Sarah Banks has, in the lead article, clearly and concisely set out the challenges facing social work, which are a consequence of the dominance of new public management (NPM) in public services in the UK. My response is concerned with trying to contextualise this and spell out the challenges further, which may be in some senses more profound than Sarah suggests in terms of defending social work as an ethical enterprise.

Sarah outlines the way NPM originated under the Conservatives in the 1990s, but also notes the way that this was hugely expanded under New Labour. The result of this was that NPM was given a legitimacy it never could have had when it was primarily identified with a Thatcherite politics. In a sense the New Labour ‘modernisation’ project, rather than representing a return to, or even a modernisation of, the principles of the welfare state, was a continuation of a free market, neoliberal ‘common sense’, albeit with greater state funding. Stuart Hall has recently made the point that ‘New Labour came closer to institutionalising neo-liberalism as a social and political form than Thatcher did’, particularly as Tony Blair's language found ways making these ideas acceptable ‘to Labour voters as well’ (Derbyshire, 2012).

Sarah's discussion includes the example of the way agencies were expected to target scarce resources to those who ‘need them most’. The use of this approach by New Labour effectively shifted the discourse of welfare away from a universalist conception, one of the primary achievements of the post-war welfare state, and thus opened the way to a much more punitive and controlling conception of welfare. These practices have already had a massive impact on social work practice, particularly in the area of children and families, which is now hugely stigmatised, and of course this process has been aided and abetted by the reactionary Murdoch press.