Social work, as we have noted, is a contradictory practice, and there are a number of perspectives (within the academy and the profession at large) over its appropriate roles, functions and activities. Yet by the late 1980s CCETSW had established a number of clear rules and regulations over the training content and programmes of the new Diploma in Social Work. Central to these developments was the requirement for students to be taught and to be able to facilitate anti-oppressive practice, accompanied by the claim that racism was endemic in British society. As we have noted, this was an important and radical development and it is worth establishing where these ideas developed and why.

A first point to consider is why the anti-racist commitment should have been incorporated within social work education and training at a time when the political climate in Britain was generally hostile to such concerns. This was a period when the Thatcherite project was apparently in full swing (Hall and Jacques, 1983; Gamble, 1988). According to Gamble (1988), part of the Thatcherite political agenda was to establish a new hegemony around a commitment to a free economy and a strong state, and for Hall (1985), central to obtaining such hegemony was the development of an authoritarian populist ideology, within which were implicit references to the ‘traditional values’ of family, nationhood and ‘race’. Thatcherism clearly represented a new political formation, drawing on the tradition of “organic, patriotic Toryism” combined with “a virulent brand of neo-liberal economics and an aggressive religion of the market” (Hall, 1985, p 16), and was a relatively successful attempt to move mainstream political thinking in this direction, shaping a new party political consensus which would seem to be continuing, with some minor countervailing trends, under the present New Labour government (Ludlam and Smith, 1996; Lavalette and Mooney, 1999).

But while ‘Thatcherism’ may have altered significantly the dominant politics of the main parties in Britain, and sociological and academic discourse over the development of British society in the 1980s, it was never the case that these ideas and values were unproblematically accepted in toto by the majority of the population. First, the rhetoric of Thatcherism masked the reality, which often represented a much less dramatic break with economic and social policy than the claims would lead us to believe (Johnson, 1990; Wilson, 1992).