ABSTRACT
After leaving the Scottish middle class at 17 years of age to go to work in logging camps and gold mines in Canada, where it was not easy to get work, I had to be resourceful for the first time in my life. Before getting on a payroll, I slept on pool tables in Edmonton as the only place non-paying guests could escape the sub-zero temperatures. Returning to Scotland to study at Aberdeen University, moral philosophy somehow connected with the days in the Yukon and I managed to get a social work traineeship with Lanarkshire County Social Work Department in the West of Scotland. I spent formative days in the housing schemes of Lanarkshire as trainee social worker, social worker and then senior social worker. I moved to Glasgow as Area Manager (team leader) in two of the most challenging jobs in social work at the time: Castlemilk and Easterhouse Area Offices. Those were heady days when it seemed to me at the time that real attempts were being made to tackle ‘multiple deprivation’. The Urban Programme, through which funds specially dedicated by central government were used to fund imaginative projects to tackle what is now called ‘social exclusion’, created authentic opportunities for social work as I had never seen it operate before: pilot projects such as day assessment with children deemed too diffficult for school; the kind of Intermediate Treatment1 that brought Easterhouse gangs together without killing each other; social workers working partly as community workers; a claimants’ union slot at our team meetings.2 Imaginative use Section 12 of the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968, which allowed money to be used to help families in difficulties, enabled us to push back the frontiers of poverty, or so we thought at the time.
