Hundreds protested against the US-Israel attacks on Iran in Parliament Square on Saturday, fearing a wider conflagration and horrified by the targeting of young schoolchildren, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
Latest editorial
How can we keep social work politicised?
In the past, egalitarian trade union politics went hand in hand with how we saw our role in society itself — we must fight to preserve that in the changing sociopolitical context, writes KATE RAMSDEN
LUKE FLETCHER outlines Plaid Cymru bold plans for wide-ranging policy consultations with trade unions in Wales
With this attack on Iran, Trump and Netanyahu are taking a reckless leap toward escalation. The region is balancing on the brink of a major war that could undermine the global economy and nuclear security, says MARC VANDEPITTE
Liverpool Trades Council has unveiled a ‘People’s Budget’ to fight £56m cuts and council tax rises. DEAN YOUNG reports
As Washington and Tel Aviv escalate their assault on Iran, the rhetoric of ‘great power’ politics masks a faltering empire resorting to familiar regime-change tactics, says JOHN McINALLY
Labour’s by-election defeat tells a story Scotland has known since 2008. A party that assumes loyalty while offering little more than managed decline will eventually discover that voters always have somewhere else to turn, says MATT KERR
HAVING just retired after 43 years as a social worker, I’ve had the opportunity to look back at the changes to our profession since I qualified back in 1980.
Many will argue that social work has become more “professional” as a plethora of research has been published into all aspects of the social work role, alongside tools for assessing service users on all sorts of things — their likelihood of reoffending, their ability to care for their children, their need for adult services — and frameworks for writing all sorts of different reports.
This has been presented as progress, but many of these developments have focused practice on the individual rather than setting it within the wider social and political context, understanding that the vast majority of the people we support in social work live in the poorest communities and are the most disadvantaged. The practice has become more focused on “individual failings” and social work has often been experienced by service users as both unhelpful and judgemental.
Similar stories
Scotland’s deepening crises expose the human cost of political complacency — and the toll it is taking on working-class communities, says NEIL FINDLAY
The visa system traps workers with abusive employers, creating a vulnerable workforce scared to complain for fear of deportation — that is why we’re campaigning for a ‘common sponsorship’ model instead, writes FAVOUR DAVIDKING
Tackling poverty in Scotland cannot happen without properly funded public services. Unison is leading the debate
From the ‘motherhood pay penalty’ to low-paid care work, the Morning Star Women’s Readers and Supporters Group in Scotland has been looking at how neoliberalism has been pushing back women’s hard-won gains, writes KATE RAMSDEN