I ONCE shared a mic with Alistair Findlay, who's recently published a memoir on his four decades as a social worker.

I envied him. He played for Hibs as a young man and he could speak football to a Scottish audience. You could make the case that any Scottish poet, if they are to speak to a working-class public, needs to speak fitba’.

Findlay was describing how it feels when the “committee men,” who favour “showy bastards,”  select the team. Like a shanked clearance lofted up from the pitch one of his phrases, about when the wrong guys are in charge and you feel your “fate in numpty hands,” stuck in my mind and attached itself to life at large.

Watching the government’s daily briefings on Covid-19, “in numpty hands” is how I feel. Findlay’s words are poetry because they are instantly memorable.

And you can tell that they are Findlay because they're ammunition to mock the management.

Findlay’s poetry is like that — sharp and memorable phrases woven into demotic, everyday speech. It has the ring of consensus and common experience. And when the football-literate laureate practises social work, that same sharp monologue catapults you into working-class experience and working-class politics.

You don’t doubt the authenticity when he writes of lost children: “... they sit waiting/all the children I’ve ever taken/into care/for a parent to phone,” or the smell of poverty: ...“kind of dank/and musty like you find underneath/a leaky sink,” or the pain turning violent: “...an old claw-hammer, a keepsake/from a distraught mother trying/to stop us taking her son away...”

Findlay’s gift is to render the situations in which social workers intervene immediate. All it takes is for one object — phone, sink or hammer — to be repurposed into a painful situation and you get it. It is an art of deceptive skill and economy. You sense the fragile psychologies of the people and, behind them, the injustice, the social contradictions that produce the situation.

He does it with a kind of hard-knuckled, dead-pan humour that you can find in Berthold Brecht: “They’ve put me in charge/of parenting classes for Scotland./Lesson number one:/this is a bairn, not a football...” Findlay shares with Brecht the double-distilled leftism and the sheer confidence that language is there to be used against the class enemy.

Individual poems summon individual experiences but Findlay has his eye on the bigger picture. The cumulative effect is a report on the condition of the working class as a class divided against itself. And he asks the question: “What can we do to change society?”

Findlay stays in the realm of art but his ambition, unmistakably, is to supercharge a political sensibility, to play his part in making language fit for collective action. To speak up for his profession but also to rouse the anger.

When he titles a poem Charity, you can be sure that it’s against charity, a call never to accept charity instead of your rights. When the title is Work to Rule, it’s going to be a freewheeling and joyous experience of strike action. And when it’s called Managers, it’s going to be a blunt instrument for reminding managers how to be human.

To read his poems now, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, is to get a shock. The need for front-line social workers is higher than ever as domestic- and child-abuse rates soar, as incomes collapse, as vulnerable people find themselves entirely isolated. But have you heard anyone mention social workers in the same breath as the NHS?

Findlay wants to bring the rich experience of social work into the light. Mollycoddling the Feckless, his memoir of his four decades as a social worker, gives you the sense of a whole profession, just as  his poetry gives you the sense of a whole class.

Beginning in the 1970s, when Findlay was among the first in Scotland to take a professional degree, it's a sprawling love letter to everything that social work ever aspired to be and he writes inspiringly of the political and intellectual excitement of those years. Then, with 40 years’ hindsight, he shows you what happened.

At the personal level, it was about learning to cope with the face-to-face encounters that lie at the heart of social work, situations of emotional rawness for which no classroom can prepare you and for which you must develop a professional self who doesn’t over-identify.

For Findlay, this is the difficult lesson that every social worker must learn in their own way. “I no longer have skin but pelt,” he writes, almost regretfully.

At the professional level, it was about “informed compassion” and learning to distinguish truth from lies. Lies go with the territory — it may be paradoxical but abused children never tell on their parents. You need other antenna to detect abuse: “the wary look/the expressionless gaze/we are always told to look out for...” That’s from the poem Baby P and gives a snapshot of how informed compassion operates.

At the level of language it was about stating “the bald truth, boldly” and “your chances of meeting a social worker increase the poorer you are,” he writes. To recognise the rights of the poor is a political choice. Just as each process of learning, whether personal, professional or linguistic, is shot through with politics like red letters through rock:

“We learned that the state, of which we were part, needed to patrol its own boundaries and question its own procedures and morality every bit as vigilantly as it employed people like us to interrogate the assumptions, lifestyles and value-bases of some of the wee neds living down the Bog Road.”

As he surveys his four decades, Findlay deploys his poetic knuckleduster to describe “the era-long skid-mark from socialism to entrepreneurial fundamentalism.”

That has undermined the precious integrity of front-line workers and the drive to privatise social care under target-oriented management that has created “the dog’s dinner of half-truths, unrealistic expectations, underfunded services, bed-blocking and food banks on view everywhere today.”

Findlay’s bald truth is boldly stated and it's shocking to read. “Social workers have become hated – and I mean truly hated – by the public at large,” he states. The profession has been undermined from within but to be hated is the result of relentless negative stereotyping by politicians and the press.

No-one stands up for social workers. In December 2019, a survey of front-line social workers and their managers by Scottish Unison showed that almost 80 percent said that teams did not have enough staff and around the same proportion stated that their workloads were heavier than ever.

Most shockingly of all, nine out of 10 were considering leaving their jobs.

Since then, the pandemic has descended and social workers have been left to “use their own initiative” to carry out their duties. How can those who carry out an essential service in dangerous conditions be so unsupported, unprotected and underpaid? Who cares for the carers?

Findlay swims against this woeful tide. His memoir is not just the first insider story of social work in Scotland, it is an account of how the most authentic political voice in Scottish poetry was forged.

There is political value in reading Findlay today, when the virus has lifted the veil on so much invisible labour. Today, when at last the government, the press and the public acknowledge the hidden and undervalued labour of immigrants, shop-workers, nurses, cleaners, care workers and deliverymen, Findlay reminds us no-one mentions social work. There is total silence towards those who practice informed compassion.

How can we show our support? Findlay’s poetry gives us a way to recognise social workers in a positive way and to shout our solidarity would be something: “Wir clapt-oot tramp steamers/doonladen wi’ ores, subs frae the Indies,/electric bar fires, wir tubs fu’ o’ dreamers/but deep in wir hold’s thir’s urgent supplies...”

But to restore dignity to front-line workers requires collective action and practical steps. Findlay would be the first to acknowledge that literature, if it has value, is a prelude to action. The first step would be to use trade unions and professional organisations to campaign for social workers and client groups to be represented on the Care Inspectorate and the regulatory SSSC body.

The Corbyn manifesto foresaw worker-representation on company boards and this would be the social-work equivalent. That would be a start, and one glimpse of a better future.

Alistair Findley is the author of the poetry collections Sex, Death and Football and Dancing with Big Eunice and Mollycoddling the Feckless: A Social Work Memoir.

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