From our President: if my Presidency over the next year stands for one thing, it will be social justice

ADASS President Phil Holmes stresses that social justice must sit at the heart of adult social care. In a time of rising division and prejudice, he calls for leadership that moves beyond words and into meaningful action. 

The first job of the new ADASS President each year at our Spring Seminar is to give a speech to a gathering of adult social care leaders (people who draw on care and support who are giving up their time to help us improve, people who work in councils up and down the country, national organisations we work in partnership with).

On Tuesday this week I started my speech, after some opening pleasantries, with reference to work that ADASS did last year entitled “Leading in Troubled Times”. I described last year’s work as “in response to local and national narratives which seemed to pit disenfranchised groups against one another as if happiness and success was some sort of zero-sum game: you can only have it if that other group of people doesn’t”.

This work is clearly far from over. It was very clear from what people said at the Spring Seminar that they care greatly about adult social care, and the Casey Commission, and neighbourhood health, and everything we need to improve together. But what they care most about (and colleagues couldn’t have been stronger in the way they expressed this) is social justice. Without social justice being front and centre, further adult social care reform will feel meaningless and hollow.

I’m writing this immediately following the barbaric attack in Golders Green. People sometimes describe these sorts of incidents as “senseless” when they are anything but. They are logical developments of emboldened prejudice, in this case from anti-semitism. Anti-semitism is racism plain and simple, and no anti-racism approach can be complete without a focus on eradicating it.

But as above, it’s not a zero-sum game. Social justice is not a competition – except with those who would deny it. Courageous leadership and meaningful actions start with our individual and organisational responsibilities but ADASS can provide a framework for us all to come together. Separately and collectively we can address anti-semitism, and islamophobia, and all forms of racism or religious persecution, and the prejudice that trans people experience day in and day out, and the discrimination that older people and disabled people face when they are regularly  patronised and written off, and the casual sexism (and worse) that women both drawing on and working in adult social care have been expected to rise above for years.

We all start this with rage – through our response to atrocity and because we are not going to tolerate any sort of discrimination, any sort of attempt to divide people who should be united by their humanity. But we’ll only resolve this with love,  through shared commitment to open up local, regional and national spaces where we listen, empathise and act together.

Acting is what it’s all about. Statements (like this one) are tedious at best and downright obstructive at worse if all they offer is tick-box platitudes that signal virtue while achieving nothing. I think there are a minimum of three things that ADASS will do: clearly expressing our position on social justice as an independent charity, convening spaces for our members to come together, learn from and support each other (the upcoming elections in many councils may provide a further catalyst to do this), and being open to learning ourselves from the acts of courageous and inclusive leadership that you share with us.