Introduction

As I start writing this chapter I have in front of me a copy of Bailey and Brake's Radical social work (a deceptively slim and succinct book, published in 1975), and also a pile of rather frayed copies of Case Con, ‘the revolutionary magazine for social workers’, the first copy of which appeared in 1970, the last in 1977. Both the book and the magazines shared a social and historical moment and were engaged in the same struggles but they stepped on the stage at slightly different times and played somewhat different roles: Case Con with all the energy of the beginning of the decade, Radical social work, published and coming to prominence, perhaps, just as the mood was beginning to shift, presaging the triumph of Thatcherism from whose dark shadow we are seeking still to distance ourselves.

The prime purpose of this chapter, then, is to explore the experience of Case Con, both as the quarterly magazine and as an aspiring organisation of radical social workers, and to proceed to see how this complemented and/or competed with the Bailey and Brake book in the development of radical social work in the 1970s.

Philip Larkin famously observed that ‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen-sixty three’ (1988, p 167) and similarly for the radicals of the late 1960s and early 1970s there was an arrogant assumption that the revolution in social work started with us. But, as Ferguson and Lavalette have pointed out, there was ‘a radical kernel’ (2007, pp 11–31) within social work from its very beginnings: in the Settlement movement of the Victorian period and within the work of the pioneers of the labour, feminist and socialist movements. Sylvia Pankhurst took the experience she gained from the suffragette movement into her anti-First World War agitation which included practical support in terms of providing food and milk distribution to the women and children in the working-class communities in the East End of London (Davis, 1999). George Lansbury, also in the East End, held a similar balance, working with the individuals ground down by poverty with organised opposition to the Poor Law, a fight he took to its logical conclusion when, as leader of Poplar Council, he was imprisoned rather than implement policies he found unjust (Lavalette, 2006b).