5 years from normal

As the fifth session of the Scottish Parliament came to a close last week, I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on the last five years of policy-making for SASW.

The last election took place during the COVID pandemic in 2021, in what now feels like a very different world. Joe Biden had just been elected President of the US, vaccines were rolling out even as COVID persisted, and for many, me included, it felt like hope, as well as Spring, was in the air. The world appeared to be going back to “normal”.

How wrong we were. In Britain, we have had four Prime Ministers. In Scotland, we are on our third SNP First Minister. 

Fast forward to now and we have lived through a cost-of-living crisis, a European war, a return to MAGA politics, the erosion of the rules-based international order as we knew it, and endless, tragedy in the Middle East. At home, it feels as though we are more divided than ever, and intolerance appears to be on the rise.

So perhaps it has not been a great five years all around, but with context, it may not be as bleak as it seems. I still argue for hope. I argue that despite everything, there are still signs of progress.

The problems and catastrophes are unprecedented when taken together. Millennials like me often joke about how many “once in a lifetime” events we are expected to experience. But that is precisely the point: despite all of this, the world is still turning, and progress is still being made.

The things we cherish today have been rare throughout most of human history: civil society, human rights, tolerance, and the idea of a welfare state, including social work in its modern form. All of these, as we know them now, emerged only after two generation-destroying wars and a collective determination to prevent such horrors from happening again. We can cling to that legacy and wonder how we ended up where we are today. But in reality, the entire post war period up until the 1990s existed under the shadow of potential nuclear armageddon (my dad often talked about gas mask training and nuclear strike drills at school). The world we revere, the post war world, grew like green shoots under the constant threat of annihilation. From the 1990s onward, we tended to believe the world was settled, that we had resolved the major issues and were simply adding the finishing touches to a world we had shaped in a just and orderly way.

This was, I increasingly realise, a fantasy. The things we cherish have always needed to be fought for. Democracy itself must always be defended, and democratic institutions are inherently vulnerable to strongmen and authoritarians. Democracy’s strength, and the values it upholds, comes from a population that is engaged, demanding of the process, committed to the rule of law, and willing to support the “boring” bureaucracy that keeps it all functioning.

We should take heart that these things are defendable and worth defending. But we must also remember that they always need to be loved, cherished, and cared for. It is never “job done”. The fight must be won again for each successive generation.

My work here at SASW is about joining the dots between social work practice and public policy. It is about taking social work values and the needs of workers, and those they support, and transforming them into our actions, and the asks we make of policymakers. And again, take heart: our members have been incredibly successful in empowering us to make the case. We have changed policy, increased protections for people, fought for resources, and argued against social fragmentation. In the 2.5 years I have been here, I have seen so much positive work moving society forward.

Progress looks like pilots of the Minimum Income Guarantee, work to tackle child poverty, commitments to better support adopted children and their families, increasing the role of social work in the Scottish Government through the National Social Work Agency, creation of the Scottish Social Work Partnership, ensuring protections within an assisted dying bill, and SASW has contributed to hundreds of consultations, makes professional representations to MSPs, Council leaders, created guides and reports, supported campaigns and so much more. This progress is all aided and supported by your membership, and that membership has huge real-world impact.

George Hannah

Senior Public Affairs and Communications Officer, SASW