How To Be A Social Worker (2021)

Book Review from the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everything You Really Need To Know About Politics: My Life As An MP. By Jess Phillips. Gallery Books UK. 2021. £16.99

In some ways it’s difficult to dislike Jess Phillips. Forthright, sincere, energetic and passionate. Authentic perhaps too, if you can discount a tendency towards attention-seeking.

And this is what you get in this book. It is at times sad, at times funny and nearly always frustrating. Just like its author. How could it be otherwise when you have a politician who dedicates her life to helping other people get their lives back on track without ever seeming to question why their lives might have gone off track in the first place?

If you are homeless, unemployed or have been abused, you would do a lot worse than to have Jess Phillips on your side. Few reading this book about her day-to-day life as Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley could doubt the effort she puts into helping her constituents. Indeed, this is something she revels in as an MP who believes in ‘getting things done’ and there is a chapter dedicated to this (there’s also a chapter on ‘People Care About Potholes’, as if anyone doubted it).

She links her drive to help people back to her own upbringing and the support she had growing up locally in Birmingham and for initiatives like ‘Sure Start’ attributed to the Blair Labour government. She says: ‘We, the people, can absolutely get the government to adopt the things that we care about, whether these are big broad changes or niche, specific ones’ (p.116).

But there is little by way of recognition that this hard work and campaigning is bounded and ring-fenced by the way in which society is organised. You can, say, campaign to double the state pension and the minimum wage until you are blue in the face but the economics of the profit system tells us that these things just ain’t going to happen.

Unlike the Corbynistas she derides, Phillips is much more of a practical reformist. But the reality is that practical means small, incremental (‘niche’) and without fundamental challenge to the way the system works. And even small changes tend to be conceded by governments during periods of economic boom – Labour under Blair being a case in point until the financial crisis and all that came with it shattered their dream, revealing the harsh reality of what the market economy periodically does to purge itself. In doing so, creating unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction and all the other things that got worse when things were only meant to get better.

There are worse jobs than being a social worker, but like many local councillors, that is what Phillips effectively is. A well-paid social worker who gets on telly and social media a lot, trying her damnedest to empty the sea of social distress by the proverbial bucketful. Good luck to her perhaps, but don’t let it be confused with being a political agent for meaningful change, and you’ll find nothing about that here.

Dave Perrin