Scotland Decides ’14: are Scots too sensitive?

First paragraph: Mix the Scots and sport and you’re bound to end up with trouble. Just ask William Hague, who gaffed this week that Team GB would break a leg at next month’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow – forgetting that unlike the Olympics, the four nations compete separately. Access this article on The Conversation website: https://theconversation.com/scotland-decides-14-are-scots-too-sensitive-2817

‘Downpressor Man’: securitisation, safeguarding and social work

The Counter Terrorism and Security Act came into force in July 2015 in the UK. This places a statutory duty on many frontline organisations, i.e schools, social services, and prisons for example, to work within the PREVENT agenda, a policy arising from Britain’s overall counter-terrorism policy, CONTEST. We argue that PREVENT is representative of increasing securitised social policies, that serve to firstly, view people within particular individualised neo-liberal discourses and thin narratives, and, secondly, serves to coerce the profession of social work into hitherto unknown areas, namely, national security and counter-terrorism. We note the unapologetic linkage of traditional forms of what we term here, “welfare safeguarding” customarily the domain of social work, with what we term “security safeguarding”. If the profession of social work in the UK, and we suspect other Western regimes, wishes to avoid becoming a profession of “downpressor men”, the uncritical incursion into issues of national security and counter-terrorism must be highlighted

‘Under Heavy Manners?’: Social Work, Radicalisation, Troubled Families and Non-Linear War

The “war on terror” signalled a new type of warfare, one that accorded with the features of what Surkov argues is non-linear war Pomerantsev (2014). Traditional war, that takes place in a particular geographical location, with an identifiable enemy, is no more. Instead, warfare is a more fluid phenomenon. The paper argues that Surkov’s concept can be usefully applied to current developments in social work practice in the UK. We trace the origins of key anti-terrorist policy developments in the UK (PREVENT and CHANNEL) from the war on terror and argue that such policies have serious implications for social work. We argue that there is an increasing securitisation approach in addressing modern social problems. We describe these as reflecting conflationary rhetorical logic, notably, the linking of Troubled Families programmes with “terror”. The paper concludes that social workers, need to firstly recognise tactics at play in the state of non-linear war, secondly, become critically aware of conflationary rhetorical turns in political discourse, third: actively resist securitised discourses and lastly, reject discriminatory notions of so called dangerous people and communities. In other words, we should actively re-engage with and promote social work values and social justice