
who have no background or training in social work. In the interests of
‘joint working’ and ‘integrated services’, social work departments have
often been merged with other local authority departments, such as housing,
and in some cases have been closed down altogether, with staff relocated
into departments of education or health. The growth of the social care
sector and the increasing individualisation of services is contributing to
the process of de-professionalisation, both within the voluntary sector
(or Third Sector, as it is now usually referred to) and within local authorities.
Others, meantime, are relocated into call centres owned by private
multinational companies like BT.
10 Reclaiming Social Work
Yet despite these changes, and despite a profound ambivalence and
distrust towards social workers on the part of New Labour which has
led to their exclusion from key welfare programmes (Jordan with Jordan,
2000), the profession has not disappeared, either in Britain or elsewhere.
On the contrary, on a global scale, as Lorenz has noted:

Social work is very much in demand, enjoys a boom, represents a growth

industry even in countries that ideologically would rather do without it.
(Lorenz, 2005a: 97)

In part, this expansion is itself a reflection of these same political and

economic processes discussed above – national, European and global –
which are aimed at creating greater integration of markets and increased
government regulation of professional education and practice (Penna, 2004).
In the UK, for example, an expansion of social work education has
resulted in part from the Bologna process of harmonising European
social work education, which means that social work in the UK is now a
graduate profession (Lorenz, 2005b). In addition, the development of new
forms of governance under New Labour has given rise to a raft of
new social work bodies, including the Social Care Councils, the Commissions
on Social Care, the Social Care Institute for Excellence and its Scottish
equivalent. In Scotland, Changing Lives, the Report of a major enquiry into
social work commissioned by the Scottish Executive, is likely to give rise
to major legislative changes, creating a new framework for the profession
for the coming period (Scottish Executive, 2006a). Meanwhile, as noted
by Lorenz, on a global scale it does appear that social work in one form
or other is seen by governments as having a role to play within advanced
market societies. The fact that social work schools are springing up
rapidly in the newly marketised societies of Eastern Europe, and also China,
suggests that the governments of these countries see a use for professional
social work in situations of growing social and economic inequality and
dislocation (Yip, 2007). It seems likely, then, that social work will survive,
though the fact that it will often do so in a truncated and sometimes
punitive form means that in itself, this is hardly a cause for celebration.
More importantly, however, in terms of the form in which social work
survives, there has been a second development in the years since these
articles were written which gives grounds for genuine hope, since
in important respects it represents the beginnings of the ‘widespread
revulsion against current trends and inequalities’ which Jones and Novak
saw as the basis for social work’s re-emergence as a liberal, humane
profession. The late 1990s saw the emergence of a powerful reaction
against the neo-liberal version of globalisation which had become
the common sense of most governments, both conservative and social-
democratic, during that decade. For much of the past two decades, as the
radical journalist George Monbiot observed, the great advantage of the
neo-liberals had been that they had only one idea: that society should
 A Profession Worth Fighting For? 11
subordinate all other concerns to the interests of big business (Monbiot,
2001: 5). It was that idea above all, however, that came under attack at the
end of the decade. The turning-point in the development of opposition to
neo-liberalism, the ‘fork in the road’ as the American anti-corporate
campaigner Ralph Nader described it, came in the city of Seattle in
November, 1999. There, 40,000 demonstrators, drawn from a very wide
variety of constituencies, brought the proceedings of the World Trade
Organisation to a halt and, in doing so, initiated a global movement which
has since challenged neo-liberal governments and neo-liberal policies on
every continent (Charlton, 2000; Danaher, 2001). Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel
Prize-winner and former Chief Economist at the World Bank, and a critic
of the dominant version of globalisation, has explained the significance of
this new movement:

Until the protestors came along, there was little hope for change and no outlet
for complaints. Some of the protestors went to excesses; some of the
protestors were arguing for higher protectionist barriers against the developing
countries which would have made their plight even worse. But despite these
problems, it is the trade unionists, students, environmentalists – ordinary
citizens – who have put the need for reform on the agenda of the developed world.
(Stiglitz, 2002: 9)

In the years which followed Seattle, this anti-capitalist movement (or global
justice movement, as it is sometimes called) has grown and developed
in four different, though connected, ways. First, there have been
the demonstrations. Since 1999, each time the world’s business and
government elites, notably the World Trade Organisation and the
G8 group of world leaders, have met to discuss ways in which the liberalisation
agenda can be taken a stage further, their deliberations have taken place
against the background of large mobilisations by angry protestors, drawn
overwhelmingly from the country in which they are meeting (Callinicos,
2003). More than 300,000 protestors, for example, gathered in Edinburgh,
Scotland in July 2005 to demand that the G8 leaders meeting in nearby
Gleneagles ‘make poverty history’ (Hubbard and Miller, 2005).
Second, the movement has developed its own structures and discussion
points in the form of the World Social Forum and Regional Social Forums,
where the experiences of opposition to the free-market policies of the G8
and WTO can be shared and alternative policies proposed and debated.
Since 2001 such gatherings, typically involving tens of thousands of
participants, have regularly taken place in cities across the globe including
Porto Alegre, Cairo, Mumbai, Florence, Paris and London (George, 2004).
Third, the influence of this movement, coupled with people’s direct
experience of neo-liberal policies, has fuelled mass movements against
privatisation in many different countries and contributed directly and
indirectly to political change. This is most obviously the case in Latin
America, where struggles against the privatisation of basic utilities such
12 Reclaiming Social Work
as water and electricity have given rise to huge popular movements in
countries like Colombia and Ecuador and elsewhere, as in Venezuela and
Bolivia, that have led to the election of new radical governments
(Ali, 2006). Meanwhile in Europe, opposition to the neo-liberal agenda
has led to the creation of new political parties which, in several countries
including Italy, Portugal, Britain and Germany, have gained parliamentary
representation.
Finally, since 2003, the movement has been central to the development
of an even bigger global social movement in opposition to the devastating
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as the ongoing occupation of
Palestine by the Israeli state). Following the events of 9/11 in New York in
2001, there was a widespread assumption, voiced by the New York Times,
that the global justice movement would wither away, unable to withstand
the patriotic fervour engendered by George W. Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’.
Instead, the movement rapidly developed in an anti-war direction,
with many people easily making the connection between the economic
policies of the world’s most powerful states and corporations and their
military policies, summed up in the popular slogan ‘No blood for oil’. The
result has been the biggest anti-war movement the world has ever seen,
with 10 million people marching globally on 15 February 2003, including
2 million people on the streets of London (Murray and German, 2005).
One indication of the extent to which this movement has shaped popular
consciousness is the fact that the term ‘imperialism’, long associated with
some of the more esoteric sects on the far left, has once again become a
term of common use in describing the behaviour of the major powers.
As one prominent critic of the wars of recent years has noted:

I used not to use the word imperialism. I thought young people wouldn’t even
know what it meant. Then Robert Cooper [formerly foreign policy adviser to
Blair] writes a pamphlet in which he openly calls for what he describes as a
new imperialism. Suddenly I find that everyone is using the words imperialism
and anti-imperialism and I think that is a jolly good thing. If something looks like
a duck and walks like a duck, the chances are it is a duck. That’s exactly what
we’ve got going now – a new imperialism. All sides are using its real name.
(Galloway, 2003: 117)

Challenging Neo-liberal Social Work

What might be the significance of this global movement, and this shift
in popular consciousness, for those seeking to recreate a social work
profession rooted in notions of social justice? First, without understating
the extent to which neo-liberal ideas and policies continue to dominate the
political landscape in Britain and in many other countries, the movement
has been successful in challenging the notion that neo-liberal globalisation is
the only show in town. One indication of the shift in ideas that has taken
 A Profession Worth Fighting For? 13
place is that some of those who, less than a decade ago, were arguing that
social democratic governments need not concern themselves overmuch with
issues of inequality are now to be found arguing for a ‘new egalitarianism’
(Giddens and Diamond, 2005).
Second, as Thompson has argued (Thompson, 2002), social work in
the past has been profoundly affected by its contact with social movements
and the shifts in popular thinking which such movements bring about.
This is most obviously true of Britain, Canada and Australia in the 1970s.
In important respects, radical social work was a product of the great
social movements of these years, notably the civil rights movement, the
movement against the war in Vietnam, the women’s movement and the
struggles of trade unionists. On a smaller scale, in the 1980s and 1990s,
‘new social welfare movements’ such as the disability movement and the
mental health users’ movement have similarly exerted an influence on
professional social work, reflected in the widespread acceptance of social
models of disability and health. However, as I shall argue in Chapter 6,
the links between social work and social movements go back much earlier
than the 1970s and are not confined to the countries mentioned above. The
ways in which the social movements of the twenty-first century – notably
the anti-capitalist or global justice movement on the one hand and the
anti-war movement on the other – can inform the development of a new,
radical practice will be considered in Chapter 8.
Third, this wider dissatisfaction with neo-liberalism finds a strong echo
from within a social work profession whose knowledge base, skills and
values have been distorted and undermined by the imposition since the
early 1990s of a pro-business ideology, sometimes referred to as New Public
Management (NPM). McDonald identifies some of the key elements of
NPM as being:

a shift of focus by public sector leaders from policy to management; an emphasis

on quantifi able performance measurements and appraisal, the break-up of
traditional bureaucratic structures into quasi-autonomous units dealing with
one another on a user-pays basis, market testing and competitive tendering
instead of in-house provision, strong emphasis on cost-cutting, output targets
rather than input controls, limited-term contracts for state employees instead
of career tenure, monetized incentives rather than fi xed salaries ‘freedom
to manage’ instead of personnel control, more use of public relations and
advertising and encouragement of self regulation instead of legislation.
(McDonald, 2006: 69)

One of the main effects of these changes has been to hugely reduce the
possibilities for social workers to undertake direct work with service
users. The desire to ‘work with people’, alongside the aspiration to
‘make a difference’ have historically been amongst the main reasons for
people coming into social work. Yet as Changing Lives, the Report
of the 21st Century Social Work Review in Scotland published in 2006,
14 Reclaiming Social Work
makes clear it is precisely these aspects of the job that have been undermined
by the changes described above:

Working to achieve change is at the heart of what social workers do. Identifying
needs and risks through assessment and developing and implementing action
plans to address these will achieve nothing without an effective therapeutic
relationship between worker and client . . . . Yet social workers consistently told
us that it is this very aspect of their work which has been eroded and devalued
in recent years under the pressure of workloads, increased bureaucracy and
a more mechanistic and technical approach to delivering services. (Scottish
Executive, 2006a: 28)

The social workers interviewed by Jones in one of the few studies to

explore the experience of frontline social work in England in the year 2000
expressed very similar views:

We are now much more office based. This really hit home the other day when
the whole team was in the office working at their desks. We have loads more
forms which take time to complete. But we social workers also do less and less
direct work with clients. Increasingly the agency buys in other people to do
the direct work and we manage it. (Jones, 2004: 100)

One factor underpinning this shift has been the reduction of professional
social work to care management, reflecting the introduction of a purchaser/
provider split aimed at creating a market in social work and social care. Another
factor creating worker dissatisfaction is the increasingly authoritarian
climate in which workers are required to operate, particularly in the areas of
asylum and youth justice. As another of Jones’ respondents commented:

I was talking to a youth justice worker last week and she told me how much
she loved her job until the recent changes. Now she hates it as they do less
work with kids, have got to be more concerned with disciplining them and have
to work with police officers and the like. It seemed to her that it was all based
around a punitive approach and that Jack Straw [Labour minister] was as bad
as Michael Howard [Conservative Minister]. Both seem to hate youngsters and
seem more concerned with criminalising the kids who are seen to be of no use.
(Quoted in Jones, 2004: 103)

What is significant about this dissatisfaction is that it appears to affect

much wider layers of social workers than those who were influenced
by radical social work ideas in the 1970s. The reason is that neo-liberal
social work, to use Jones’s phrase, undermines not only radical or structural
approaches but also ‘traditional’ relationship-based social work. The
weakness of professional social work organisation in Britain and the
failure (until recently) of the main social work trade union to seriously
engage with these ‘professional’ issues means that the dissatisfaction and
unhappiness which exists has until now usually been expressed in
individualised ways – through sickness, moving job or leaving the profession.
 A Profession Worth Fighting For? 15
In Chapter 8, however, we shall return to a discussion of the ways in which
that dissatisfaction might be collectively channelled into the construction
of a new engaged practice.

A Profession Worth Fighting for?

Both implicit and explicit in the arguments of these radical critics of

current trends within social work is the view that the disappearance of a
social work profession rooted in social justice would be a defeat for those
committed to challenging oppression and inequality. Conversely, it would
be an encouragement to those in positions of power who seek to blame
the poor and oppressed for their own poverty and for the problems they
experience (see also Jones et al., 2004). That view, it has to be said, is not
a self-evident one. For much of its history, social work has been seen by
the State – and experienced by those on the receiving end of social work
services – primarily as a form of social control, with social workers the
‘soft cops’ who differ from ‘hard cops’ only in the technologies that they
employ. At its most extreme, that social control remit over the past century
has allowed for the involvement of social workers in Australia in the forced
removal of Aboriginal children from their families and the placement of
these children in white institutions or with white families (Briskman, 2003);
social workers in 1930s Nazi Germany employing the transferable skills
of ‘assessment and counselling’ to sort out those who were not seen
as part of the nation’s ‘healthy stock’ and helping them to ‘come to
terms emotionally with measures to which they had been subjected . . .
i.e. institutionalisation, sterilisation or deportation’ (Lorenz, 1994: 68); and
closer to our own times, the expectation (and statutory requirement) that
social workers in Britain will be involved in removing children from the
families of asylum seekers who have been refused leave to remain (Hayes
and Humphries, 2004). On a more day-to-day level, the statutory powers
of social workers to remove children from their families, coupled with
their roles of assessment, rationing of scarce resources and surveillance of
poor families or ‘risky’ individuals means that they have frequently been
viewed with fear and mistrust by the poorest sections of the population,
and are seen in a much less positive light than other welfare professionals
(Donzelot, 1980). Movies such as Ken Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), or
Holman’s collection of writings by parents in a deprived area of Glasgow
highlight the ambivalence which many poor, working-class people feel
towards social workers (Holman, 1998).
For much of its history, it is these controlling features of social work that
have been to the fore. What is also true, however, is that historically, social
work, to a greater extent than other health and social care professions has, from
time to time, been an awkward or troublesome profession. It is a profession
whose members have sometimes sided with their clients against the State
and challenged dominant ideologies in a way that other professionals have not.
16 Reclaiming Social Work
If social work is mistrusted by its clients, it is no less true that it has often
been mistrusted by the State. In this respect, as Butler and Drakeford
suggest, ‘social work is heir to a radical, emancipatory and transformative
ideal, or at least, it has the potential to promote such an ideal’ (Butler and
Drakeford, 2001: 16). Some sense of this potential for change is evident
in the quote with which Cree and Davis end their 2007 study of service
users’ and workers’ views of social work. For Sarah, a care-leaver who is
about to begin her social work degree programme:
I’m really passionate about social work – we can make a difference and inform
practice and legislation. I know the difference social services made in my life,
and I think I could do it, and do it really well. I know there’s a lot of regulations
and a lot of pressure – but I really want to do it and I think that I can make
a difference. (Quoted in Cree and Davis, 2007: 159)

It is this ‘radical kernel’ of social work, the inherent tension between its
controlling role on the one hand and its potential to be a force for social
change and social justice on the other, that make social work different and
social workers more than just ‘soft cops’. In Chapter 6 I shall explore the
nature and history of this radicalism in more detail. Here, however, I shall
identify some of the elements which make social work, at least potentially,
a troublesome profession and a profession worth fighting for.

A Site of Ideological Confl ict

The most general explanation for the radicalism lurking within social work
lies in its location within capitalist society. Since its inception, social
work has acted as a prism which mirrors – and often distorts – the most
fundamental divides and antagonisms of the society in which we live.
Precisely because of the human material with which it deals, it is a site
of ideological conflict. Its concern is to make sense of, and respond to,
the ways in which human beings relate to each other as family members
and as citizens; with questions of individual responsibility versus public
responsibility; and with the role of the family as both heaven and hell.
It is concerned with ‘difficult’ or ‘risky’ behaviours, and with the reasons
for these behaviours. It is concerned with the ways in which inequalities
and oppressions impact upon the psyches and the relationships of human
beings and the cumulative impact of these. It is, in C. Wright Mills’
famous phrase, concerned with ‘public issues’ and private troubles’ and
the relationship between them (Mills, 1959/2000). Given the essentially
contested nature of its subject matter, for this reason, if for no other, it would
be strange if social work itself did not reflect the contested nature of issues.

Guilt by Association

Since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, social work has had
the particular societal mandate of going amongst the poor, and working
 A Profession Worth Fighting For? 17
with the poor, but with the clear injunction ‘not to go native’ (the analogy
with Christian missionary work in the remotest parts of the Empire is,
of course, exact and early social work was often seen explicitly in these
terms: Stedman-Jones, 1984). Jones refers to the ever-present danger of
social workers becoming ‘over-involved’ with their clients as the problem
of ‘contamination’ and sees the development of social work education as
being part of a strategy to arm budding social workers against this danger
(Jones, 1983). The dilemma this involved was evident from the earliest
days of the Charity Organisation Society (COS). The Society’s philosophy,
which fi nds many echoes in the current moral authoritarianism of
New Labour, will be discussed in Chapter 3, but it is worth noting here
that even the strong, free-market ideology of the COS could sometimes
be challenged by the contact of COS volunteers like Beatrice Webb with
the realities of poverty:

it was difficult to see how such [COS] principles could be ‘made consistent
with the duty persistently inculcated of personal friendship with the poor’.
(Lewis, 1995: 56)

That threat became most pronounced during the 1970s with the advent
of radical social work, when many social workers explicitly rejected the
dominant explanations of the roots of their clients’ problems in favour of
structural explanations which led them to seek ways of engaging in joint
action with clients against the policies of local and central government.
However, even during periods when social workers have been much less
politically involved, the simple act of ‘friendship’ with service users
who are being demonised by government or the tabloid press, such as
asylum seekers or young people in poor areas, can be seen as evidence
of ‘soft-headedness’ or more recently, ‘political correctness’. For many
social workers, such guilt by association may be seen as ‘coming with the
territory’, as the price to be paid for working in an ethical manner which
only demonstrates respect for clients. In an article on political correctness
and social work, Douglas cites the case of Alison, a social worker with
Barnet Social Services, who

‘sees the lack of resources as more relevant than ideology’ . . . . She sees no
evidence of political correctness in her workplace. In her view, social workers
have a responsibility to defend the rights of groups like asylum seekers who are
treated poorly and with considerable prejudice at times by other professionals
like benefits agency staff. If social workers are politically correct, that is fine if it
helps to mitigate hostility to vulnerable groups. (Douglas, 1999: 46)

Troublesome Values
As the comments from Alison suggest, a further source of social work’s
awkwardness lies in its value base. This applies most obviously to the
more radical social work values developed through the 1970s and 1980s,
18 Reclaiming Social Work
which became the basis of anti-oppressive practice (Shardlow, 1989; Braye
and Preston-Shoot, 1994) but increasingly, it also includes more traditional
social work values, such as respect for persons. As the demonisation and
scapegoating of particular social groups, such as young people and asylum
seekers, have continued and even intensified under New Labour
governments (Butler and Drakeford, 2001), even these traditional values
can begin to take on a radical edge and can force social workers to begin
to challenge existing policies and practices. That ‘being treated like a
human being’ was the thing homeless people valued most about the
services they received was a key finding of research into homelessness
and mental distress in Glasgow (Ferguson et al., 2005; more generally on
the importance of respect, see Sennet, 2003). Conversely, the implications
for mental and physical health of not feeling respected is evident in the
following comment from an Afghani asylum seeker ‘dispersed’ to one of
the most deprived areas of Glasgow:

When people look down on you, when they don’t respect you as a human being,
then you feel very belittled. We think that people don’t respect us like human
beings. We have a responsibility to be part of the society but if people don’t
want us to be part of society, then we feel very segregated, very isolated. That
affects us psychologically and mentally because we feel that nobody needs
us, they don’t respect us like any other human being. (Quoted in Ferguson and
Barclay, 2002)

Another traditional social work value which finds itself increasingly at

odds with dominant ideas is a belief in people’s capacity to change.
Several writers have noted the shift in social policy over the past two decades
from a discourse of rehabilitation, which emphasised people’s capacity to
change, to a discourse of risk management which emphasises risk minimisation
and control (Parsloe, 1999; Webb, 2006). That discourse is now dominant
within a number of areas, including mental health (particularly in relation
to people with the diagnosis of personality disorder) as well as criminal
justice (particularly in relation to sex offenders).

Emphasis on the Social

In contrast to theories of society which locate the roots of social problems

within the individual, most social work theories, including most mainstream
theories, have tended to emphasise the interaction between the individual and
society (or ‘environment’). To that extent social work challenges explanations
of social problems which seek to reduce them to the behaviours of individuals.
It is this emphasis on the ‘social’ which on the one hand permits a holistic
approach to the understanding and response to people’s problems and on
the other, which has allowed social work, to a greater extent than any other
profession, to contribute to the development of social models of disability and
mental health over the past two decades (Oliver, 1996; Tew, 2005).
 A Profession Worth Fighting For? 19

Making Sense
Gee, Officer Krupke, we’re very upset;
We never had the love that ev’ry child oughta get.
We ain’t no delinquents, We’re misunderstood.
Deep down inside us there is good!
(West Side Story, Sondheim, 1957)

Sondheim’s witty parody on the perceived tendency of social workers to

seek to explain every form of human behaviour, no matter how dreadful
or anti-social, has been mirrored in recent years in a much less amusing
discourse which eschews such explanations in favour of a harsh moralism
which seeks primarily to blame and punish. Its founding credo might
well be the (then) Conservative Prime Minister John Major’s response to
the death of the two-year-old child Jamie Bolger at the hands of two other
children, when, in an interview with the Mail on Sunday, he suggested
that society needs to ‘understand a little less and condemn a little more’
(Mail on Sunday, 21 February 1993). ‘Understanding’ in this case should,
of course, have meant acknowledging not only the dreadful upbringings
experienced by the two children who had killed Jamie but also the fact
that the murder of children by other children is extremely rare and that
the numbers have not risen in recent years (Ferguson, 1994). The way in
which this shift from ‘depth’ explanations of social problems, in the sense
of explanations which look for meanings, to ‘surface’ explanations whose
primary aim is to manage and control (Howe, 1996) will be explored later
in this book. What is true, however, is that since its inception, a central
concern of social work has been to make sense of people’s behaviour, and
to explore the meanings of clients’ lives and relationships (England, 1986;
Preston-Shoot and Agass, 1990). This is not, of course, an inherently radical
activity. In the early days of social work, the main purpose of ‘making
sense’ of clients’ behaviour was to determine eligibility for charitable
relief; while at other times, the framework for making sense has been a
narrow individualistic one which precluded a whole range of possible
explanations which emphasised wider societal processes (Mayer and
Timms, 1970). Nevertheless, the recognition by almost every current in
social work (other than, perhaps, some behavioural schools) that looking
at alternative explanations of behaviour, ‘hypothesising’, is an essential
part of the process of social work assessment and intervention is a given
within most mainstream social work approaches (Hughes, 1995; Milner
and O’Byrne, 2001). It is for that reason that a broad, in-depth knowledge
base, which since the 1970s has included sociology and social policy as
well as developmental psychology, should continue to be a core part of
social work education (Simpson and Price, 2007). Part of the current
impatience with social work stems from a dominant discourse which
would prefer not to try to make sense of ‘difficult’ behaviours (not least
since this might raise wider questions about the society in which we live)
20 Reclaiming Social Work
and rely instead on ‘common sense’ to locate the blame within ‘dangerous’
individuals or ‘risky’ families.

Holistic Practice

The recognition, drawn in part from a sociological knowledge base,

that the roots of service users’ problems often lie not with the individual
or the family but in oppressive social structures and disempowering social
processes pointed to the need for holistic responses which address service
users’ problem at whichever level seems most appropriate, be it individual,
group, community or structural. Despite their limitations, it was this
recognition which gave the ecological or systems approaches that
came to the fore in the 1970s whatever radical potential they possessed
(Leonard, 1975).
Ironically, thirty years after that 1970s’ critique of the dominance of
social work practice by one method, psychosocial casework, like community
work, has also been eclipsed by the domination since the early 1990s
of another US import, care management (Schorr, 1992), as the preferred
vehicle for the introduction of market forces into social work (Harris, 2003).
Rediscovering and re-valuing the full range of social work methods which
permit a genuinely holistic response would seem to be an essential task in
reclaiming social work.

Conclusion

Not all of the features described above are unique to social work. Other
professions espouse similar values, emphasise the importance of process
and relationship, draw on a knowledge base or use similar approaches.
Social work, however, is more than the sum of its parts. The combination
of a value base of respect, empowerment and social justice; the emphasis
on a relationship between worker and service user founded on trust and
non-judgemental acceptance; a knowledge base which embraces both
developmental psychology and also an understanding of social structures
and social processes; and a repertoire of methods ranging from individual
counselling to advocacy and community work; all these give social
work a holistic perspective which makes it unique amongst the helping
professions. That perspective is reflected in the definition of social work
adopted by the International Federation of Social Workers in 2000:

The social work profession promotes social change, problem solving in human
relationships and the empowerment and liberation of people to enhance well-being.
Utilising theories of human behaviour and social systems, social work
inter venes at the points where people interact with their environments.
Principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to social work.
(www.ifsw.org.com)
 A Profession Worth Fighting For? 21
It is also that combination of elements which gives social work the potential
to be an awkward profession, as well as a profession worth preserving.
Like Jones, Powell also argues that

Social work’s capacity to survive depends upon its legitimacy as an authentic

‘humanising voice’ rather than simply a conservative profession conveniently
wrapping itself in the rhetoric of the market. (Powell, 2001: 16)

Later in this book, I shall explore some of means by which social work
might rediscover its humanity, as well as its radicalism. Before then,
however, it is necessary to examine in more detail the philosophy, policies
and practice of the ideology that has shaped the experience of most of the
world’s peoples for more than a decade, as well as having created the current
crisis in social work: neo-liberalism.
 2

Neo-liberal Britain

Introduction: 1973 – the Year the World Changed

Life on Mars was a popular BBC TV drama series first screened in early
2006. It featured a young police detective who, after being struck by a
car, wakes up to find himself transported back more than thirty years
to 1973. He makes his way to a local police station where his arrival as
a new senior detective in a team characterised by sexism, racism and
crude investigative techniques has been anticipated. Each week the series
portrayed the young man’s increasingly frantic efforts to make sense
both of the time warp within which he found himself and also of the
very different world of Britain in the early 1970s. Life on Mars attracted
a huge following, not only due to its imaginative storylines but also
because of its identification of the profound ways in which life in Britain
has changed over these three decades. At the most superficial level, there
are the changes in dress and style (gone, the flared trousers and mullet
haircuts). Then there are changes in technology: no PCs, Internet or
mobile phones. Most striking, however, are the changes in popular values
and attitudes which the series portrayed. For this was the world before
the Steven Lawrence enquiry in 1999 branded the Metropolitan Police as
institutionally racist, a world in which overt sexist and racist attitudes
were often the norm (and not only in police canteens) and a world where
minorities in general were afforded precious little respect. In that sense,
the series showed how far Britain as a society has come as a result of
the struggles against discrimination and oppression over these years.
The year 1973 is significant, however, for another reason not touched on
by the series. For this was the year which saw the end of the ‘long boom’,
the period of unprecedented world economic growth which followed the
Second World War (Armstrong et al., 1991). During the 1950s and 1960s,
poverty in Britain and other Western capitalist societies did not go away
but many people in the West did experience a real improvement in their
living standards. In addition, the creation of a Welfare State in Britain in
1948 meant that, for the first time, working-class people could enjoy a degree
of security in the face of illness and unemployment (Timmins, 1996).
 Neo-liberal Britain 23

Not for nothing did the left-wing Labour MP Aneurin Bevan call his
collection of essays on the Welfare State In Place of Fear (Bevan, 1952).
These were years in which working-class people could begin to dream
of a better life for themselves and their children than their own parents
could ever have envisaged. The world economic crisis of 1973, triggered
by a sharp rise in oil prices that year but reflecting much deeper
structural problems, changed all that (Harman, 1984). It had three main
consequences.
First, it led to the return of mass unemployment. In virtually all Western
countries, unemployment which had hovered around the 1 or 2 per cent
level for most of the post-war period doubled and then doubled again at
the end of the decade. In Britain, the figure passed 1 million in 1979, higher
than it had been since the Great Depression of the 1930s (Keegan, 1984).
Second, the economic crisis led to attacks on the Welfare State. Social
work spending, for example, which had risen by 15.8 per cent under
a Conservative government between 1970 and 1974 grew by only 1.9 per cent
under a Labour government between 1975 and 1979 (Langan, 1993). The
Kilbrandon Report in Scotland (1965) and the Seebohm Report in England
and Wales (1968) had laid the basis for a social work practice which was
preventative, inclusive and which, in Scotland, required local authorities
to actively promote social welfare (Hartnoll, 1998). As Langan notes, however,
the introduction of targeting of services to particular client groups by the
new Labour Government at the end of 1974 meant that

Within six years of Seebohm the selective mentality of the old Poor Law had
come to prevail over the universalist aspirations of the report’s more radical
proponents. (Langan, 1993: 54)

Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, public spending

in Britain was reduced by 9.5 per cent in real terms after allowing for
inflation between 1976 and 1978, a higher cut than was ever achieved in
the subsequent years of Conservative government and one which resulted
in the closure of large numbers of schools and hospitals (Cliff and Gluckstein,
1988; Elliot, 1993).
Third, it brought to an end the political and economic consensus which
had existed between the two main political parties for most of the 1950s
and 1960s (usually referred to as ‘Butskellism’, after Rab Butler and Hugh
Gaitskell, leading figures in their respective parties at that time). Central
to that consensus had been the ideology of Keynesianism, based on the
ideas of the economist John Maynard Keynes and in practice involving
an acceptance of the key role of the State in the provision of welfare, in
the management of essential industries and in the regulation of the economy.
Now Keynesianism was to be replaced by monetarism, the prototype of
present-day neo-liberalism. Significantly, monetarist policies were introduced
not by Margaret Thatcher but by the Labour Government of 1974–79, with
24 Reclaiming Social Work
a key shift signalled in the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan’s
speech to Labour Party Conference in 1976:

We used to think you could spend your way out of a recession, and increase
employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in
all candour that that option no longer exists, and that in so far as it ever did
exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose
of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the
next step. (Quoted in Cliff and Gluckstein, 1988: 322–3)

In practice, this increasingly meant a return to the free-market ideologies

which had been discarded during the Great Depression of the 1930s, albeit
adapted to the increasingly globalised world of the 1980s and 1990s.
This chapter will explore the promise and the reality of neo-liberalism.
For over the past two decades, its central credo, first mooted by Margaret
Thatcher, that there is ‘no alternative to the market’ has become the common
sense not only of the political Right but also of most social democratic
parties around the world, albeit often dressed up in the rhetoric of the
‘Third Way’. In the next two chapters (Chapters 3 and 4), I shall explore
the ways in which neo-liberalism has reshaped social work, and in Chapter 8,
the final chapter, the ways in which the growing resistance to neo-liberalism
both inside and outside social work is creating the conditions for a different
kind of social work, rooted in social justice. First though, the rationale for
neo-liberalism as well as its key elements will be explored. Thereafter, the
core promise of neo-liberalism – that all would benefit from the extension
of market forces as a result of wealth ‘trickling down’ from the richest to
the poorest – will be critically assessed through an examination of poverty,
inequality and insecurity in Britain in the first decade of the twenty-first
century.

Neo-liberalism: The Promise

Neo-liberalism is best understood as a political and economic strategy,

adopted initially by governments in Chile, Britain, the USA and
New Zealand but thereafter throughout most of the world, to address the
crisis of profitability which was exposed by the oil crisis of 1973. Its
overriding concern was with restoring the health of capitalist economies – in
particular, through increasing profitability. Harvey defines neo-liberalism
as being

in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that
human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial
freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong
property rights, free markets, and free trade . . . . Furthermore, if markets do
not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security
 Neo-liberal Britain 25

or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if

necessary. (2006: 2)

In practice, this has meant two things. On the one hand, it has involved
the creation of new markets, whether through the privatisation of existing
State-owned utilities (such as rail, gas and water) or through the setting
up of new institutional arrangements which allow market forces access to
areas from which they have previously been excluded (in the case of health
and social care services in Britain, through the purchaser/provider split
introduced by the NHS and Community Care Act in 1990 – Harris, 2003;
Pollock, 2004). On the other hand, it has involved the removal (or weakening)
of what are perceived as barriers to the free operation of market forces,
whether in the form of ‘unnecessary regulation’, trade unions or pro-
fessional interest groups, such as doctors and lawyers. This latter process
has taken place through a combination of international agreements (such
as the General Agreement on Trade and Services), employers’ offensives
(such as Ronald Reagan’s attack on the air traffic controllers’ union in the
USA in 1981 or Margaret Thatcher’s war with British miners in 1984/85)
or through an aggressive consumerism which employs notions of ‘choice’
and ‘user empowerment’ to undermine professional power.
Pratt identifies the three key elements of neo-liberal ideology as being
fi rst, methodological individualism, the notion that society is reducible to
individuals pursuing their own self interests, so that, in Margaret Thatcher’s
famous phrase, ‘there is no such thing as society, only individuals and
families’; second, rationality, in the sense that individuals normally act
rationally in pursuit of their own self-interest; and third, market supremacy, the
belief that the market unhindered by impediments such as trade unions
is the most rational way to organise society (Pratt, 2005: 12–13). Linked to
this third element is the notion that everyone benefits from market society,
in that while some people will grow much richer than others, wealth will
also ‘trickle down’ to the poorer sections of the community (or in another
much overused metaphor, ‘in a rising tide, all boats rise’).
All three of these elements are relevant to a discussion of the ways in
which neo-liberalism has shaped welfare services and the experience of those
who use them. The extreme individualism which Thatcher celebrated,
for example, has over two decades contributed to what Lorenz has described as
‘neo-liberalism’s erosion of solidarity’ (Lorenz, 2005a), a profound atomisation
of social life vividly explored in movies such as Paul Haggis’s Crash, and the
consequences of which in the US context were all too evident to the poor black
population of New Orleans following the devastation wrought by Hurricane
Katrina in 2005. The notion that individuals always act rationally in pursuit
of their own self-interest has underpinned the reconstruction of clients
or service users as customers within a social care marketplace. However, it
is primarily the third claim – the notion that neo-liberal policies benefit not
just the rich but all members of society – that this chapter will seek to assess,
focusing mainly on the experience of Britain under New Labour since 1997.
26 Reclaiming Social Work

Neo-liberalism: The Record

What, then, has been the impact of the neo-liberal policies initiated by
Conservative governments in the 1980s and continued under New Labour
since 1997? Answering that question will involve us in looking at three
distinct but related areas: poverty; inequality and insecurity.

Poverty

Hills and Stewart summarise the State of Britain when the first New Labour
government took office as follows:

The Labour Government that took office in 1997 inherited levels of poverty and
inequality unprecedented in post-war history. More than one in four UK children
lived in relative poverty, compared to one in eight when Labour had left office
in 1979 . . . . Poverty among pensioners stood at 21%. Income inequality had
widened sharply: in 1979 the post-tax income of the top tenth of the income
distribution was about five times that of the bottom tenth; by the mid-1990s
that rate had doubled. (Hills and Stewart, 2005: 1)

Even these figures, however, fail to give a true picture of the huge
redistribution of wealth – from poor to rich – which took place during
these years, the spirit of which is best captured in novels such as Jonathon
Coe’s What a Carve-Up!. The Sunday Times ‘rich list’ in 1999, for example,
showed that the wealthiest 200 people were worth £38 billion in 1989 but
£75.9 billion in 1999 (Labour Research, 2000). In fact, during the 18 years
of Conservative rule, the poor became poorer by £520 per annum
while the incomes of the rich rose by more than £12,000 per year
(Gordon, 2000: 34).
The issue of poverty is of considerable relevance to social workers for
the simple reason that most people who use social work services are poor.
As an American observer of British social work commented in the
early 1990s:

the most striking characteristics that clients of social services have in common
are poverty and deprivation. Often this is not mentioned . . . still, everyone in the
business knows it. (Schorr, 1992: 8)

In 1997, Becker found that nine out of ten social work clients in the
UK were in receipt of welfare benefits (Becker, 1997) while earlier in
the decade Brandon had observed that ‘the most common symptom of
mental illness is poverty’ (1991). The fact that 15 years later, 40 per cent
of those claiming Incapacity Benefit were suffering from mental
health problems suggests that little has changed (The Guardian,
26 January, 2006).
 Neo-liberal Britain 27

So how have poor people fared under New Labour? The incoming
government’s strategy in relation to poverty (and wealth) is explained in
the following way by its most prominent academic supporter:

New Labour since 1997 has focused firmly on the poor. The reasoning is that
the priority should be to concentrate on the most disadvantaged, rather than
worry about overall levels of income inequality. The rich were to be largely left
alone; it was far more important to concentrate on raising the floor – improving
the economic and social position of the poor both in absolute terms and relative
to median income. New Labour sought to break away from the traditional theme
of the left that the rich must have become so by exploiting others. Those who
are economically successful often bring benefits to wider society as a condition
of their drive, initiative and creativity. (Diamond and Giddens, 2005: 103)

Leaving the rich alone meant that the traditional social democratic
strategy for addressing poverty – wealth redistribution – was not an
option. Rather, for New Labour, the road out of poverty lay through what
Adler has called the ‘employment model’: getting people into paid work
and subsidising low-paid employment through tax credits (Adler, quoted in
Grover, 2006). As Jordan has argued, this emphasis on work has shaped
every aspect of New Labour’s welfare strategy, including its narrow
understanding of social exclusion (as meaning primarily exclusion from
paid work), the authoritarianism underpinning its welfare policies (since
those reluctant to work, for whatever reason, must be ‘helped’ to do so,
through policies such as the New Deal for the long-term unemployed)
and the exclusion of social work from its welfare initiatives (since it is not
seen as suited to the tough economic role these policies demand) (Jordan
with Jordan, 2000).
How successful, then, has welfare-to-work been as a strategy for
reducing poverty? A number of major studies have painted a comprehensive
picture of poverty in Britain just under a decade after New Labour first
came into office (Hills and Stewart, 2005; Palmer et al., 2005; Pantazis
et al., 2006).
Thus in 2003/4, 12 million people in Britain – about one in five – were
living in income poverty. This is nearly 2 million less than in the early
1990s. It is still, however, nearly twice what it was when the Conservatives
came into office in 1979. In fact, since New Labour was elected, poverty
levels have declined only amongst two groups: families with children
(down from 32 to 29 per cent) and pensioners (down from 27 to 22 per cent). In
contrast, the proportion of working-age adults without dependent children
in income, poverty has actually increased by 400,000 since the late 1990s
(Palmer et al., 2005).
Poverty has also grown amongst working-age disabled people, 30 per cent
of whom live in income poverty as compared to 27 per cent a decade ago
(Palmer et al., 2005: 13).
28 Reclaiming Social Work
It is in relation to child poverty, however, one of only two areas where
New Labour set themselves targets for reducing poverty, that the limitations
of the current strategy are most obvious. At a lecture in 1999 in memory
of William Beveridge, Tony Blair committed the government not just to
reducing child poverty but to its abolition:

Our historic aim [will be] that ours is the first generation to end child poverty
forever . . . . It is a 20-year mission, but I believe it can be done. (Quoted in Hills
and Stewart, 2005: 11)

The fi rst stage in that twenty-year mission was to be a 25 per cent

reduction – 1 million – in the number of children living in poverty by
2004/5. There was general agreement that this would be the easiest
target for the government to reach, given that they would be moving
those nearest to the poverty line over that line. Despite this, when the
figures were announced in March 2005, they showed that the government
was 30 per cent (or 300,000 children) short of its target. This meant that
in 2006, 3.4 million children in Britain were still living in poverty. The
conclusion drawn even by some sympathetic to New Labour was that,
while progress had been made, a strategy of relying mainly on tax credits
and a very low Minimum Wage would be insufficient to raise millions of
children out of poverty and that substantial redistribution of wealth was
required (Toynbee, 2006a). Others were much harsher in their criticism of
the government’s performance. Save the Children UK, for example, issued
a press statement headed ‘Blair Betrays’ Britain’s Children’ and demanded
an urgent enquiry into the failure to meet the target of 1 million (Save the
Children, 2006).
In other areas too, there seems to have been little or no change. Thus,
for example, the 50 per cent of children who qualify for free school meals – one
of the most commonly accepted indicators of child poverty – still come
from 20 per cent of schools, a figure unchanged since 1996 (Palmer et al.,
2005: 33).
Moreover, while some commentators attribute the decline in child
poverty that has taken place mainly to the impact of government policies,
notably Working Families Tax Credits, this is not a universally shared
view. Thus according to the authors of the Joseph Rowntree Poverty and
Social Exclusion Annual Monitoring Report:

It is the increase in employment rather than the increase in benefits which is

primarily responsible for the fall in child poverty . . . in-work benefits too, in the
shape of tax credits, have played a limited direct role in lifting households out
of poverty. (Palmer et al., 2005: 11)

While this may initially seem to lend support to the government’s strategy
of emphasising work as a way out of poverty, again this is not a conclusion
drawn by most of these studies. Thus according to the Joseph Rowntree
 Neo-liberal Britain 29

Foundation’s (JRF) study, 50 per cent of children in poverty are living in

households where someone is doing paid work, most of them in two-adult
rather than one-adult households. They go on to argue that

However strongly employment grows in the future, there is no reason to believe

that job growth alone will be able to reduce child poverty by 1.4 million between
2003/4 and 2010 when it has only managed to reduce it by 600,000 since
1998/9. (Palmer et al., 2005: 12)

The reason given by the authors is simple: low pay. The conclusion that
‘work isn’t working’ is also drawn by the authors of the most comprehensive
study to date of deprivation in Britain, the Poverty and Social Exclusion
Survey (PSE).

Many of those in paid work do not earn enough to lift them out of poverty. In-work
benefits may supplement income but do not address the social exclusion that
results from pressure on time, especially for those with caring responsibilities.
Encouraging people to work longer hours is clearly not the answer to the problems
of poverty and social exclusion. (Pantazis et al., 2006: 467)

Not surprisingly then, attacking low pay, including a substantial increase

in the Minimum Wage, is seen by most of these authors as one of the more
effective ways of challenging poverty.
There is however, a further difficulty with a strategy which places so
much emphasis on paid work as the way out of poverty. As Hills and
Stewart note:

The improvements we describe in many areas have taken place while the
economy has been growing steadily and indeed has been doing so for ten
years. (Hills and Stewart, 2005: 345)

While on the one hand that means it may be harder to reduce relative
poverty rates, it also suggests that it is an expanding economy (linked
to the motor of the US economy) rather than solely specific government
policies which is making the difference to poverty rates. If, however, that
economy falters and unemployment begins to rise again, as it started to do
in 2006, then even those small gains that have been made can be quickly
wiped out. As former welfare minister Frank Field commented when the
child poverty figures were announced:

A major rethink of the government’s anti-poverty strategy is now required,

with unemployment rising, no new money to make a substantial lifer in the
value of tax credits, and with the pot of money for major new welfare reform
projects now empty. (Quoted in Herald, 10 March 2006)

In fact, only one year later, official figures showed that relative poverty
in the UK had risen to 12.7 million in 2005–06 from 12.1 million the year
30 Reclaiming Social Work

before. More damningly, for a New Labour government which had made
the eradication of child poverty a policy target, the number of children
living in poverty also rose during that year from 200,000 to 3.8 million
(The Guardian, 28 March 2007).
Finally it is necessary to set the government’s poverty programmes in
a wider political context. Whatever the limitations of a strategy that has
combined an emphasis on work as the route out of poverty with targeted
benefits, the fact that by 2006, 700,000 children had been lifted over the
poverty line is to be welcomed and shows that government intervention
and increased resources can make a difference. One can only wonder,
however, how many more children might also have been lifted out of
poverty by 2006 if only a small percentage of the £5.3 billion set aside to
fund the ongoing war and occupation of Iraq had been targeted instead
towards the ending of child poverty (The Independent, 13 March 2007).

Inequality: Does It Matter?

Reducing poverty, particularly child poverty and pensioner poverty, has

been an explicit New Labour objective since the late 1990s. As the quote
given above from Diamond and Giddens indicated, however, the same
cannot be said of inequality. The flavour of government thinking in
relation to inequality was famously conveyed by Tony Blair in an interview
for the Newsnight programme:

The issue isn’t in fact whether the very richest person ends up becoming richer. The
issue is whether the poorest person is given the chance that they don’t otherwise
have . . . the justice for me is concentrated on lifting incomes of those that don’t
have a decent income. It’s not a burning ambition of mine to make sure that
David Beckham earns less money. (Quoted in Sefton and Sutherland, 2005: 233)

The theoretical rationale for this view of inequality, which involves a

significant break with traditional social-democratic approaches, is spelled
out in more detail by David Goodhart, editor of the monthly journal Prospect:

The old fi xation with the gap [between rich and poor] is the problem. A third
way theory of fairness should state that the gap does not matter – or at least
that it matters less than the life chances of the people at the bottom. If these
are rising steadily, then it does not matter that the rich are getting richer . . . .
(Quoted in Callinicos, 2000: 14)

Unsurprisingly then, the trend towards inequality in Britain that began

under the Conservatives has continued and intensified under New Labour.
In his book Rich Britain, Lansley found that

Britain has been slowly moving back in time – to levels of income inequality
that prevailed more than half a century ago and to levels of wealth inequality of
more than thirty years ago. (Lansley, 2006: 29)
 Neo-liberal Britain 31

According to a report published in 2004 by the Office for National

Statistics, the wealth of the super-rich has doubled since Tony Blair came
to power. Nearly 600,000 individuals in the top 1 per cent of the UK
wealth league owned assets worth £355 billion in 1996, the last full year
of Conservative rule. By 2002 that had increased to £797 billion. Part of
the gain was due to rising national prosperity, but the top 1 per cent also
increased their share of national wealth from 20 to 23 per cent in the first
six years of the Labour government. Meanwhile the wealth of the poorest
50 per cent of the population shrank from 10 per cent in 1986 towards the
end of the Thatcher government’s second term to 7 per cent in 1996 and
5 per cent in 2002. On average, each individual in the top 1 per cent was
£737,000 better off than just before Mr Blair arrived in Downing Street
(ONS, 2004).
Some flavour of the ‘greed is good’ mentality that continues to flourish
amongst the very rich in Britain and elsewhere was captured in a report
in the Independent newspaper in early 2006. Headed ‘Boom and Bust
Britain’, the article reported a study by leading thinktank the Centre for
Economic and Business Research which showed that City traders were set
to share a staggering £7.5 billion bonus pool after a bumper year for share
prices and company takeovers:
At the top end, about 3,000 people, usually at boardroom level at such
companies as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, will get bonuses of more
than £1m, with a handful nudging £10m . . . . But there are also 330,000 City
workers, usually traders, brokers and dealers, who are also getting bonuses,
ranging from a few hundred pounds up to the magic £1m figure: the average is
around £23,000. (Thornton and Kirby, 2006)

According to the article, sales of penthouses, luxury cars and champagne

were at an all-time high. Meanwhile, however, a government report published
the same week showed that more than 20,000 people were forced to file for
bankruptcy in the three months running up to Christmas 2005 after being
overwhelmed by their debts. The total of 20,461 was, apparently, a 51 per cent
jump on the previous year and the highest number for a three-month
period since records began in 1960. The total for 2005 was almost 70,000,
57 per cent higher than 2004. House repossessions, the article continued,
were up by 70 per cent to the highest level since the 1991 crash.
In fact, contrary to the views of Third Way ideologues like Goodhart,
inequality does matter, for three main reasons.
First, it matters on moral grounds. Most people intuitively see it as
unacceptable that extreme poverty should coexist alongside such fantastic
wealth. In early 2006, for example, the Scotsman newspaper carried a picture
of two children born on the same day in different parts of Scotland. The life
expectancy of the first child, born in an affluent village outside Edinburgh, was
87; the second child, born only 30 miles away but in one of the poorest
districts of Glasgow, would be lucky to reach the age of 54 (Scotsman,
4 January, 2006). There is a link, in other words, between equality and
32 Reclaiming Social Work

notions of social justice (Powell, 2002). Within liberal political theory,

the strongest case against such inequalities is contained in John Rawls’
A Theory of Justice (Rawls, 1999). At the heart of Rawls’ notion of ‘justice
as fairness’ is the ‘difference principle’, the idea that inequalities can only
be justified if they can be shown to work to the advantage of the least
favoured groups in society. It is difficult to see what inequalities could
justify a thirty-year difference in life expectancy.
Even amongst some prominent supporters of Third Way approaches
there is growing disquiet about the impact of widening inequality and
tentative calls for a ‘new egalitarianism’ (Giddens and Diamond, 2005).
Such calls are based, first, on a Durkheimian concern with the consequences
for community and social solidarity of blatant inequality and social
divisions; second, with the implications of such inequalities for the
self-respect of those at the bottom of the social heap. In respect of the first
point for example, Ed Miliband has argued that

It is increasingly clear in the modern age, for example in the literature on

happiness, that higher consumption on its own does not provide fulfilment;
a sense of citizenship and community is also important. And there are strong
reasons for thinking it simply isn’t possible to have a sense of community when
vast inequalities of wealth and income mean that citizens are increasingly
segregated in housing, schooling, etc. (Miliband, 2005: 45)

Miliband’s point links to the second reason why economic inequality

matters: namely its direct and indirect relationship with other forms of
inequality. In relation to health inequalities, for example, on coming to
office New Labour pledged to reduce the inequality gap by 10 per cent
between 1997 and 2010. A study, however, by the Department of Health’s
own Scientific Reference Group on Health Inequalities in 2005 found the
gap in life expectancy between the bottom fifth and the general population
had actually widened by 2 per cent for men and 5 per cent for women
between 1997–99 and 2001–03 (the first time, incidentally, this has ever
happened under a Labour government). This means that life expectancy
in the wealthiest areas is now 7–8 years longer on average than in the
poorest areas (Department of Health, 2005).
Meanwhile the gap in the infant mortality rate between the poorest
10 per cent of people and the general population rose from 13 per cent
higher in 1997–99 to 19 per cent higher in 2001–03. The infant mortality
rate for the whole population was 5 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared
to 6 per 1,000 among those with fathers in routine and manual work.
This was significantly higher than the rate for those in the managerial and
professional class, which was 3.5 per 1,000.
In one sense, none of this should surprise us. As studies from the
Black Report in the late 1970s to the Acheson Report in the late 1990s
have shown, there is a powerful correlation between class position and
health (Whitehead et al., 1992; Acheson Report, 1998). In addition, the
groundbreaking work of epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson strongly
 Neo-liberal Britain 33

suggests that levels of inequality, rather than poverty alone, also contribute
to this enormous waste of human life. Drawing on a vast amount of
empirical data, Wilkinson concludes:

Across the twenty five or thirty richest countries, there is no relationship between
life expectancy and average income at purchasing power parities. Yet within
each of these countries, health remains strongly related to income or any other
socioeconomic marker. The paradox that health is related to income within the
rich countries but not to income differences between them almost certainly
arises because we are dealing with the health effects of relative income, social
position or class. (Wilkinson, 2005: 184 – emphasis in original)

Such material inequality, moreover, is linked not only to health inequalities

but also, as Wilkinson shows in his The Impact of Inequality, to levels of
emotional health, violence and the quality of social relations between
people, including levels of trust.
The third reason why inequality matters is that poverty is relational not
only in the sense suggested by Wilkinson but in a further crucial sense.
For contrary to what Goodhart argues in the passage quoted above, the
US boom which has driven the world economy for the past two decades
and swelled the personal fortunes of the individuals who run Microsoft,
GAP, Shell and other corporations has been based primarily on quite
unprecedented levels of exploitation of workers in America and elsewhere.
In a discussion of the US economy, the respected Marxist economist
Robert Brenner has argued that

Between 1979 and 1990, real hourly compensation in the [US] private business
economy grew at an average rate of 0.1 per cent. The trend in these years for
hourly real wages and salaries (including benefits) was far worse, falling at an
average rate of 1 per cent. At no time previously in the twentieth century had real
wage growth been anywhere so low for so long. (Quoted in Callinicos, 2000: 10)

Similarly as the (non-Marxist) economic journalist Jeffrey Madrick comments:

[T]he average real income of families was only a few percentage points higher
in 1993 than in 1973, and that largely because so many more spouses were
working. There have been shorter periods when wages have fallen sharply, but
so far as we can tell, there has been no other twenty-year period since 1820
when average real wages fell, with the possible exception of the years just
before and after the Civil War. (Quoted in Callinicos, 2000: 10)

The fact that the US boom is based on such hugely increased levels of
exploitation, rather than the increased investment of the post-war boom,
also means that its consequences – political, ideological and economic – are
very different. As Harman comments:

The contrast is all-important. The great post-war boom transformed the lives of
tens of millions of US workers, making it seem that things would continually get
34 Reclaiming Social Work
better under capitalism and that the American Dream could become a reality. The
boom of the 1990s did not have anything like that effect. In fact it leaves one in
eight Americans below the poverty line and nearly 45 million without health
insurance. The fact that the top 5% of American families have seen a 64%
increase in their incomes since 1979 does not in any way mitigate the way the
bottom 60% have been running to stand still – with the bottom 20% going backwards.
(Harman, 2001: 50)

Risk Society or Class Society?

Alongside persistent poverty and growing inequality, neo-liberalism has

also created a society in which people feel much less secure, in which life
seems much more precarious. The most influential theoretical exposition
of this increased insecurity is provided by the German sociologist Ulrich
Beck. In his Risk Society, Beck has argued that we have entered a new
phase of modern society in which ‘social, political, economic and individual
risks increasingly tend to escape the institutions for monitoring and
protection in society’ (Beck and Ritter, 1992: 5). In this society, new risks
or hazards emerge as by-products of the development of science, technology
and industry. ‘Mad cow disease’ (BSE) or global warming would be two
examples of such risks. However, whereas in earlier ‘industrial society’,
risks were linked to class, poverty and inequality, now, Beck argues,
everyone is at risk from the uncontrolled development of science and
technology.
That there has been an increase in the level of risks that people
experience in their daily lives is indisputable. It is also true that few, no
matter how wealthy, can completely escape the effects of phenomena such
as global warming. What is less convincing, however, is Beck’s argument
that risk (or the management of risk) has replaced accumulation as the
dynamics of neo-liberal society, or that the risks that people experience
and their capacity to respond to them are not shaped primarily by class
divisions and inequality. In relation to the first point, Webb asserts that

In risk society political rule and power are less concerned with maintaining
material provision and wealth than with regulation and compliance . . . .
Arguably neoliberalism is the political programme of risk society. (2006: 38)

In fact, this is a topsy-turvy way of understanding what is going on.

For as I have argued above, neo-liberalism is best understood as a response
to a crisis of accumulation, a response based on the removal of all barriers
to the incursion of market forces. If that response results in increased
risk, whether environmental or social, then that is often a very secondary
consideration for those whose primary concern continues to be with
the accumulation of wealth. Global warming, for example, is not simply
a product of the uncontrolled development of the forces of science and
technology but rather stems from the insatiable desire of the oil and
automobile industries for greater profits at any costs, whether human or
 Neo-liberal Britain 35

environmental. It is the close links between these companies and national

governments that explains the unwillingness of these governments,
notably the US government, to sign up to agreements such as the Kyoto
Agreement on Carbon Emissions which might, even in a small way, reduce
the level of greenhouse gases. Second, while everyone is at greater risk,
some continue to be at more risk than others. In relation to ‘environmental’
risks such as bird flu, for example, clearly those whose livelihoods are
dependent on their livestock (including many millions of poor farmers in
China and elsewhere) as well as those who have no choice but to eat cheap
poultry (including many millions of people in the West) are considerably
more at risk than those who have other sources of income or who can
afford alternative types of meat. Third, an emphasis on environmental risk
can lead to an underestimation of the social risks faced by those with
limited fi nancial resources in an increasingly privatised world. These
might include the risk of being unable to find a decent school for your
child when ‘educational choice’ increasingly means the capacity to move
house to be near ‘good’ schools (Taylor, 2005); the risk of being unable to
afford the costs of higher education and thus less able to compete effectively
in a globalised marketplace; and, most worryingly of all for millions of
people, the risk of being left without a decent pension in old age. As Levitas
comments in a critique of Beck’s thesis, in Britain:

Genuine material need has increased with the rise in not just relative but
absolute poverty since 1979, and the removal of welfare state protections
(reduced eligibility for benefits, near collapse of the National Health Service,
abolition of state provision for the elderly) and regulations (abolition of wages
councils; refusal to accept the social chapter and working time directive). The
sense of insecurity under these conditions derives from economic insecurity as
well as environmental hazards. (Levitas, 2000: 205)

Compounding that sense of insecurity is the re-organisation of public

services under New Labour around the concepts of ‘choice’ and
‘personalisation’ (to be explored more fully in Chapter 4) involving what
Webb, following Rose, describes as the ‘privatisation of risk’ (Rose, 1999;
Webb, 2006):

The real issue of income inequality means that families and communities are
afflicted with a huge burden of responsibility in having to sort out their own
problems with a little push from the experts. Economic and structural disadvantage
is ignored. (Webb, 2006: 62)

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that the realities of neo-liberal policies in

Britain as pursued first by Conservative governments and, since 1997, by
New Labour have not lived up to the promise. While poverty levels may
have been reduced for some groups, notably families with children, for
36 Reclaiming Social Work

others they have remained the same or worsened, despite a generally

favourable economic situation. Even commentators sympathetic to the
New Labour Project have argued that without much greater redistribution
of wealth, in particular through taxing the rich, then it is highly unlikely
that the government will come anywhere near achieving its stated objective
of eliminating child poverty by 2020 (Toynbee, 2006b).
Then there is the belated recognition by New Labour strategists such
as Anthony Giddens that inequality does in fact matter after all. Belated,
since after almost a decade of New Labour government, the distribution
of incomes was more unequal than at any time in recent history (Pantazis
et al., 2006: 4). As we saw above, these income inequalities have been
accompanied by growing health inequalities as well as falls in social
mobility. Statistics alone, however, cannot convey the bitterness often felt
by those at the bottom of the pile towards those who flaunt their ever-
increasing wealth, or the sense of failure and lack of respect experienced
by those who do not make enough money to ‘count’. Some sense of what
these many millions of people experience is provided by Sennett in his
meditation on the meaning of respect:

Lack of respect, though less aggressive than an outright insult, can take an
equally wounding form. No insult is offered another person, but neither is
recognition extended; he or she is not seen – as a full human being whose
presence matters. When a society treats the mass of people in this way,
singling out only a few for recognition, it creates a scarcity of respect, as though
there were not enough of this precious substance to go round. Like many
famines, this scarcity is man-made: unlike food, respect costs nothing. Why
then should it be in short supply? (Sennett, 2003: 3)

Finally, neo-liberalism has led to a huge increase in insecurity in almost

every area of life, including education, employment, health care, housing and
pensions. Ironically, given New Labour’s commitment to ‘putting
children first’, this sense of insecurity is greatest amongst Britain’s children.
According to a UNICEF Report published in 2007 and based on an analysis
of data from twenty-one economically advanced countries, children growing
up in the UK suffer greater deprivation, worse relationships with their
parents and are exposed to more risks from alcohol, drugs and unsafe sex
than those in any other wealthy country in the world (UNICEF, 2007). They
are, in the words of a Times newspaper commentary on the Report ‘the
unhappiest children in the Western World’ (The Times, 14 February
2007). It would be hard to think of a more damning indictment of more
than two decades of policies which, in Monbiot’s phrase, have systematically
put the interests of big business above those of society.
 3

New Labour, New Social Work

Introduction
Strangers embraced: ‘Where were you when Portillo lost?’ A seventy-year-old
woman bought a rose for Tony Blair – ‘If I live to be a hundred there’ll never be
another day like it!’ . . . In their wild euphoria they even talked of the night the
Berlin Wall fell, of Nelson Mandela’s release. It was the day the country
exulted – even the sneering editorial writers at Wapping. (Toynbee and
Walker, 2001: 1)

Toynbee and Walker’s description of the scenes in Downing Street on

the morning of 2 May 1997, following the defeat of the Conservatives in
the previous day’s General Election and Tony Blair’s triumphant arrival
at No. 10, captures well the mood throughout much of Britain on that
day. After eighteen years of Conservative rule, many millions of people
allowed themselves to believe that, in the words of New Labour’s campaign
song, things could, indeed, only get better. For many too in social work
practice and education, the election of a Labour Government was a cause
for hope and expectation. As we saw in Chapter 2, the previous two decades
had witnessed a huge increase in the poverty and inequality experienced
by many social work clients, even while the very use of the term ‘poverty’
was discouraged in government publications (Jones and Novak, 1999).
Practitioners had grown increasingly demoralised as their competence
and value base were repeatedly disparaged by ministers (including former
social workers), who denounced them for ‘political correctness’ and called
for their replacement by ‘street-wise grannies’ (Carvel, 2000). Meanwhile,
against this background, social work, in all its aspects, was undergoing
a profound reconstruction, with the welfarist project of Seebohm and
Kilbrandon being abandoned in favour of a market-driven system with
the central role allocated to care managers, required to focus primarily on
budgets rather than client need (Parton, 1996).
In social work, as in many other areas of social policy, these early hopes
and expectations were to be cruelly disappointed. As Orme and Jordan
amongst others noted, New Labour’s attitude to social work during its
38 Reclaiming Social Work
first term was characterised by uncertainty, ambivalence and mistrust
(Jordan with Jordan, 2000; Orme, 2001):

After two decades of Tory administration in which the future of social work
had been uncertain, what was required was a clear commitment to a qualified
social work and social care workforce to fulfil specifi c roles in the welfare
system. However the most telling aspect of New Labour policy has been a lack
of coherence. Despite the fact that many of the new politicians had a social
work background, there was ambivalence in policies about welfare which
brought little relief to those working in social work and social care and those
involved in education and training. (Orme, 2001: 612)

In fact, the ambivalence to which these commentators refer concerned

less the welfare policies which New Labour politicians wished to pursue
than their confidence in the capacity of social workers to play a role in
pursuing them: the extent to which, in other words, social work was
(in a term often employed by a later New Labour Home Secretary)
‘fit for purpose’. As we saw in Chapter 2, that purpose was enshrined
in one policy which underpinned the whole project of welfare reform:
work as the route out of welfare. As I shall argue below, that policy was
also reflected in the two key themes of the 1998 White Paper for England
and Wales, Modernising Social Services: First, there was the emphasis on
independence, which stressed that ‘those who can should live independently’
while only those who could not should receive ‘quality services’
(Baldwin, 2002: 173). Second, the White Paper endorsed the shift
introduced by the Conservatives in the early 1990s towards a market in
social care and sought to move ‘the focus away from who provides the
care’ and to place it instead on ‘the quality of services’ (Department of
Health, 1998: 8).
While the aim, then, of New Labour welfare policy since that time –
to create service user ‘independence’ within the context of a social care
market – has been clear and consistent, two factors have contributed to
doubt on the part of government about the capacity of the social work
profession to contribute to this aim:
First, there is the issue of competence. There are two aspects to this. First,
New Labour inherited from the Conservatives a view of social work as
essentially a failing profession, a profession in need of reform. As Harris
notes, within New Right theorising, social work was often presented as
a metaphor for all that was perceived to be wrong with the Welfare State
(Harris, 2003: 36). The evidence for this failure (other than perhaps the
unspoken assumption that social workers should always be able to prevent
the deaths of children at the hands of their carers) was seldom spelled out,
but was asserted so often by politicians and the media over the past two
decades that it gained the status of a self-evident truth. Second, there was
the issue of whether social workers possessed the specific skills required
by a welfare-to-work programme. Traditionally the focus of social work
 New Labour, New Social Work 39
had not been the workplace, but rather the home and the community.
It was perhaps predictable, therefore, that social workers would not be
central to New Labour’s reforms.
There was, however, another more important reason for New Labour’s
mistrust of the social work profession: namely, its value base, and the extent
to which it could really be trusted to promote key New Labour policies
in areas such as asylum, youth justice and ‘welfare to work’. Butler and
Drakeford, amongst others, have drawn attention to what they describe as
New Labour’s ‘moral authoritarianism’ (Butler and Drakeford, 2001). The
ways in which that authoritarianism has clashed with core social work
values, particularly in relation to notions of dependence, independence and
interdependence will be explored below.
In practice, these concerns have led New Labour governments to adopt
a twin-track strategy in relation to social work. On the one hand, as Jordan
has argued, they have led to the exclusion of social workers from most of
New Labour’s key programmes, such as the New Deal programmes and
Sure Start (Jordan with Jordan, 2000). On the other, they have sought to
‘modernise’ the social work profession in order to bring it into line with
wider New Labour goals. Unsurprisingly, given the tensions between
some of these wider goals and the ethical base of social work, a central
element of that programme of modernisation has involved attempting
to excise, or at least neutralise, that ethical base and to present
social work as essentially a technical project, for example through
an emphasis on (allegedly neutral) evidence-based practice (Gray and
McDonald, 2006).
In the first section of this chapter, I shall explore the values and
ideological assumptions which have underpinned New Labour welfare
policy, and consider why they might cause problems for professional social
work. The second section of the chapter will explore the ways in which
New Labour have sought to ‘modernise’ social work and social care, and
to harness them more closely to government goals and priorities. Harris
has suggested that this project can best be understood in terms of three
main interlocking themes: managerialism; the rhetoric of regulation; and
consumerism (Harris, 2006). Here, I shall discuss the first two of these
themes, while consumerism and its latest offspring, personalisation, will
be discussed in Chapter 5.

New Labour, New Moralism

In a discussion of New Labour’s welfare policies, Clarke has observed that

New Labour emerged as a distinctly contradictory formation: committed to the

modern, yet profoundly traditionalist; unevenly liberal and authoritarian; and
both expansive and repressively containing. (Clarke, 2004: 132)
40 Reclaiming Social Work
Nowhere is the traditionalist and authoritarian side of this apparent
contradiction more evident than in New Labour’s emphasis on morality
and on the active remoralisation of the poor (Lavalette and Mooney,
1999; Jordan with Jordan, 2000). This emphasis on morality has not
been confined to the field of welfare reform. By the third term of his
administration, former prime minister, Tony Blair frequently justified
many of his government’s policies, including, for example, the invasion
and occupation of Iraq, the dismantling of comprehensive education and
the extension of market forces into the NHS by the simple assertion that ‘it
is the right thing to do.’ It is, however, in New Labour’s attitude towards
poor people (and, importantly, to those who work with them) that this
moralising emphasis is most explicit.
This class dimension of New Labour’s approach to morality was noted
by a Guardian leader in 1999 following a speech by Blair on the evils of
teenage pregnancy:

Blair has put ‘moral’ on the masthead [of government policy]. And for all his fine
talk of modernising Britain it is clear his understanding of that loaded word is
saloon-bar suburban: it means sex . . . [but his] moral does not . . . cover sex at
large . . . Moral means to him what it did to Octavia Hill in the 1880s: the evils of
poor people fornicating. (Quoted in Lavalette and Mooney, 1999)

While this is too narrow an interpretation of New Labour’s approach

to morality, the reference to Octavia Hill is, nevertheless, telling. There
are indeed strong similarities between New Labour notions of what is
moral, and the ideology and practices of the nineteenth-century Charity
Organisation Society (COS) of which Hill was a founding member.
Some flavour of the ethos of that organisation is provided by Whelan
in his (sympathetic) history of the COS. He cites a case where a male
breadwinner’s failure to hold down a job resulted in the family going into
the workhouse. The COS member involved commented:

Would it not have been better in the beginning to have investigated why
a skilled carpenter was always out of work, then to have refused charity, and
simply to have urged the man to the moral effort, which would then have saved
him? The charity given only encouraged him in his habits of sloth. (Quoted in
Whelan, 2001)

While in the early twenty-first century, the language used to explain the
de-moralisation of poor people may have changed, the core COS notion
that the poor need to be coerced into behaving morally, often through the
medium of a ‘personal relationship’ with a ‘friendly visitor’, is also at the
heart of New Labour’s welfare strategy (even if the ‘friendly visitor’ now
comes in the form of a New Deal Personal Adviser). Jordan has described
New Labour’s mechanism for achieving such model citizens as ‘tough
love’, a combination of carrot and stick, with the carrot being targeted
benefits (aimed mainly at families with children), personal advisers and
 New Labour, New Social Work 41
training opportunities, and the stick usually involving some combination
of increased surveillance and the threat to cut benefits (Jordan with Jordan,
2000: 47). As Callinicos argues in his critique of the Third Way, however,
far from such ‘tough love’ being in opposition to, or contradicting, New
Labour’s modernising economic agenda, in fact, the two approaches
complement each other:

There is . . . an important sense in which New Labour authoritarianism is a

consequence of Gordon Brown’s version of neo-liberal economics . . . if
macro-economic stability is secured and the right supply-side measures are
in place, any further unemployment is voluntary. Unemployment in these
circumstances is a consequence of the dysfunctional behaviour of individuals
who refuse to work, and this behaviour must in turn be caused either by their
individual moral faults or by a more pervasive ‘culture of poverty’. The kind of
coercion implicit in the New Deal for the long-term unemployed, where government
benefits are denied to those refusing to take part, is therefore legitimate.
(Callinicos, 2001: 62)

The two key pillars of such ‘tough love’ are an emphasis on ‘personal
responsibility’ on the one hand, and on a particular understanding of
‘community’ on the other. Each of these concepts will be considered
in turn.

Independence and Personal Responsibility

Within New Labour ideology, where attempts to draw attention to the

structural factors which shape people’s lives are often portrayed as ‘making
excuses’, the supreme principle is ‘personal responsibility’, the overriding
strategy ‘responsibilisation’ (Young, 1999). The principle, of course, is hardly
a new one; it was, as noted above in the COS example, a central pillar
of Victorian morality. What is different or ‘modern’ about New Labour’s
spin on this essentially nineteenth-century worldview, however, is its
economic content, as well as the context in which it is being deployed.
For within the New Labour lexicon, personal responsibility primarily
means equipping yourself with the skills to compete effectively in a
globalised marketplace. That includes behaving prudently by putting
aside money for your pension, mortgage or student loan, regardless of
your income; maintaining your health and fitness by exercising, not smoking;
and not becoming obese so that you do not become a ‘drain’ on State
resources. Above all, it means striving to be ‘independent’, with the good
citizen being the person who relies on his/her own resources and does
not draw on the resources of the State. Here we see the overlap between
morality, community and social exclusion. As Grover has noted:

In its political use . . . the idea of social exclusion has been reduced to concerns
with exclusion from paid employment . . . in a process that individualises exclusion
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
[468]

Memorie sulla Storia e Notomia degli Animali senza Vertebre,

1823.

[469]

Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertèbres, vol. iii. 1816, p. 76.

[470]

Le Règne Animal, 2nd ed. 1830.

[471]

γέφῦρα = a bridge, Ann. Sci. Nat. (3), vol. vii. 1847, p. 340.

[472]

Fischer, Abh. Ver. Hamburg, Bd. xiii. 1895, p. 1.

[473]

Cuénot, Arch. Zool. exp. (2) ix. 1891, p. 593.

[474]

Bull. Mus. Harvard, vol. xxi. 1891, p. 143.

[475]

Shipley, Quart. J. Micr. Sci. vol. xxxi. 1890, p. 1.

[476]

Stud. Johns Hopkins Univ. vol. iv. 1887-90, p. 389.

[477]

Conn, Stud. Johns Hopkins Univ. vol. iii. 1884-87, p. 351.

[478]

Arb. Instit. Wien, Bd. v. 1884, p. 61.

[479]

Shipley, Quart. J. Micr. Sci. vol. xxxii. 1891, p. 111.

[480]

Proc. Roy. Soc. Edin. xviii. 1892, p. 17.

[481]

Selenka, Die Sipunculiden. Semper's Reisen im Archipel d.

Philippinen, vol. iv. 1883.

[482]

Stud. Johns Hopkins Univ. vol. iv. 1887-90, p. 389.

[483]

Selenka, Challenger Reports, vol. xiii. 1885.

[484]

Ann. Sci. nat. (7) vol. xx. 1895, p. 1.

[485]

Zool. Anz. ix. 1886, p. 574.

[486]

This is not true of all species.

[487]

Acta Ac. German, Halle, xli. Part II. No. 1, 1879.

[488]

Recueil Zool. Suisse, iii. 1886, p. 313.

[489]

Vide p. 335.
[490]

P. Phys. Soc. Edinb. vol. i. 1856, p. 165; and Edinb. New Phil.
Journ. vol. iv. (n.s.) 1856, p. 313; Ann. Sci. Nat. 4th ser. vol. xi.
1859, p. 150; and F. D. Dyster, Tr. Linn. Soc. London, vol. xxii.
1859, p. 251.

[491]

Ann. Sci. Nat. 4th ser. vol. x. 1858, p. 11.

[492]

"Beiträge zur Anatomie der Phoronis," Inaug. Dissert. Prag. 1889,

and Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. vol. li. 1891, p. 480.

[493]

P. Linn. Soc. N. S. Wales, 1st ser. vol. vii. 1883, p. 606; and 2nd
ser. vol. vii. 1893, p. 340.

[494]

Quart. J. Micr. Sci. vol. xxx. 1890, p. 125.

[495]

Challenger Reports, vol. xxvii. 1888; and Proc. Roy. Soc. Edinb.
vol. xi. 1882, p. 211.

[496]

Proc. Roy. Soc. London, vol. xxxiv. 1883, p. 371.

[497]

Zapiski Acad. St. Petersb. vol. xi. No. 1, 1867 (Russian). Abstract
in Arch. Naturg. Jahrg. xxxiii. 1867, Bd. ii. p. 235.

[498]

Caldwell, loc. cit. Foettinger, Arch. Biol. vol. iii. 1882, p. 679;
Gegenbaur, Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. vol. v. 1854, p. 345; Krohn, Arch.
Anat. Jahrgang 1858, p. 289; Metschnikoff, Nachricht. k. Ges.
Wiss. Göttingen, No. 12, 1869, p. 227, and Zeitschr. wiss. Zool.
vol. xxi. 1871, p. 233; J. Müller, Arch. Anat. Jahrgang 1846, p. 101;
Schneider, Monatsber. Ak. wiss. Berlin, 1861, p. 934, and Arch.
Anat. Jahrgang 1862, p. 47; Wagener, Arch. Anat. Jahrgang 1847,
p. 202; Wilson, Amer. Natural. vol. xiv. 1880.

[499]

Proc. Roy. Soc. Edinb. vol. xxi. 1896, p. 59; and Zool. Anz. xix.
1896, p. 266.

[500]

The account given in the following pages has been deliberately

restricted, for the most part, to British species. Our own fauna
contains an assemblage of Polyzoa which is so representative that
it has seemed better to do some justice to the British forms than to
attempt to cover the whole ground in the limited number of pages
devoted to this group. Those who desire to make a wider study of
the subject should refer, for marine forms, to Busk's Catalogue of
Marine Polyzoa in the Collection of the British Museum, Parts I.-III.
1852, 1854, 1875; to the Challenger Reports on Polyzoa, Parts 30
(1884), 50 (1886), and 79 (1888); for references and lists of
species, to Vine's Report on Recent Marine Polyzoa,
Cheilostomata and Cyclostomata (Report, 55th meeting Brit. Ass.
Aberdeen, 1885, pp. 481-680); [and to Nickles and Bassler,
Synopsis Amer. Foss. Bryozoa incl. Bibliography (Bull. U.S. Geol.
Survey, No. 173, 1900)]. References to the literature of the fresh-
water forms will be found below, in Chap. XVIII.

[501]

Hooker, quoted by Landsborough, Hist. Brit. Zoophytes, 1852, p.

346.

[502]

Rare and Remarkable Animals of Scotland, ii. 1848, p. 15.

[503]

Arch. Zool. Exp. 2 sér. x. 1892.

[504]

Kraepelin, Abh. Ver. Hamburg, x. 1887, No. ix. p. 19; κάμπτειν, to

bend; δέρμα, skin.

[505]

Parts of the ectocyst of some calcareous forms are covered by an

external investment of cells, which give rise to secondary
thickenings, ridges, and other growths.

[506]

From the Quart. J. Micr. Sci. xxxiii. 1892.

[507]

Ibid. p. 123.

[508]

Quart. J. Micr. Sci. xxxiii. 1892, p. 147. The experiment was

conducted in a laboratory, and the results may not be perfectly
normal with regard to the time occupied.

[509]

See also Joliet, Arch. Zool. Exp. vi. 1877, p. 202, and explanation
of plate viii. for another series of observations.

[510]

See especially G. J. Allman, Monograph of the Fresh-water

Polyzoa, Ray Society, 1856, p. 41; and H. Nitsche, Zeitschr. wiss.
Zool. xxi. 1871, p. 479.

[511]

Ray Society, 4to, 1856.

[512]

Zoological Researches and Illustrations, v. "On Polyzoa." Cork,

1830.

[513]

"Symbolae Physicae," 1831, and Abh. Ak. Berlin, 1832, i. p. 377,

etc.

[514]

T. cit. p. 92.

[515]

Vol. i. 1880, Introduction, p. cxxxi.

[516]

Élémens de Zoologie, 2nd ed. Animaux sans Vertèbres, 1843, pp.

238, 312. Prof. A. Milne-Edwards has kindly written to me,
informing me that he believes this to have been the first occasion
on which the term was thus used.

[517]

Phil. Trans. vol. cxliii, 1853, p. 62.

[518]

Nitsche, Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. xx. 1870, p. 34.

[519]

πρωκτός, anus; ἐντός, within; ἐκτός, without.

[520]

λοφός, crest or tuft.

[521]

γυμνός, naked; λαιμός, throat.

[522]

φυλάσσω, I guard.

[523]

κύκλος, circle; στόμα, mouth.

[524]

χεῖλος, lip.

[525]

κτείς, κτενός, comb.

[526]

Miss E. C. Jelly, Synonymic Cat. Recent Marine Bryozoa, London,

1889.

[527]

Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. xxi. 1871, p. 421.

[528]

Fischer, Nouv. Arch. Mus. Paris, ii. 1866, p. 293.

[529]

Ehlers, Abh. Ges. Göttingen, xxi. 1876, p. 3, and Joyeux-Laffuie,

(as Delagia) Arch. Zool. Exp. 2 sér. vi. 1888, p. 135.

[530]

Busk, "Challenger" Reports, Parts 30 and 50.

[531]

Hincks, Brit. Marine Polyzoa, Introduction, p. cxxxv.

[532]

Hincks, Brit. Mar. Polyzoa, i. p. 558.

[533]

See Hincks, Brit. Mar. Polyzoa, i. p. lxiv.; and Busk, Cat. of Marine
Polyzoa in the British Museum, part ii. 1854, p. 103.

[534]

J. Linn. Soc. xv. 1881, p. 359.

[535]

"Challenger" Report, part xxx. 1884, pl. ix.

[536]

Hincks, Brit. Mar. Polyzoa, i. p. 58.

[537]

Brit. Mus. Cat. part ii. 1854, p. 106; Hincks, t. cit. p. 181 n.

[538]

p. 475.

[539]

Barentsia Hincks (= Ascopodaria Busk) differs from Pedicellina in

that each stem has a muscular swelling at its base. The genus is
represented by two British species, B. gracilis Sars and B. nodosa
Lomas.

[540]

Arch. Zool. Exp. 2 sér. ix. 1891, p. 91.

[541]

For structure, see Davenport, Bull. Mus. Harvard, xxiv. 1893, p. 1.

[542]

λοξός, oblique; σῶμα, body.

[543]

Quart. J. Micr. Sci. xxvii. 1887, pl. xxi. Fig. 10.

[544]

For a recent account of the Entoprocta, see Ehlers, "Zur Kenntniss

d. Pedicellineen," Abh. Ges. Göttingen, xxxvi. 1890, No. iii.

[An important account of the structure of marine Ectoprocta is

given by Calvet, "Contribution à l'Histoire Naturelle des
Bryozoaires Ectoproctes Marins," Trav. Inst. Zool. Montpellier,
N.S., Mém. No. 8, 1900.]

[545]

Kraepelin, K., "Die deutschen Süsswasser-Bryozoen."—Abh. Ver.

Hamburg, x. 1887, No. 9, p. 95.

[546]

Jullien, Bull. Soc. Zool. France, x. 1885, p. 92.

[547]

Hincks, Brit. Marine Polyzoa, i. p. 132.

[548]

T. cit., p. 167.

[549]

Quoted by Kraepelin, t. cit., p. 83.

[550]

Kraepelin, Abh. Ver. Hamburg, xii. 1893, No. 2, p. 65.

[551]

Zool. Anz., xvi. 1893 (1894), p. 385.

[552]

Hyatt, Proc. Essex Institute (U.S.A.) (reprint from vols. iv., v. 1866-
1868), p. 9.

[553]

Rare and Remarkable Animals of Scotland, ii. 1848, p. 93.

[554]

Trembley, Mém. Hist. Polypes, 1744; iii. Mém., p. 217. The same
processes are described by Baker, Employment for the
Microscope, new ed. 1785, p. 311.

[555]

Oka, J. Coll. Japan, iv. 1891, p. 90.

[556]

Hyatt, t. cit. p. 99.

[557]

Verworn, Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. xlvi. 1888, p. 119.

[558]

Dalyell, t. cit. p. 94.

[559]

Kraepelin, Abh. Ver. Hamburg, x. 1887, No. 9, p. 141.

[560]

Phil. Trans. 1837, p. 396.

[561]

Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. xxi. 1871, p. 426.

[562]
J. Coll. Japan, iv. 1891, p. 113.

[563]

Zool. Anz. xii. 1889, p. 508. This paper contains references to M.

Jullien's writings on the mechanism of protrusion.

[564]

[See P. Cambridge Soc. vol. xi. Part 1, 1901.]

[565]

Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. xlvi. 1888, p. 124.

[566]

Kraepelin, Abh. Ver. Hamburg, xii. 1893, No. 2, p. 47; Braem, Bibl.
Zool. (Bd. ii.) Heft 6, 1890, pp. 66 f.

[567]

Cf. Kraepelin, Abh. Ver. Hamburg, x. 1887, No. 9, pp. 154 f.

[568]

T. cit. p. 83.

[569]

Joliet, Arch. Zool. Exp. vi. 1877, p. 262.

[570]

Kraepelin, Abh. Ver. Hamburg, xii. 1893, No. 2, p. 22.

[571]

Harmer, Quart. J. Micr. Sci. xxxiv. 1893, p. 211.

[572]

Arch. Zool. Exp. 2 sér. x. 1892, p. 557.

[573]

Phil. Trans. 1837, p. 408.

[574]

Brit. Marine Polyzoa, Introduction, pp. lxxxvi, xc.

[575]

Arch. Zool. Exp. vi. 1877, p. 261.

[576]

Recherches sur l'Embryologie des Bryozoaires, 4to Lille, 1877.

[577]

Prouho, loc. cit.

[578]

Arch. Zool. Exp. 2 ser. v. 1887, p. 446.

[579]

Quart. J. Micr. Sci. xxxiv. 1893, p. 199; xxxix. part i. 1896, p. 71.

[580]

Jullien, Mém. Soc. Zool. France, iii. 1890, p. 381.

[581]

Cori, Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. lv. 1893, p. 626.

[582]

Oka, J. Coll. Japan, iv. 1891, p. 109; viii. 1895, p. 339.

[583]

Cf. Seeliger, Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. xlix. 1890, p. 168; and l. 1890, p.
560.
[584]

Cf. Milne-Edwards (H.), Ann. Sci. Nat. 2 ser. vi. 1836, pp. 5, 321.

[585]

See Norman, Ann. Nat. Hist. ser. 6, xiii. 1894, p. 114.

[586]

See Holdsworth, P. Zool. Soc. pt. xxvi. 1858, p. 306.

[587]

Brit. Mar. Polyzoa, Introduction, p. cxxii.

[588]

Ann. Nat. Hist. ser. 5, xx. 1887, p. 91.

[589]

Aetea, Eucratea, and certain other forms were separated off by Mr.
Busk as a distinct division, the Stolonata.

[590]

Most of the writings of this author are referred to on pp. 277, 278
of Miss Jelly's Synonymic Catalogue, referred to on p. 523.

[591]

Catalogue of Marine Polyzoa in the Collection of the British

Museum, parts i.-iii. 1852-1875; and Challenger Reports, Parts 30
(1884) and 50 (1886).

[592]

Trans. and Proc. R. Soc. Victoria, xxiii. 1887, p. 187, and Tr. R.
Soc. Victoria, iv. 1895, p. 1.

[593]

Tr. Zool. Soc. xiii. 1895, p. 223.

[594]

Zittel, Text Book of Palaeontology (Eng. Trans.), 1900, p. 257

(Bryozoa, by E. O. Ulrich).

[595]

Paléontologie Française. Terrains Crétacés, tome v., Bryozoaires,

8vo. Paris, 1850-1851. This great work refers, however, to recent
as well as to fossil species.

[596]

Heteropora, of which recent species exist, is placed by Dr. Gregory

in the Trepostomata.

[597]

Quart. J. Geol. Soc. l. 1894, pp. 72, 79.

[598]

See, however, Vine, Ann. Nat. Hist. ser. 5. xiv. 1884, pp. 87, 88,
and P. Yorksh. Geol. Soc. xii. 1891, p. 74, for possible Palaeozoic
Ctenostomes (Ascodictyon, Rhopalonaria, and Vinella).

[599]

Two vols. 8vo. London (Van Voorst), 1880.

[600]

8vo. London (Dulau), 1889.

[601]

One or two genera of Cheilostomata may be mistaken for

Cyclostomata. In case of doubt, 7 et seq. must be worked through.

[602]

Certain varieties of adherent species occasionally assume an

erect form.
[603]

For Celleporella (colony minute: orifice tubular), see 41 et seq.

[604]

Rhynchozoon (see No. 61), in which the primary orifice becomes

much obscured by the development of a large mucro, is placed in
this section.

[605]

Hincks, J. Linn. Soc. xxi. 1889, p. 123.

[606]

Micropora complanata, Norman, should be placed in the genus

Lepralia. See Hincks, Ann. Nat. Hist. 5 ser. xix. 1887, p. 304.

[607]

See Norman, Ann. Nat. Hist. ser. 6, xiii. 1894, p. 113.

[608]

Hincks, "Marine Polyzoa" (reprints from Ann. Nat. Hist. 1880-91),

Index, p. v. note. (Replacing Rhynchopora, preoccupied for a
Brachiopod.)

[609]

A form of Lepralia pallasiana, in which a mucro is developed, may

be mistaken for Umbonula (see characters given for Lepralia
under No. 59).

[610]

See Arch. Zool. Exp. 2 ser. vi. 1888, p. 135 (as Delagia), and ibid.
x. 1892, p. 594. [See also J. Mar. Biol. Ass. v., 1897-99, p. 51.]

[611]

F. S. Conant, Johns Hopkins Univ. Circ. vol. xv. 1896, p. 82.

[612]

Ibid. vol. xiv. 1896, p. 77.

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