The radical restructuring of UK social policy has made an impact on almost all of us. For some its effects have been extreme. Welfare reform has been associated with an upsurge in suicide (Blackburn, 2013). It has forced people to leave neighbourhoods in which they have lived for years, losing friends, networks and support services (BBC News, 2014). It has been linked with ‘hate crime’ against disabled people stigmatised by high profile government and media ‘anti-scrounger’ campaigns (Walker, 2012). Between 2010 and 2014, the number of prescriptions for anti-depressants increased by 25% (O’Hara, 2014b). Yet it is difficult, amid all these difficulties, not to detect some degree of complacency in social policy academic writings. These have shown a reluctance to take on the bold new ideas and arguments developed by welfare user movements. A strong sense of Fabian ‘business as usual’ lingers. For example, in 2014, in the latest edition of what’s described as a ‘best-selling social policy textbook’, the academic Professor Paul Spicker concludes that: ‘People who are poor, disabled, mentally ill or unemployed cannot be expected to overcome the problems they face simply because they have more effective control over services’ (Spicker, 2014, 351)

He goes on to make the much wider point: