Shelley Giorgi was a great youth worker, a great trade unionist and a great socialist, and spent her working life in South West England, mainly in Taunton. Sadly she was taken from us far too soon, at the age of 55 on 21 February 2010. Her passing coincided with a period of intense and renewed debate about youth workers and youth work. Shelley was intellectually clear about many of the key ideas that she believed made youth work such a powerful force. She worked to assist youth workers in combining together to make them a group capable of significant social changes. She worked for a working-class, and therefore revolutionary, concept of workers and youth work.

It was evident to me in a period in February 2010, coinciding with Shelley’s last days, and as the struggle for youth work hotted up again, that the perennial internal confusions that have bedevilled youth work had somehow been passed on to another generation. I am not sure what or who passed them on – lecturers, our general, undemocratic times, pressures of poverty and inequality? Some say it is the condition of being Thatcher’s children, but in my view, this just serves to inflate one prime minister’s influence and power.

The repetition of outdated ideas at this moment of danger to youth work means that history could repeat itself, but this time as an awful farce. This is epitomised by the current Coalition government’s launch of a stream of what I see as incoherent policies under the banner ‘Positive for Youth’, at a time when things have never been so negative for young people. Today’s generation of young people is the first, certainly since the Second World War, to be facing fewer positive prospects.

The individualism, fragmentation, selfishness and weakness flowing from certain ideas being repeated today will only assist the disintegration of youth work as an educational, emancipatory and democratic practice. Youth work jobs should not be sold for trivial redundancy packages. I therefore decided to write this book as a tribute to Shelley and all those like her, and to advocate that more youth workers should join us, as part of a necessary resistance.