John Berger, the late writer and art critic, recounts how, when asked who his favourite artist is, he instinctively replies, Caravaggio. The reason? While other painters, such as Hogarth, Guttuso or Goya, painted in order to show how the less fortunate of the urban poor and marginalised lived, Caravaggio depicted scenes not for others but because he was part of them (Berger, Reference Berger2005:80). In presenting the argument for a participatory social policy in which service-users are empowered to take control and design of the services we/they need, Peter Beresford is arguing as a user of (mental health) services as well as a writer, researcher, educator and activist. His progressive future is one in which the welfare state is participatory, decentralised, anti-hierarchical, rights and needs-led, and based on an inclusive universalism (p. 266–267). The book also offers a passionate argument for the centrality of first-hand experience as knowledge, born out of the author's own experiences and knowledge of welfare provision and practices. This argument underpins the format of the book in which the personal accounts by the author and members of his extended family illustrate and enliven the narrative of social policy past, present and future.

The book starts with a very readable account of the development of the British welfare state from the 1834 Poor Law through the creation of the post-war welfare state to its restructuring by the New Right, New Labour and the Coalition governments. (It is a long book, some four hundred pages, so bear with me as I summarise the key contents and arguments). The central argument is that the post-war welfare state was a momentous achievement providing services and opportunities to the population that had not existed before, but it was flawed in a number of ways: in not addressing diversity but principally in failing to engage with its service-users, particularly those who were socially marginalised, disabled and older people, lone parents, people with mental health problems, people in poverty and homeless. The narrative draws on the scandals of the time in homelessness and residential care, as well as work of cultural historian David Kynaston with the well-known but nevertheless pertinent example of the failure of high-rise city council housing design to ask residents how they actually wanted to live (p. 115–6). The author presents himself as a living example of this contradiction experienced over the lifetime of the post-war welfare state: decent post-war state education and support for his widowed mother living in very modest circumstances enabled him to get to (Oxford) University and subsequently to become a Professor of Social Policy. This was combined with demeaning experiences of the bureaucracy of the benefits system and the paternalism of mental health services. As his account explains, the subsequent New Right government exploited such dissatisfactions with welfare inaccessibility and offered control by way of consumerism, and efficiency through markets and managers, which was continued in a modified form by New Labour. These moves to neoliberal welfare, though new, have returned us ‘back to the Poor Law past’ (chapter seven).

This narrative of social policy past contains no surprises and its strength is in its readability rather than originality. However, this first half of the book ends with a critique of social policy as a discipline, which mirrors this argument and takes it further. The author contends that the on-going legacy of Fabianism with its commitment to developing objective, scientific evidence by experts to convince the political elite has created a separation between academics, experts and policy-makers on the one side and the real-life experiences of service-users, on the other. Marginalised people have become statistics, cases, objects of academic and professional expertise (p.173). What is needed, he argues, is a new approach to the way social policy is researched, and the way it is developed and delivered which puts the service-user and their experiences right at the centre. It is this theme that gathers speed through the second half of the book. This recounts the history of the service-user movements, particularly the disability movement, and how their demands for greater user control in the social relations of both welfare and research production constituted a fundamental challenge to social policy as we know it, research it, and practice it. The author sets out ‘new principles for social policy’: speaking for ourselves; self-organisation and collective action; rights-based policy; independent living; and living in the mainstream. A helpful chapter summarises the key points and processes involved in emancipatory research methods to emerge from disability research and their links with the struggles of the disability movement. The final three chapters expand on what all of this means for participatory and democratic services where service-users, workers and local people are involved in articulating their rights and needs. This provides a very grounded picture utilising the huge amount of research Beresford has done over the years with different groups of service-users (and especially in collaboration with his partner, Suzy Croft, herself a practitioner) setting out what, for example, are the main barriers to getting help (p.269), or what people say they want when asked (pp. 264–5).

In many ways, Peter Beresford presents a compelling argument. He is at his best when he describes people's collective struggles over welfare and when he sets out the double whammy of humiliation and frustration felt by individuals trying to access help in circumstances which require support and human understanding. The collation of the accounts from his family members are often touching, especially those that interweave histories of inter-war Jewish communities in London with his mother's experiences. His occasional forays beyond social policy boundaries into nationalised industries, heritage railways, and other enthusiasms, brighten the text. In addition, his accounts of particular struggles of activists within the social policy community deserve to be told and re-told. There is the story of one of the earliest tracts from the disability movement – Fundamental Problems of Disability (UPIAS/Disability Alliance, 1976) – and how it came to represent the most profound political and theoretical differences between social policy researchers (here represented by the Disability Alliance a pressure group consisting of disabled and non-disabled social policy researchers, including Peter Townsend) seeking to improve disabled people's poverty, and a group of disabled activists (the Union of Physically Impaired against Segregation – UPIAS) struggling against a model of disability which presumed their dependency and failed to recognise their rights to independence and control of their lives (pp.189-194). Enlightening too is the story of residents of a Leonard Cheshire residential home in their struggle to gain a voice and recognition in the early 1960s asking for researchers to study and report on the oppressive institutional regime, only to be confronted with an ‘objective’ account by the researchers of how the residents’ physical and psychological problems made their claims for the freedoms of normal life ‘unrealistic’ (pp. 219-121).

These detailed accounts provide a much better understanding of where Beresford's critique of mainstream social policy is coming from than the chapter on ‘What's wrong with social policy’ (chapter eight) and the scathing criticisms of individual social policy academics which are scatter-gunned through the book. Indeed I would advise readers to start with the Fundamental Principles story in chapter nine because it explains much of the reading of the history of the discipline of social policy and the dismissal of the ‘poverty industry’, of pressure group politics and the tactics of ‘Letters to the Guardian’ from ‘social policy experts’. It is not that I disagree with the basis of this critique, but my experience is that the contemporary discipline of social policy is more diverse than presented here. For example, feminist and anti-racist activism campaigns around health and welfare delivered damning critiques of the medical profession's misunderstanding of women and ethnic minorities and the need to de-mystify professional knowledge and put patients’ own experiences at the centre of practice and research. There have been important developments in research and policy proposals which centre children and older people, not only as citizens but as people who use services. Also significant have been dialogues and intersections between different groups – between disability and feminist scholars and activists around the conceptualisation of care; around disability and sexuality, or disability, race and ethnicity. The point here is not the tit for tat of one difference against another, but that these arguments for service-user control in research and practice may well have more potential allies than the author seems to concede (although he does give a good example of the development of ‘mad studies’ in Canada – p. 350–1).

Beresford is, in many ways, right to hammer his point home and to brook no ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ and ‘on the other hands’ because it kicks the ball into centre field. However, when it comes to discussing and prefiguring alternative welfare futures, reaching out for alliances and commonalities is, I would suggest, becoming more important, and more urgent. In this respect I would have liked to know where some of the other perspectives and pressing issues for the future stood in his own vision – for example, what about a Basic Income; what about migration and multiculturalism; about transnational and global social policy; about new ideas on time, care and labour; what of climate change?

In addition, in the long history of the right appropriating the arguments of the left, there is now a new one to contend with. When Michael Gove said in the run-up to the Brexit referendum that people have ‘had enough of experts’ he was doing precisely the same thing that Margaret Thatcher did when she said people had had enough of a nanny state: touching a popular nerve, a nerve which Beresford exposes so well in this book with respect to service users. Except in Gove's case it unleashed, as we saw in Trump's mimetic speeches, a massive disavowal of knowledge, science (especially about climate change), accumulated wisdom, and of democracy itself. It replaced ‘facts’ with any old fact: fake or not, it didn't matter. I suspect these events happened after this book was written but they do, in my view, complicate the position on experts. While it makes Beresford's argument for locally-based democratic processes even more pressing, it also means that just as we argued ‘in and against the state’ we now find ourselves both ‘for and against the experts’.