While I don’t mind campaigns to get the press and everyone else to see social work more positively (Community Care passim), I’ve been in social work since the 1960s and this has been unchanging since the 1970s (before that there was quite a lot of ‘I think you’re wonderful doing a job like that’ – actually there’s still some of that around).

But I think the question to ask is why certain newspapers and columnists are like that and whether it matters. My view is that they’re like that because of their right-wing politics. Highly individualised, they think everyone should look after themselves and their families and not require the state to spend money to help them through problems, so they have an in principle objection to social work; it’s a sign of being pathetic if you need such help. There’s also the personal ideology which doesn’t believe in personal and psychological help. Just bring your good old stiff upper lip along.

Years ago after a bout of such social worker bashing, I heard a senior minister at a conference say that people of judgement don’t hold such extremely limited views. And some decision-makers don’t think much of social work, some are prepared to look at the evidence and some are positive; it will probably always be thus. Looking back, our experience of the Thatcher era (while not an altogether unsympathetic woman personally by all accounts, she would have held to this kind of political position, I guess) social work got quite a lot of jobs to do, and was not regularly reorganised out of existence like the NHS and teaching. Some people thought this was because we were not important enough. But I think it had a lot to do with the reality of Conservative policies that they always generate a lot of social troubles, and they’re mostly against doing anything constructive about them, and so they need lots of social workers to cope with the fall-out. I reckon we generally do better under the Tories than Labour for this reason. Labour thinks they can actually do something about social ills directly, so they’re much less inclined to support a profession that mainly deals with theconsequences of social problems than their causes.